The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Not so incredible.” His voice held the gentle insistence of a teacher reminding his pupils of a lesson they’d forgotten. “Robbie said there was something there.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “When you’ve kent Robbie longer, you’ll understand. I’m not a man of faith,” he said, “but if Robbie said the flood was coming, I’d build myself an ark.” He turned the sherd over carefully in his fingers. “Is this all you found?”

  “That, and a few fragments of animal bone—birds and mice, mostly, I think.”

  “Right then, let me fetch my notebook, and we’ll get this properly recorded. I won’t be a minute.”

  Left alone by the half-empty sieve, I folded my arms across my chest and frowned harder at the pottery fragment, without really seeing it. I ought to have been pleased, I told myself. It was, after all, beginning to look very much as if there really was a marching camp at Rosehill, and Ninth Legion or no, the discovery of a Roman camp was something. So why, I wondered, was I suddenly feeling uneasy?

  I stood there a long moment, thinking, so absorbed in thought that when the footsteps rustled through the grass behind me, I didn’t turn round. It wasn’t until I heard the half sigh of an indrawn breath close by my shoulder that I realized someone else had come to join me. Shaking off my foolish fancies, I fixed a smile of welcome on my face and turned to say hello.

  My greeting fell on empty air.

  My heart lurched. Stopped. Began again. Over the sudden roaring rush of blood that filled my ears I heard a herring gull cry out its warning high above the twisted trees, and then the whispering footsteps passed me by and faded in the softly blowing grass.

  Chapter 9

  “You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” said Adrian, surveying me over the top of his drawing tablet. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Because you don’t need to stick around for this part, if you’re tired. Robbie and Wally have gone home for tea, and as soon as I’ve done this rough map I’ll be taking a break myself.”

  “I’m fine,” I repeated stubbornly.

  My hands had finally stopped trembling but I kept them clenched deep in the pockets of the windcheater David had insisted on fetching for me when he’d returned to find me shaking from what he’d assumed was the cold. Not that the afternoon was particularly chilly, but when the sun ducked in behind the passing clouds I found myself grateful for the windcheater. The breeze had developed a bite.

  I blamed the breeze, as well, for what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard. The wind could have a human voice, sometimes. It had fooled me often enough in childhood, setting the front gate creaking on its hinges and drawing the branches of our walnut tree across the roof until I would have sworn a gang of thieves was creeping up the old back stair behind my room, while I lay cowering in darkness with the blankets round my ears, too terrified even to call out loud for my mother.

  My mother, come to think of it, would have been a welcome sight just now. She was a large, no-nonsense woman with a voice that brooked no opposition. “There are no such things as ghosts,” she would have told me, and of course I would have believed her.

  But at the moment, surrounded by strangers in a wild landscape, with the remnants of a long-dead civilization spread at my feet, such things as ghosts seemed possible.

  Below me in the trial trench David sat back on his heels and dug the point of his trowel into the damp soil, resting a moment. “Feeling any warmer now?” he asked me.

  He had beautiful eyes, I thought vaguely. It really was unfair how nature always gave the longest eyelashes to men. His were black, like his hair, and made his eyes look brilliant blue by contrast.

  “Much warmer, thanks.”

  Adrian sent me another assessing glance. “Not got a headache, have you?”

  I sighed. “No, I’m fine. Honestly.”

  “But you’ve got that little line, just here.” He touched a forefinger between his eyebrows. “And usually, when you get that little line, it means you have a headache.”

  Quinnell, at the far side of the trench, raised his head in enquiry. “Who’s got a headache?”

  “Verity,” supplied Adrian.

  David, not to be outdone, explained to Quinnell that I’d just got a wee bit chilled, and I was on the verge of explaining to the lot of them that I was, in actual fact, fine, when the sun abruptly vanished behind a gathering bank of gray cloud.

  Quinnell turned, and sniffed the air. “Rain,” he pronounced, in a mournful tone.

