The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  The wind had played havoc with my hair, as well. Against my face I felt the strands that had been tugged free of their plait, and when I vainly tried to coax them back my fingers found a bit of twig tangled behind my ear. I drew it out with a rueful smile. “I don’t feel much like a stoater now,” I confessed, “no matter what your son might think.”

  “You look just fine,” said Jeannie firmly. “And anyway, I don’t think Robbie’s alone in his opinion.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s Davy’s jacket you’re wearing, isn’t it?”

  To be perfectly honest, I’d forgotten all about the windcheater. I looked down now at the dark green folds of it that swallowed me and smelt of him, a clean elusive scent, quite different from the men’s colognes to which I’d grown accustomed. I was all but hugging it, like a schoolgirl proudly wearing her boyfriend’s football jersey.

  I hadn’t been aware of the fact before, but now I found myself wondering whether David Fortune had noticed it, too. Frowning slightly, I cleared my throat. “He let me borrow it because I was cold.”

  Jeannie said nothing, but I caught the simmering laughter in her eyes as she bent to clear away the teapot and our empty cups. I sighed again, and let the matter drop, shrugging my arms out of the oversized jacket as though my wearing it was unimportant.

  But I did feel cold, without it.

  Chapter 10

  The rain fell steadily through the night and when the morning came there was no sun at all, only a dull gray light and a dull gray sky and the dreary rhythm of the raindrops beating ceaselessly upon the roof above. The only variation came from rain blown hard against my bedroom window—it spattered there and trickled down in crooked lines and struck the ground below with deep plop-plunks that formed a bass line for the uninspired melody.

  I’d never learned the knack of leaping out of bed on dismal mornings. A quick look through unfocused eyes, a mental groan of protest, and I’d pull the blankets back up round my ears and wriggle purposefully into them, trying to reclaim the drifting realm of sleep. It never worked, of course. Once wakened, I could never quite drop off again, but still there was something gloriously sinful about stealing an extra quarter of an hour in bed on a Sunday morning. Besides, I reasoned, with the weather outside so bleak and the whole house shuddering with every blast of wind, there was little incentive to wake up.

  The air outside the covers bit my nose, but my bed was warm, made all the warmer by the fact that both cats had chosen to join me some time in the night. The black tom Murphy lay sprawled full across my feet, while little Charlie snuggled underneath my elbow, breathing shallow, even breaths that stirred her fur. Shame to disturb them, I thought… so I didn’t. Instead I closed my eyes and sifted idly through the strange events of yesterday.

  We’d found a potsherd, I reminded myself. And a ditch. Well, what appeared to be a ditch, my logical mind corrected me. My logical mind was, to be honest, still finding it difficult to absorb the fact that we’d found anything at all, let alone the ditch and rampart of a Roman marching camp. Not that the rampart—if it was a rampart—was necessarily Roman. In a childish way I almost wished it wasn’t. I could forget, then, about psychic children and long-dead Roman sentinels and unseen people breathing down my neck.

  As it stood, I hadn’t a hope of forgetting. I felt like one of those poor people plucked from a magician’s audience to play assistant onstage, forced to stand there dazzled by the mirrors and tempted at each sleight of hand to ask “How did you do that?”

  The trick, when revealed, was usually dead simple, but that didn’t make it any less impressive. And it was no small trick to make me believe, however briefly, in ghosts.

  Even now, the morning after the fact, I still felt an irrational touch of panic when a floorboard creaked outside my bedroom. For the space of a heartbeat I held myself motionless, screwed my eyes shut tighter, turned away from it… and then I heard a thinly stifled yawn and knew that it was only Fabia, passing by on her way downstairs. Relaxing into the pillows, I breathed and reached an automatic hand to switch off my alarm before it sounded.

  Murphy, disturbed by the small movement, raised his head to glare at me a moment before leaping neatly from the foot of my bed to the windowsill. “And don’t you start,” I warned him, as his tail began to twitch. “If you see anything through that mess you can bloody well keep it to yourself.” As though he understood my words the black cat settled himself at the window and stared in stony silence at the pouring rain outside.

