The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Och, he’ll be fine. My dad collects him from his piano lesson, see, and they have a wee walk round the harbor, look in on Dad’s friends. Robbie loves it. Besides,” she added, “he’d be bored, here with us. He’s been through the exhibits a hundred times, and Granny Nan will be wanting to show you everything, especially since she kens you’re a museum person, too.”

  “Has she worked here a long time, then?”

  “Aye, since it opened. The doctor tried to make her give up working after her heart attack, but she’d not hear of it. Might as well try to make the sun set in the east.”

  As we walked the final few steps, heads bent low into the blowing rain, Jeannie glanced sideways and shot me a mischievous smile. “You’ll want to be taking your raincoat off, though, afore we go in.”

  I looked down. “Is it really so awful?”

  “No, but it belongs to Davy,” she informed me, smug at having twice caught me wearing the big Scotsman’s clothes. “And Granny Nan’s a noticing sort of woman.”

  Chapter 11

  The wind slammed the door at our backs as we came in through the vestibule, but no one in the lobby took much notice. Two couples stood pressed close against the long L-shaped reception desk—young couples, smartly dressed and out of sorts. I couldn’t see the woman who was helping them, but I could hear her talking on the telephone, asking someone if they had a room. Which seemed an odd question, until I remembered that David had told me the Eyemouth Museum was also the local tourist information center. Finding rooms for frazzled vacationers who hadn’t had the sense to book ahead for the Bank Holiday weekend apparently went hand in hand with showing visitors round the exhibits.

  A large part of the lobby had been set aside for wall displays and standing panels, spread with maps and scenic views and photographs of local B and Bs. Bus and train schedules jostled for rack space with a dizzying assortment of free pamphlets promoting everything from stately homes and gardens to a self-conducted walking tour along the rugged coast.

  Folding the dripping yellow raincoat more tightly over my bent arm, I stepped aside to let a young man, loaded down with pamphlets, pass me by. He started up a flight of metal stairs that ran along the nearest wall, and I tipped my head up, curious. “Is there a floor above, then?”

  “Aye,” said Jeannie. “That’s where the temporary exhibitions go. But the main displays are down here, through that door beyond the main desk, d’ye see?”

  I looked, and saw an open doorway, double width, with swinging gates that marked the way in and the way out.

  “We’d best wait for Granny Nan, though.” Jeannie smiled. “She’ll want to take you round herself.”

  My gaze moved once again to the reception desk, but the young couples were still tightly clustered round it and I saw only their backs. Denied a glimpse of David’s mother, I pretended a keen interest in the shelves of souvenirs that lined the wall behind us.

  One silly toy did catch my eye—a small round puff ball of pale fur topped by a red tartan tam. Two beady eyes peered at me from between the tufts of fur as I picked the strange thing up and turned it over. “What is this supposed to be?”

  “Och, have you never seen a haggis? Canny wee creatures, they are. You almost never see them, in the wild. This one sings, like.” She pressed its little tam and was rewarded by a high-pitched rendition of “Scotland the Brave.”

  I laughed, I couldn’t help it. It was so delightfully ridiculous. “A singing haggis?”

  “Aye. The real ones aren’t so friendly looking…”

  “Oh, give it up,” I said. “I may be English, but even I know a haggis is only a sheep-stomach sausage.”

  “Is it?” Jeannie made her dancing eyes deliberately mysterious, and moved away, to scan a nearby bookshelf. “Here you go,” she said. “Here’s what you’re wanting.”

  Keeping hold of my haggis, I came across to join her, but before she could show me what she’d found we were forced to stand aside again to let the smart-dressed foursome leave, and in their wake I got my first good look at David Fortune’s mother.

  Having heard her called “Granny” so often I’d fully expected her to be like my own grandmother, a small saintly woman with withered cheeks and soft white hair pulled back in gentle wings. But Granny Nan, decidedly, was not my Granny Grey.