  “Aye.” David stood. “I’m done for the moment, at any rate. It’s all down to the one level.” He looked at me. “That’s the last of it, for now,” he promised, pointing to the three full buckets to one side of the trench. “I’ll just take them up to the Principia for you, so they’ll not get rained on. You don’t want to be sieving mud.”

  I smiled at his casual use of the Latin word. “The Principia? Where’s that, the stables?”

  “Aye.” He smiled back. “The nerve center. Quinnell named it, and the name stuck.”

  Most appropriate, I thought. Every Roman fort had its principia—the large headquarters building at the center of the complex, where the legionaries gathered to receive the day’s commands.

  Our own commander, Quinnell, climbed with great reluctance from the trench and watched while David gathered up the heavy buckets. “Taking those up, then, are you? Good lad. Time for a drink, I suppose. There’s not much we can do here until the rain passes. We’ll meet you back up at the house.” Turning, he put a fatherly hand on my shoulder to walk me up the hill. “And I’m sure Jeannie could find some aspirin for you. Bound to be a bottle or two around, somewhere.”

  It seemed pointless, really, to protest, and after all the arguing about my health it was heaven to sit in the quiet kitchen at Rosehill and let Jeannie serve me my aspirins with a nice hot cup of sugared tea. “Is it very bad?” she asked.

  I sipped my tea, uncertain. “Is what very bad?”

  “Your headache.”

  “Oh.” My expression cleared. “I don’t have a headache, actually.”

  “But the aspirins…”

  “Adrian’s fault. He saw some line between my eyebrows, which he claims beyond a doubt means that I have a headache. Mr. Quinnell suggested the aspirins.”

  “Peter,” she corrected me. “He’ll want you to call him Peter. The only one who calls him Mr. Quinnell round here is my Robbie.”

  “Well, anyway, the point is it’s a waste of breath,” I told her, “arguing with Adrian. I learned that ages ago. Far easier to take the tablets and be done with it.”

  She smiled and sat down in the chair opposite. It was, I thought, the first time I had seen her sitting still, not doing something. “Of course,” she said. “You went with Adrian at one time, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Ancient history, that.”

  “Was it serious?”

  “With Adrian? Never. He’s not the serious type. Besides,” I added, “I’ve the wrong hair color for Adrian. He likes blondes. I rather fancy he’s cast his roving eye on Fabia, poor girl.”

  Jeannie shrugged and reached for the teapot to pour herself a cup. “Nothing odd about it, she’s a beautiful lass. And not nearly so helpless as she lets on. Care for some shortbread? Quietly, though, don’t rattle it about in the tin, or the men will be in here afore long.”

  I mumbled my thanks through a crumbling mouthful of biscuit. “Your father,” I informed her, “seemed surprised I wasn’t blonde.”

  “Aye.” Her eyes danced. “He had his doubts, when Peter said he’d hired an old girlfriend of Adrian’s. Full of dire warnings, was Dad. What did you think of him?”

  “I barely saw him all day,” I admitted. “He was digging with Quin—with Peter and David, while I sifted dirt with Fabia, but what I saw
of him I liked.”

  I could tell she was fond of her father by the way she swelled with pleasure at my words. “He’s a grand old man,” she said, “but you want to watch him. He can be a right bugger when he wants to be.”

  “Talking about me again?” David Fortune filled the doorway as he walked through it. He had cleaned himself up a little, washed his hands, and his walk had a cocky, self-satisfied roll to it.

  Jeannie sent him a motherly look. “If you were chocolate,” she told him, “you’d eat yourself.” By which I gathered she was calling him conceited.

  Unconcerned, he smiled and looked around the narrow kitchen. “Speaking of food, did I hear you open a tin of shortie?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Liar. Verity’s eating it now… aren’t you?” His cheerfully accusing eyes swung from me to the tin on the table, sparing me the effort of replying with my mouth full. I went on munching while he helped himself. The unfamiliar Scots terminology reminded me of something I’d meant to ask Jeannie earlier. Chasing down my shortbread with a sip of cooling tea, I casually enquired what a stoater was.