  There was to be no digging today, not just because of the wet weather but because Quinnell held Sunday to be a day of rest. “If the good Lord had wanted us to work on Sundays,” he’d told me last night, sounding for the first time like an Irishman, “he’d not have allowed the pubs to stay open.”

  Which explained why, when I finally extricated myself from my blankets and made my way downstairs in search of coffee, I was surprised to learn that Quinnell had ignored his own decree.

  “He’s gone up to the Principia,” said Fabia, uninterested. The Sunday Telegraph lay sprawled across the kitchen table in disordered sections, and she’d drawn up a second chair so she could prop her feet up, ankles crossed, and read in comfort. Picking up the Review section, she shook it out and looked at me over the spread pages. “He’ll have coffee on up there, if you want some. I don’t drink the stuff.”

  The kettle sat cold on the stove and the air felt cold in the kitchen. Deciding that Quinnell’s company would be more cheering than his granddaughter’s, I borrowed a bright yellow mac from a peg in the front entry and made a dash for it, up the hill.

  I found Quinnell sitting at David’s desk, tapping at the keys of the computer with one finger, aimlessly. He raised his head as I came in, and smiled at the picture I made.

  “My dear girl, could you have found a larger raincoat, do you think?”

  “It was the closest thing to hand,” I told him, pushing back the hood. “My sister conveniently forgot to pack my own, you see…”

  “Conveniently?”

  “It’s a Barbour raincoat,” I explained. “Almost new.”

  “Ah.” He looked me up and down, assessingly. “Well, I’m sure we can find something more your size. I can barely see you, in that one. You look like a large rubber duck.”

  At least I was dry, I consoled myself, shaking out the dripping folds while Peter returned his attention to the computer. “I thought Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest,” I reminded him.

  “What? Oh, yes… yes, it is.” He typed something out and frowned. “It’s only that this system is still giving us some problems. Eating my reports, you know, and spewing out all kinds of unintelligible symbols—that sort of thing.”

  “That sounds rather like you might have a virus,” I offered, moving closer to look.

  “Yes, well, that’s what we thought, too, at first. But we’ve had it all checked out and serviced since, and our consultant couldn’t find a problem.”

  “How odd.”

  “Not to worry, I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out.” Switching off the machine, he stood and smiled warmly. “If all else fails, I can always hit it with my cricket bat. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “That would be brilliant, thanks.”

  He went through to the common room and came back with two mismatched mugs of steaming liquid—black for himself, and white for me. He’d only seen me drinking coffee once, last weekend, and I was surprised he’d remembered how I took it; but then Peter Quinnell, I had noticed, made a habit of remembering.

  “You look as though you need this,” he said, handing the mug over. “Did the rain keep you awake, last night?”

  I assured him I’d slept very well. “I only woke up once, I think, and that was the fault of your neighbor’s horses. He ought to be shot, really, keeping them out in this weather.”
r />   Quinnell’s eyebrows drew together, vaguely. “Horses?”

  “Yes, the ones in the field behind here. Does he race them, or something?”

  “There are no horses here, my dear. A few cows, maybe, but…”

  “I’ve heard them twice now,” I said firmly. “Galloping.”

  “Ah.” He nodded, smiling faintly, a parent amused by an obstinate child. “Perhaps you’ve been hearing the shadowy horses.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s Yeats,” he explained kindly, naming the great Irish poet. “‘I hear the Shadowy Horses…’ Púcas, I suppose he meant—evil spirits in the shape of horses, though it’s quite the wrong season for púcas, just now. November’s their month.” He tilted his head to one side, thinking. “Of course, Yeats might have been writing of Manannan’s horses. In Ireland, our sea-god, Manannan Mac Lir, is also the god of the otherworld, riding his chariot over the waves in the wake of his magical horses. They carry men off, do those horses—over the water and into the mist, to the land where the living can’t go. When I was small,” he said, his eyes warming, “my father would show me the waves rolling in, with their curling white foam, and say: ‘Look now, boy, look at the horses of Manannan, see their white manes… he’ll be coming behind in his chariot.’”