  She put me in mind of those marvelous film stars of the thirties and forties, who’d flouted tradition by dressing in trousers and throwing off wittily crafted one-liners. She stood tall for a woman and ramrod straight, with the same strong, uncompromising angle of chin and jawline that she’d passed on to her son. Her eyes were wider apart than his, and the mouth was different, but her hair, like David’s, had once been dark—there were traces of it in the short cropped steel-gray curls which framed a face that must have been pretty in youth, and in maturity was striking. Although her ailing heart had flushed her face with color her complexion remained clear, with hardly a wrinkle to mar the mobile features, and her blue eyes held a warm blend of intelligence and humor that I recognized.

  “Tourists,” she said, with a broad smile, and dusted her hands on her corduroy trousers. “How would you not book a room on Bank Holiday weekend? They’re lucky that Margaret and Jimmy could take them.”

  “They’re just sent to test you,” said Jeannie. She paused, sniffing the air suspiciously. “You’ve not been—”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Aye, you have so, I can smell it on you.” Jeannie sniffed again, to prove her point, and this time even I caught the faint smell of tobacco smoke, but Granny Nan stood firm.

  “You can blame that on your father,” she said. “He was round here not an hour ago, stealing my biscuits and telling me about the ongoings up at Rosehill. He told me a lot about this lass,” she added with a wink. “I hear our Robbie thinks she’s a stoater.”

  “Aye, well, I don’t think he’s the only one.”

  “No, old Wally’s fair taken with her. Even my Davy let dab she had bonny long hair, and he rarely notices a lass unless she’s three hundred years dead.”

  After which comment it took all my effort to hold back a blush while I stood through our proper introduction. My one relief was learning that she had a real name—Nancy Fortune. I’d have felt dead silly calling her Granny Nan.

  Over our handshake she nodded at my singing haggis, openly amused. “Found a wee friend, have you?”

  “Yes, well…”

  Jeannie cut in, grinning. “She’s fair taken with it. And you’ll want to sell her one of these as well.”

  This time I saw the book she was pointing to, and reaching out, I took a copy from the shelf. “Oh right,” I said. “My Scottish dictionary.”

  “Scots,” Nancy Fortune corrected me firmly. “A Scots dictionary, that’s what you’ve got there. Scottish means anything having to do with Scotland, ye ken, but Scots is the name of the language. Most Scots speak Scots.” She smiled broadly. “Except in the Highlands, it’s Gaelic up there. And the way we talk here in the Borders is different again from what you’d hear in Aberdeen.”

  “Oh.” I flipped a page of the pocket-sized paperback, scanning the strange-looking words. Stoater. Fantoosh. Oose. Where did one come up with a word like that? I wondered.

  “Oh aye, oose,” Jeannie said, when I read the word aloud to them. Lounging against the reception desk she sent me a rueful smile. “Fluffy dust, like. I’ve plenty of that under my beds. What d’ye call it in England?”

  I shrugged rather helplessly. “Dust.”

  “Such an uninspired language, English,” David’s mother said. “Though northern English sounds a bit like Scots; we use some words the same. And then there’s Ulster Scots as well, in Northern Ireland. Peter always said he had no trouble at all understanding us, when he first came over—it sounded just like home.”

  I smiled. “He’s lived
in Scotland a long time, I gather.”

  “Aye, since the early fifties. He was searching in the west of Scotland then, like all the other Roman experts. When I first went to work for him he’d up and bought a grand old house near Glasgow, to spend his summers in. Ah, those were good days,” she said, eyes softening at the memory. “We must have walked every inch of Dumfries and Galloway, the two of us, looking for likely battlefields.”

  Looking for battlefields along the Scottish-English border, I thought, must be rather like looking for paving stones in the heart of London. They’d be everywhere. Trying to find one specific battlefield among the many—that would be the difficulty. “Did you never get discouraged?”

  She shook her head. “We were young then, lass, we didn’t ken the meaning of the word. Peter still doesn’t. He’s a driven man, is Peter—he’ll not die afore he’s tracked down his Hispana.”

  I tried to imagine the two of them young. Peter Quinnell, handsome now, would have been irresistible in his thirties, I thought—tall and lean and full of charm. I found myself wondering what sort of man David’s father had been, by comparison. “Did your husband work for Peter, as well?” I asked.