  “A stoater?”

  “Yes. Someone told me I was one, so I just wondered.”

  “Oh, aye?” Her mouth curved in spite of her obvious attempt to keep a straight face. “And who was it said you were a stoater?”

  Behind her shoulder David smiled and cupped a hand beneath his chin to catch the shortbread crumbs. “Your son,” he said. “That’s who.”

  “Cheeky,” she laughingly pronounced judgment on her absent son. “That’s his father coming out in him, poor lad. A stoater,” she explained, to me, “is a very good-looking woman.”

  “Oh,” I said. Because, after all, there seemed very little else to say…

  David angled his gaze to meet Jeannie’s. “We’ll need to be getting her a wee Scots dictionary, so she can understand us. D’ye still sell them at the museum?”

  “Aye, I think so.”

  I looked from one to the other of them, intrigued. “There’s a museum here in Eyemouth? I didn’t know that.”

  “A good museum,” David confirmed. “Not a big one, ye ken, and it shares space with the tourist information service, but the exhibits are nicely done and they give you a feel for the past of a fishing town.”

  Jeannie nodded. “I can take you through, if you like. I work there Thursdays, on the desk.” She sent a teasing glance up at the big archaeologist. “We’d best pick a day when your mum’s not there, though, or we’re liable to get stuck.”

  “Aye.” His smile flashed a faint cleft in one clean-shaven cheek as he leaned across to take more shortbread, and I marveled at how much more relaxed he was in Jeannie’s presence than when we were on our own. He had lost that faintly rigid and reserved air I’d grown used to, and his eyes laughed easily, engagingly. “My mother,” he informed me, “can be a bit of a blether.”

  “She likes to talk,” Jeannie translated.

  I smiled. “Don’t all mothers?” Mine certainly did. My father had developed a habit of daydreaming in self-defense, occasionally rousing himself to murmur, “yes, yes of course” or “quite right, dear,” to keep my mother’s monologues running. When I’d asked him once if he wouldn’t prefer silence, he’d said no, he quite liked the sound of my mother’s voice. He just lost interest, now and then, in what she was actually saying.

  “My mum was quiet,” Jeannie put in. “Like a mouse. But then living with Dad, she’d not have been able to get a word in.”

  “Trade you,” David offered.

  “Och, you don’t mean that. Your mum’s a lovely woman.” She lifted a curious eyebrow. “Is she still being difficult, then, about having someone to help her?”

  “Difficult,” he said, “is not the word.”

  “She’ll soon come round,” was Jeannie’s optimistic pronouncement. “And if you want difficult, Davy, you can have my dad any day. It’s the funny thing about life, isn’t it? If you’re not taking care of your kids, you’re taking care of your parents.”

  “Aye, well, Mum’s enough for me, thanks.” Grinning, he brushed the crumbs from his shirt and glanced at me. “How’s the headache, now?”

  “I’m fine.” For a moment it occurred to me that I might be wise to have that printed on a T-shirt, for future use.

  “Peter’ll be glad of that,” he said. “He sent me in to find out how you were; thought he might have overworked you on your first day out.”

  I assured him it took quite a lot to tire me. “I come from hardy stock, you know.”

  “Oh, aye?” The blue eyes didn’t look convinced. “I thought you came from London.”

  “Very funny,” I replied.

  Jeannie smiled. “What part of London?”

  “West London. Chiswick. But I live in Covent Garden now, I have my own flat. The first Grey to leave Chiswick in two generations,” I told them, proudly. “My parents thought it terribly brave of me, moving all that way. You’d have thought I’d gone to darkest Africa.”

  David’s eyebrow arched. “And what do they think of you coming to Scotland?”

  “Oh, well, after Covent Garden, nothing shocks them. And they got rather used to me gadding about when I worked for the British Museum.”

  “Aye, I ken how it is.” Jeannie nodded, straight-faced. “The Eyemouth Museum is always sending me off to exotic places, like.”

  I grinned. “Is your museum in an old building, or a modern one?”