  Small wonder the Irish were poets, I thought, when their gods were as close as the waves on the sea. “And did you ever see him?” I asked.

  “Manannan? Oh, no.” The long eyes softened, turning inwards. “But I shall, my dear, one day. No doubt sooner than I’d like.”

  His voice was gentle and resigned, but it bothered me to think of him as old, to think of the sea-god’s horses coming to carry him off to the country of the dead. And anyway, the horses that I heard at night were either real or dreamt, not phantom creatures born of Irish folklore.

  “I’ve been taking another look at that sherd you found, yesterday,” he went on, changing the subject. “Gave it a bit of a cleaning. It came up rather nicely… would you like to see?”

  Unlocking the door to the finds room, he switched on the light to show me where the gleaming bloodred fragment, freshly scrubbed, lay drying on a bit of newspaper beside the sink.

  “The edges, you see,” he pointed out, “aren’t abraded, they’re sharp, so it’s possible that fragment was buried soon after deposit. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we didn’t find a few more sherds, nearby—parts of the same shattered pot.” Bending over the three buckets of excavated soil that David had brought indoors yesterday, when the rain began, Quinnell poked about in one, experimentally.

  “Would you like me to help you look?” I offered.

  But before I could lift a finger, a firmly feminine voice spoke out in no uncertain terms from the open doorway of the finds room, telling me that I’d do no such thing. “It’s your day off,” said Jeannie McMorran, turning her maternally reproachful gaze on Quinnell. “Peter, I’m that surprised at you.”

  He held his ground admirably. “My dear, she offered.”

  “Aye. Well, whatever she was going to help you with, I’m afraid you’ll have to manage on your own. I’ve something more exciting planned for Verity. Ye ken that Robbie’s got his piano lesson in half an hour…”

  Quinnell arched one eyebrow in an elegantly dismissive gesture. “Yes,” he said, “I can see how she would be just fascinated…”

  “…and I thought she might want to come into town with us. Granny Nan’s minding the museum today. We could show Verity the tapestry.”

  Quinnell paused, then put about like a ship changing course with a shift in the wind. “Oh, right. Yes, that’s a capital idea,” he endorsed the plan, smiling encouragement at me. “Do go, by all means. No, I shall be quite all right without you… have you got your raincoat? There.”

  And seeing that my hood was up and all my snaps properly fastened, he sent me on my way, the mention of David’s mother’s name having clearly settled the matter.

  Jeannie turned up her own hood and ran through the rain, and I followed her, down the long drive to Rose Cottage, where Robbie sat waiting for us in the kitchen, holding a red-handled screwdriver.

  Jeannie laughed. “What’s that for?”

  “Granny Nan wants one.”

  “All right then, give it here, and go and get your music, or else we’ll be late.”

  The prospect of arriving late for his piano lesson didn’t seem to trouble Robbie greatly. He took a while to fetch his sheets of music from the front room. Jeannie looked across at me and shook her head. “It’s the same every Sunday.”

  “Do you play the piano, yourself?”

  “Och, no. I’ve not much talent. My mother played, though, and we’ve kept her piano.”

  It was a shame, I thought, that Robbie’s grandmother could not have lived to teach him how to play the lovely instrument. I’d learned so many things from my two grandmothers. But Robbie didn’t seem to feel the deprivation.

  As he bounced through the puddles beside me on our short walk to the shed where Jeannie’s car was garaged, Robbie happily noticed that our coats looked the same. “Look, Mum, look… mine looks just like Miss Grey’s.”

  “Aye, I see that. Don’t splash, now.”

  “Did you mind the screwdriver?”

  Jeannie reassured him that she had indeed remembered. “Have they not got a screwdriver at the museum?”