  “Och, no. My Billy was a fisherman, a lad I’d grown up with. Peter had a right canary,” she admitted, “when I left him to get married to Billy. But I was thirty-five then, and a woman wants a bairn.”

  Jeannie raised an eyebrow. “He’d have understood that, surely. He was married himself, after all.”

  “It’s different for men,” David’s mother maintained. “And besides, that was no kind of marriage the two of them had, with Elizabeth biding in Ireland. She never came out of the Castle.”

  Ordinarily I didn’t pry, but Quinnell’s life intrigued me. “The Castle?”

  “That’s what Peter called his family’s home,” said David’s mother, fondly, “in the north of Ireland, near the Giant’s Causeway. One of his forefathers made a fair fortune in sugar and slaves in the West Indies, then came back and had someone design him the Castle. Peter never liked it, much. Built with blood money, he said. But Elizabeth—Peter’s wife—loved a grand mansion. And Philip used to love that house, as well.” I saw a shadow darken Nancy Fortune’s eyes. “Poor wee Philip. Such a shame, that was.”

  I commented that it must have been hard on Quinnell, losing his son.

  “Aye, well, he’s not lost all his family.”

  Jeannie’s mouth quirked. “Not yet,” she said. “I can’t say I’m not tempted to stir a few things into Fabia’s porridge, some mornings.”

  “Jings! I hope you’ve not told Peter that. The problem is,” said Nancy Fortune, her eyes twinkling, “there’s too much of her father in her. Philip never would take a telling from anyone.”

  “Peter must have been wild himself,” Jeannie speculated, “when he was younger. He has that look about him.”

  The older woman merely shrugged. “I’ll not tell tales.”

  “So he owns three houses, then?” I frowned, still trying to sort out the various properties. “The one in Northern Ireland, and the one near Glasgow, and…”

  She shook her head. “He sold the Glasgow house, last autumn. He had no need for it, once he’d bought Rosehill. This is where he needs to be.” Her voice was very certain. “He’ll find his Romans here, like Robbie says.”

  “Och,” Jeannie said, “that minds me. Robbie made us bring you something.” Digging in her pocket, she produced the red-handled screwdriver.

  Nancy Fortune laughed. “The devil! I’ve been wanting one of these all morning. The one gate’s sagging on its hinges, and it takes a red-handled screwdriver. I went all through our tool cupboard, but no joy.”

  “Aye, well, he said you needed one, and ye ken what he’s like.”

  I looked from Jeannie’s face to Nancy Fortune’s, frowning. “Did he just know? I mean, you didn’t ring him up, or anything?”

  Her smile was warmly forgiving. “You don’t believe, I take it, in the second sight.”

  “Well…”

  “You will, in time. The bairn’s fair gifted,” she informed me. “I used to have an aunt like that, who had the second sight. She always kent when I’d been smoking out behind the shed. Kent when I was going to be up to something, too… afore I did myself, sometimes.”

  “And was she always right?” I asked.

  “Oh, aye.” She glanced at me, noting my doubtful expression. “It’s all dead simple, second sight. My auntie said we’re all made up of energy, and energy can’t be destroyed. It changes. When a body dies, some energy goes off in heat and movement, but the rest of it remains, and so you get a ghost, like. My auntie said that folk who have the second sight, their brains are more receptive to the energy that’s out there—not just to ghosts,” she said, “but to the living. A living brain’s electric, after all… electric impulses. Our thoughts go out the whole time just like television waves, and the gifted person acts like an antenna.”

  Reasonable enough, I admitted, although it didn’t explain everything. “So how can someone see the future?” I asked. “Did your aunt have a theory for that as well?”

  “That I can’t tell you. She saw things, but how she saw them…” She shrugged. “My mother, bless her heart, who was a fair religious woman, thought that premonitions were a gift from God.”

  “Some gift.” Jeannie wrinkled her nose. “Robbie almost never gets them, but when he does they drive him mad. He has nightmares, poor wee soul.”

