Women of the Dunes

by Sarah Maine

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  For Alasdair and Guy

  Prologue

   West coast of Scotland, c. 800 A.D., Odrhan

  As the sun rose over a pale sea, Odrhan emerged from his dwelling at the end of the headland. Eyes closed, he stretched, reaching his fingertips to the sky, and felt the chill of dawn on his cheek. He offered up a prayer, and a gull’s cry was blown back on the north wind as the sun set the water asparkle.

  He stood there, a solitary figure, savouring the sharp stillness of early morning, and took long breaths, filling his lungs and belly with the salt-laden air, glorying for a moment in his own youthful vigour. The sea was well in. Waves lapped on the sweep of the twin beaches either side of the spit of land which formed a natural causeway, binding his rocky refuge to the shore.

  Soon the tide would turn.

  He prayed again, and a mist rose like breath from the ocean, changing form and softly gathering. He lifted his head and allowed his eyes to follow a pair of dark shags flying low over the sea’s surface, casting fleeting shadows. The birds turned seaward, towards the distant stacks, and his gaze pursued them, then stalled.

  A shape was emerging from the mist. It vanished, then reappeared, gaining substance and form. A sail!

  A ship.

  He studied it, eyes narrowed. Should he retreat inland? Something held him back— It was just a single ship, after all, and a small one at that. Time enough to wait, and watch.

  He marked its progress as he went about his chores, and as it drew closer he saw it was a high-prowed vessel with a square tan sail. A mile or so offshore it altered course to follow the coast, moving south towards the headland. And still he stayed— By midmorning prayers it was close enough for him to discern three or four figures on board. One of them pointed in his direction and then another rose and stood at the gunwale looking towards him.

  A woman.

  They stared across the water at each other. There was yet time to head inland, but he stayed, curious now, and then seemingly the woman spoke and the vessel altered course, coming in fast on the surf.

  It beached moments later on the sand of the northern bay.

  The time to leave had passed and Odrhan felt a strange presentiment as he watched the woman, unhurried, lift her skirts and climb out of the ship into the ebbing flow of the surf.

  And she stood there on the strand line, and waited for him to come to her.

  Chapter 1

   Ullaness, 2012, Libby

  When Libby Snow finally arrived, darkness was already falling. She decided to park the car anyway and walk out onto the narrow spit of land. The tide was well in and the only sound was that of the waves as they crept, hissing over the sand to the line of seaweed which marked the tide’s turning point. Not an engine, not a voice, not a gull’s cry. And out at sea the moon floated above the horizon, pouring silver across the dark swells and lighting the spume at the shore’s edge.

  It had taken a long time to reach this place. Eight hours of driving—

  Or a lifetime, depending on how you looked at it.

  The sun had set some time ago and the vibrant colours were fading in the western sky, draining away over a watery horizon; tomorrow she must make a point of being here earlier to watch it go down. March days were short, but by June, when she returned with her students, sunset would be late and lingering as long summer evenings merged with the early dawn. And once the planned dig started, there would be less time to savour such moments.

  A breeze roughened the water and she pulled her jacket close, then shut her eyes and filled her lungs, absorbing the rank smell of high-tide seaweed and salty turf. Ullaness—a place of legend. She could almost hear Ulla’s name whispering through the marram grasses.

  There was an awesome beauty to the place, and she looked up, seeing gulls blown landward by the wind wheeling above her, their wingtips catching the moonlight against a darkening sky. Others circled out to sea, beyond the grey shapes of distant stacks, heading for the horizon over which lay the next landfall, two thousand miles away.

  She had checked once in an atlas and been disappointed to find that if you followed the line of latitude eastwards from her grandmother’s home on Newfoundland’s broken coast, it went well south of Ullaness, south of Scotland in fact, to pass through the English Channel. And if you drew a line due west across the ocean from Ullaness, it fell north of that tiny Maritime harbour where she had spent her childhood summers, and went way up, above the tip of the Labrador coast, and entered the icy Hudson Strait. At the time this had seemed wrong! It should be possible to draw a line across the Atlantic, over the arc of the globe, and link the headland at Ullaness directly with Gosse Harbour, as her grandmother’s stories had done.

  But then again, she thought, nothing in her grandmother’s stories made a straight connection either.

  She could hardly believe she was here. The place was etched so deeply into her psyche it was almost part of her being. Familiar and yet quite unknown. She watched as a string of seabirds flying low above the ocean rose to become silhouettes against clouds now edge-lit by moonlight. What a sight! Timeless and unchanging. It must have looked the same to the nomadic people who once came here to gather shellfish, and to those who followed them and then settled, and built houses. Tides and time had sculpted the shoreline, but this view must be unaltered, and Libby felt the centuries shrink around her.

  Ulla herself must once have stood here, a thousand years ago.

  And Ellen too—her grandmother’s grandmother, whose stories of Ulla had been woven into Libby’s childhood—and she wondered again at the darker threads in the weave. Generations might divide them, but standing here now she felt herself bound by the connection to both these women, held by a sense of otherworldliness in the strange stillness of the place.