  “Not a red-handled one.” Robbie leaped with both feet into one final puddle, and sloshed his way into the shed.

  It took scarcely any time to drive to Eyemouth. I rubbed the condensation from my window and peered with interest at the maze of narrow, one-way streets hemmed in by roughcast square stone houses. Unlike the big posh homes that lined the main road into town, their large front gardens bursting with cascades of bright spring flowers, the houses here crowded right against the pavement, leaving little room for anything green. But they were cheerful houses all the same, solid and dependable, with bold names painted in the transom windows over gaily painted doors.

  Ivy Cottage and Lily Cottage I could understand, but some of the names baffled me, rather, until I asked Jeannie.

  She smiled. “They’re named for boats, some of them. We passed a house a wee while back called Fleetwing—that belonged to my grandad, ye ken, and Fleetwing was his fishing boat.”

  “It’s the name of Dad’s boat, too,” Robbie put in.

  “Aye.” Jeannie’s voice was dry. “My Brian’s one attempt to honor the family tradition. Went over big with my dad, that did.”

  From which I gathered Wally Tyler wasn’t pleased his son-in-law had used the Fleetwing name.

  “Did your father fish, as well?”

  “My dad? No, he’s never been one for the sea. He hates boats, so he trained as a gardener. It was old Mrs. Finlay herself hired him on to take care of things up at Rosehill, and that was afore she was old Mrs. Finlay.” Jeannie glanced across and smiled. “He’s rooted there, now.”

  “Like the Sentinel,” said Robbie.

  Jeannie nodded. “Aye.” Negotiating a final downhill bend and crossing another road that looked very much like the road I’d first come in on, she swung the car neatly into a large parking lot. “Right,” she said to me, “won’t be a minute. I’ll just take Robbie in, then you and I can walk along to the museum. It’s not far.”

  After waiting a few minutes, I pushed open my door and stepped outside to stretch, pulling my hood tight against the soggy weather. The rain had lightened to a spatter, but the sea, just steps away, kicked up a lively spray to wet the wind and make it taste of salt. Drawn by the thunder of the waves, I turned and tried to see, through the flat gray mist, if the foam on the crest of the waves really did look like white manes on Manannan’s horses, like Peter had said, but I caught only a glimpse of them before Jeannie’s footsteps sounded briskly on the
pavement behind me.

  “Not too cold?” she asked, close by my shoulder. “Because we could take the car, if you want. I just thought, with it being Bank Holiday weekend, the parking might not be so simple.”

  I’d forgotten about the Bank Holiday. In spite of the less than perfect weather, there were a fair number of people cluttering the pavement, determined not to waste their vacation indoors. Jeannie, more sensibly, headed straight for shelter, and as I followed her along the road I felt the smug self-satisfaction of a stranger who has managed to orient herself.

  Surely, I thought, this was the road I’d come in on, that first day, when the bus had brought me down from Dunbar. Which meant that the harbor lay just over there, and to reach the Ship Hotel, where Adrian and David lodged, one had only to go down that little road, and…

  “This way.” Jeannie steered me past a curving sweep of shops and across the street into a small square edged on two sides by an odd array of buildings. One, with its distinctive symbol set above the wooden door, was obviously the Masonic Lodge, and beside it a white-plastered house in the old style proclaimed itself to be a fish merchant’s. Set on the diagonal at the corner of the square, a towering redbrick marvel of modern architecture boasting bright green window frames and a landscaped courtyard proved more difficult to identify. But the smaller structure, dead ahead, was clearly the museum.

  “The Auld Kirk,” said Jeannie, and indeed it could be nothing else. The golden walls and arching windows and beautiful bell tower could only have belonged to an old church, no longer sanctified but still demanding reverence. Below the graceful dome and weather vane that capped the hexagonal tower, a working clock declared the time to be 11:30.

  Jeannie, looking at the clock, informed me we’d be lucky to be out again by three. “She likes to talk, does Granny Nan.”

  “But what about Robbie?” I asked.