  “The Auld Kirk,” she replied. “Down by the harbor. But the museum itself is just new—they opened it to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Disaster.”

  “What disaster?” I asked, then watched while the two of them shared a look that seemed a sort of silent conversation.

  “Maybe,” David advised Jeannie, “you’d best take her through when Mum is there, after all. She tells the tale better than anyone.”

  Jeannie agreed. “You’ll just have to wait,” she told me, “and let Granny Nan tell you about the Disaster. I’d not want to spoil the story.”

  “I hate waiting,” I complained.

  David smiled. “Aye, so does Peter. And unless you want your headache to come back, you’d do well to stay clear of the sitting room. The rain,” he said, “does not improve his temper.”

  Jeannie studied him with knowing eyes. “Is that why you’re hiding in here, then?”

  “I’m not hiding, I’m running errands. I was to see how Verity was feeling, first, and then go down and check on Fabia’s photographs.”

  I looked at him, curious. “Is Fabia a good photographer, really?”

  “Bloody good.” His nod held conviction. “I had my doubts when Peter gave her the position, but he kent what he was doing. He usually does.”

  “It’s only that she seems so young.”

  “Aye, she’ll be twenty this summer. But she’s been practically raised in a darkroom, that lass. It’s what her father did,” he explained. “Photography. He could have made quite a name for himself, if he’d bothered to put in the effort.”

  “I gather,” Jeannie said, “that he was something of a… well, a…”

  “Sod,” supplied David, rocking back in his chair. “Aye, that he was. He and Fabia’s mother, they made quite a pair. All their parties and flash cars and Paris weekends. Peter finally had to cut them off—they were spending his money right, left, and center.”

  Jeannie frowned. “She was a fashion model, wasn’t she, Fabia’s mother?”

  “Aye.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “America, I think.” He shrugged. “When the money stopped, she lost all interest in living with Philip. Fabia was only a wee thing when she left, I don’t suppose she even remembers.”

  I felt a twinge of pity for the girl. “Still,” I said, “it
can’t have been easy.”

  “No,” agreed David. “It’s amazing she’s turned out as sane as she has, being brought up by Philip. He wasn’t all there, if you ken what I mean.”

  Giving in to my curiosity, I asked how Peter Quinnell’s son had died.

  “A bottle of tablets washed down with a bit of brandy,” was David’s blunt reply.

  “Oh.”

  “Not that it really surprised anyone—we’d all seen it coming a long time ago. And at least some good’s come out of it. Peter’s got his granddaughter back.”

  I frowned. “I’m sorry… what do you mean, he’s got her back?”

  “Well, Philip wouldn’t let him see the lass for years. Never sent so much as a photograph, or a card at Christmas. Like I said, he was a sod. To Peter,” he informed me, “family is everything. Not seeing Fabia fair broke his heart.”

  Jeannie made a sour face. “He should have counted his blessings.”

  “Now, don’t be unkind.” David grinned. “She may be a wee bit difficult, at times, but she is doing a good job with the photography.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Jeannie, in her motherly tone, “were you not going downstairs to check on the lass, Davy?”

  “Aye, so I was. One more shortie,” he promised, reaching for the nearly empty tin, “and I’m away.”

  He strolled out of the kitchen whistling, and Jeannie rose to salvage what remained of her shortbread, tucking the tin safely away behind a stack of plates in the cupboard. Draining my teacup thoughtfully, I leaned back in my chair.

  “He seemed in a good mood,” I remarked. “Very chatty.”

  “Who, Davy? He’s always like that.”

  “Not with me.” I spoke the words half to myself, and turned my gaze to the window. The wind had risen again outside, throwing spatters of rain against the glass and drawing a faint half-human moan from the empty field. Outside, against a corner of the peeling window ledge, a large gray spider brooded, curled beneath its web, long legs drawn up in petulant ill-temper while it waited for the rain to stop. It reminded me of Quinnell, that spider—impatient to get on with things, but thwarted by the one thing neither spiders nor archaeologists could control: the weather.