  “Has he always been…” I stumbled over the word “psychic,” and opted instead for the euphemism, “gifted?”

  Jeannie nodded. “I used to find him standing in his cot and talking to the wall. Talking to a lady, he said. I thought it was just imagination, like, until he pointed out his lady in my wedding picture, and I saw that he’d been talking to my mother.” Her smile was soft. “She died the year I married, afore Robbie was born, so she must have wished to see her grandson. She still does, sometimes, although now he’s getting older he’ll not always tell me when she comes. He’s like that since he started school—he keeps his secrets now. Except,” she added, grinning, “when he’s out with a good-looking woman.”

  “Aye,” Granny Nan agreed solemnly. “’Tis why he tells me everything.”

  I laughed. “And when did he tell you about his Roman Sentinel?”

  “Last summer.” Granny Nan tipped her head back and thought. “Aye, in June. The lad was helping me go through my bookshelves, to sort them out, like, and he took to this old battered book on the Roman military. Full of illustrations, that book was. Robbie came to me all excited and showed me one of the legionaries and said, ‘He lives in our field.’ Just like that. So I picked up a pen and wrote Peter.”

  “You were that sure?”

  “Oh, aye.” She suddenly seemed ageless, and very wise. “Robbie’s never wrong, lass. If he sees something in that field, it’s there. It’s the rest of us who are blind.”

  And then, remembering the red-handled screwdriver, she tightened her grip on the tool and sent us a purposeful nod. “Right, I’ll just fix that wee hinge and then we’re away. You two can leave that haggis and the dictionary in behind the desk, there, and I’m sure Verity won’t want to drag Davy’s wet raincoat around with her…”

  Jeannie’s dark eyes caught mine, laughing, and their message was a silent See? I told you so.

  Ignoring her, I dumped my things behind the desk and, gathering my dignity, began my proper tour of the museum.

  Chapter 12

  Touring a museum was, for me, a busman’s holiday.

  My idle mind took note of every detail of design: did the gallery flow nicely from one section to another? Was the flooring easy on the feet, or did one’s knees begin to ache before the tour was over? Were the labels written clearly, plainly, cleanly, and with care? And the artifacts themselves, were they
displayed with thought, and properly protected? This final point was my obsessive passion.

  In Paris my one and only visit to the Louvre had been spoiled by windows—rows of lovely windows pouring deadly direct sunlight on the priceless paintings opposite. And I’d never quite recovered from the horror of the flashbulbs popping round the Mona Lisa, when the guard whose job it was to drone out “pas de flash” was off on tea break. All those tourists, all those flashbulbs, all that stupid, stupid ignorance, destroying the painting as surely as if they’d slashed it with a knife, and all for a snapshot that wouldn’t hold a candle to the postcards one could buy for next to nothing in the gift shop.

  I tended to avoid museums, when I wasn’t working.

  But this, I reasoned, was a special case. I would be living out at Rosehill for the digging season anyway—it followed I should do my best to learn the local history. And to my relief, I found that there was nothing here to set my teeth on edge. Someone had done a professional job of presenting the town’s past in a well-defined sequence of information panels and displays.

  Border lords and Jacobite conspirators, boatbuilders and smugglers, the men who fished the North Sea for herring and the “fisher lassies” whose job it was to clean and salt the catch—all of them had their place in the Eyemouth Museum. And room had been made for the odd outsider.

  David’s mother paused before one panel. “And this, of course, commemorates the day the bard himself came here, to be made a Royal Arch-Mason.”

  My eyebrows rose. “What, Shakespeare came here?”

  “Robbie Burns, you heathen,” she corrected me, rolling her eyes good-naturedly in response to my English ignorance. “Our national poet, no less.”

  Jeannie thought it was a wonder Robert Burns had lived to tell the tale. “Coming to a smuggling town like Eyemouth, and him an exciseman.”

  I fancied even smugglers harbored some respect for genius. The poet’s image kept proud company with nets and the herring barrels and the whopping great cannonball Jeannie showed off with a smile. “That came from the fort.”