  The archaeological work planned for the summer might throw light on Ulla’s legend, but Libby had her own reasons for being here, her own questions to ask.

  In a few hours, dawn would filter through her grandmother’s bedroom window on the far side of the Atlantic, and the old lady would stir in her bed, emerging from under her gaily coloured quilts. As a child, in the summer holidays, Libby loved to go with her at daybreak, hand in hand, down to the fishing stages to watch the Gosse Harbour boats set off laden with crab and lobster pots, the chill morning air laced with salt and diesel. And when the boats had gone she would sit on the wooden landing, leaning her head against the mooring post, her short legs dangling, and think of the stories the old woman had told her. Of Ulla, and of Ellen who had come from Scotland, bringing the stories with her. And in her childish mind the two women had become hopelessly entangled, existing in a place she could only imagine, two thousand miles away across the ocean in Scotland.

  And Libby had felt certain that Ulla must have been as good as she was beautiful: a lovely Norsewoman, blown in on a ship by the north wind, her dying lover beside her, fleeing her husband’s wrath. In her picture book of legends there was an illustration of the fabled Isolde, and Libby had imagined Ulla to be like her, tall and slender and very beautiful, while Odrhan, the legendary monk, would have been as handsome as the knightly Tristan. The legend of Ulla had, for Libby, been as compelling as that of those star-crossed lovers, all the more so because it was personal, as Ellen’s
stories had connected her to this place, Ullaness, where the legend had been born.

  It was only later that her grandmother had explained about Ellen’s final years, when all was neither beautiful nor good.

  Libby rose, reminding herself that she was also here to do a job, and made an effort to bring her mind back to the present. She swept a more professional eye over the landscape, and tried to get a grip on how it all hung together. The ruined structure at her feet was Odrahn’s cell, so they said, and, beyond the curving line of the southerly beach, she could see the roofless nave of St. Oran’s Church, where Ellen had once worshipped. Ferns had taken root in the crumbling masonry and birds nested in niches left by fallen stones. And there, beside the church, was the abandoned manse where Ellen had worked, its broken roof slates caught in the gutters. Planks had been nailed across the door. Beyond church and manse she could see the remains of cottages, disappearing into a tangle of brambles and nettles, and wondered for a moment where Ellen might have lived. The abandoned dwellings could tell her nothing, settling back into the landscape and returning to the natural world, mute witnesses to the fact that if there had ever been a larger community here, it was long gone.

  Only Sturrock House, the landowner’s residence, remained inhabited.

  Her gaze followed the curve of the northern beach where, somewhere amongst the sand dunes, there was the mound that they would excavate this summer. From here it looked like just another dune, but she’d found it earlier and had stood staring down at the curved row of stones that the winter storms had exposed. It was now obviously a man-made feature, but was it a burial, and if so could it really be a physical part of the legend? Almost too much to hope for.

  There had been a frisson of excitement amongst her colleagues when the news had reached them of what had been reported following a particularly wild storm, and parallels had quickly been drawn with similar stone settings which had turned out to be graves, significant graves, boat-shaped Viking-age graves—and there had been general agreement that the site should be excavated before the evidence was lost. Despite her own attachment to it, the legend of Ullaness had never been in the same league as that of Tristan and Isolde, but it did, after all, refer explicitly to the burial of a Viking warrior.

  Professor Declan Lockhart, an early medievalist at the midlands university where Libby had a short-term contract, had been assigned to the project and an advertisement had gone out for an assistant to help him run it. For Libby, the job was custom-made, and she had applied. She’d not mentioned her personal connection at the interview, nor had she mentioned her grandmother’s stories when she was offered the post. They had, after all, no bearing on the ancient site.

  She moved off, back along the causeway. Tomorrow she would inspect the mound in daylight, putting the personal aspects aside, and start to think seriously about the summer. A unique opportunity to match archaeological investigation with the surviving oral tradition and ancient legend, their grant application had stated.

  And, for Libby, a career-making opportunity which must go well.

  That thought collided, as it had done all week, with the acute worry about the parcel which had arrived last Saturday from Gosse Harbour. She had opened it to find it contained an old sketchbook which she remembered from childhood, and she had thumbed through it, seeing the drawings she’d been told were Ellen’s, and smiled at her own scribblings added on wet summer days. A fragment of the legend had been written on the back page, but as she turned to it an object, wrapped in a slip of paper, had slid out from between the pages and onto her lap. This was Ellen’s, her grandmother had written on the paper. A trinket, she’d thought, as she carefully unwrapped it, and then stared down at the object in astonishment.

  It was a cross about four inches across with four splayed arms, each decorated with a simple circular design while in the centre a larger incised circle framed a deep red stone, and the object seemed to glow against her skin. Gold? Carefully she turned it over, seeing how one of the arms had been folded over to make a loop through which a thong could be threaded so that the cross became a pendant. A simple design, but skilled craftsmanship, and her heart had started to pound as she recognised it for the real thing. An ancient artefact redolent of the early days of Christianity and the emergent northern church. It could only be gold, thin, hand-beaten gold, and the stone was almost certainly a garnet, a stone once much prized. Gold and garnet. The sort of thing that would be owned by an early bishop or other high-ranking churchman, or a devout layman—eighth century in date, if she was right.

  So how had Ellen come by it? It was worth thousands.

  She looked anxiously across towards Sturrock House. Over the years items had gone missing from there, it was said, valuable antiquities—

  And she found herself wondering what else might have found its way to Gosse Harbour. The letter which arrived with the parcel had simply said: Ellen used to wear it, my dear, so I thought you’d like to have it. Libby had written straight back asking what else her grandmother could tell her about it, where it had come from, were there other items . . . ? But she had, as yet, had no reply. It was letters, stamps, and patience with Nan, not e-mail.

  She looked again at the house. The cross had almost certainly come from there, but in what circumstances, and how on earth was she to broach the subject? And with whom? The house was set back within a garden bordered by a stone perimeter wall, masked by a line of shrubs and trees, and all she could see of it in the growing darkness was the roof, a silhouette of little turrets and chimneys. A right old mishmash of architectural styles and now the home of the seventh baronet, Sturrock of Ullaness.

  It had started life as a late medieval tower house, she had read, and developed from there, with successive extensions and alterations reaching a crescendo in the nineteenth century embellishments of the third baronet. He had, by all accounts, embraced the Romantic movement with well-funded gusto and positioned himself in something of a dream world, rooted in the works of Walter Scott.

  The family was at home, she noted, seeing thin grey smoke spiralling above the rooftops. Perhaps, in the summer, there would be an opportunity to have a look inside, but on this visit, for all sorts of reasons—not least the arrival of the little cross—Libby intended to stay well below the radar.

  Declan had had all the dealings with the Sturrock estate, and had found them unhelpful and remote; it had taken forever to agree on terms for the excavation. The estate had refused to contribute a penny towards the project, and numerous conditions had been stipulated and legal contracts insisted upon. Uphill work, Declan had said.

  Libby had thought right from the start that it would have been better to come up here and deal with matters face-to-face, but Declan was a busy man, and he did not delegate, especially to a newly appointed assistant. Nor did he take advice. The baronet himself was impossible to contact, he said, so why go up to talk to an intermediary? It had taken time, therefore, and a lot of backwards and forwards of e-mails and letters to get all the paperwork in place and all appropriate bodies satisfied. In the end they had had to settle for a much less ambitious project than Declan had first envisaged, and had only secured permission to excavate the mound itself and do a building survey of the roofless church. All correspondence had to be directed to the estate’s owner, Sir Hector Sturrock, but all negotiations were undertaken with his intractable land agent, who, Declan had told her, was uncooperative. Sir Hector himself remained unavailable.

  She’d been in Declan’s office when he had phoned and tried one last time to persuade the agent to let them excavate the enigmatic ruins at the end of the headland and dig a few small test pits in the bay area. It would enhance their understanding of the ancient landscape, he explained down the phone, rolling his eyes at Libby. Ullaness was a unique and complex site, “. . . and the chance to tie the oral tradition to the physical remains is exceptional, so if—”

  “Haven’t we been through this before?” The call was on speaker, so she heard the interruption.


  “We touched on it—”

  “And the estate agreed the extent of the work.”

  Declan stuck up two fingers and continued in a tone which, in Libby’s view, was guaranteed to fail. “I know that, but what I’m suggesting is little more than a survey—”

  “You’ll have enough to do, surely,” the cool voice replied.

  Declan handled refusal no better than he handled rejection, as she’d learned to her cost, and he let it show. “I thought you’d welcome the opportunity,” he said. “After all, the Ullaness chalice must have come from somewhere on the estate, and a survey might suggest where.”

  The chalice! Libby gaped at him, and the cool voice on the phone became arctic.

  “Really.”

  The conversation ended swiftly after that and Declan put the phone down, avoiding Libby’s eyes. “He’s a stubborn sod,” he said. “And there’s no getting past him. Everything’s signed Sturrock but I bet it’s that guy making the decisions.” He spun his pen on the desk and stared sullenly out of the window. “Don’t they realise they’re sitting on one of the most promising sites on the west coast?”

  Not mentioning the chalice and taking a more conciliatory tone might have produced better results, she’d thought, but said nothing; with Declan it simply wasn’t worth it.

  “It’s the sense of entitlement that gets me,” Declan had continued. “Just because some forebear chose the winning side and got the whole damn estate as payback . . .”

  All this was before the parcel had arrived, but it was the furore around the theft of the Ullaness chalice which now fuelled her anxiety; she was torn between wanting to tell Declan about the cross and needing to know more before she did.

  It was about a year ago that thieves had broken into Sturrock House and taken the chalice, and the burglary had made the national newspapers. A short article had been published describing what was known about it, which was, in fact, very little, given that the circumstances of its original discovery were vague. All that was known was that it had been found somewhere on the estate in the late nineteenth century.