The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “And where is the fort?”

  “Over there,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the sea. “On the top of the cliffs at the end of the beach. You can see it from where we parked the car.”

  “Not a Roman fort, I take it?”

  “Tudor,” Nancy Fortune told me. “Built in the days of the boy king Edward of England, and torn down under Elizabeth. The French and the English kept fighting us for it. There’s no telling whose cannon that came from.”

  Jeannie looked down at the heavy cannonball. “The two cannon still up there aren’t Tudor, are they?”

  “No, folk set those up on Fort Point in the French invasion scare, we think—the middle of last century.”

  Invasion, I reflected, was a constant theme along this stretch of coast. Invasion and slaughter and swift retribution, an unending cycle of fire and sword. Small wonder the soil here was red.

  “The Fort,” said Nancy Fortune, “was my Davy’s favorite place, when he was younger. He did all his thinking there. It’s peaceful, like—just grass and mounds and those two cannon looking on the sea.”

  Jeannie nodded, straight-faced. “And it’s a rare fine spot to see the haggis.”

  “Oh, aye,” agreed the older woman. “Wild haggis everywhere. They like to dig their burrows in the mounds.”

  Refusing to rise to the bait, I drifted on toward the next display.

  It was dead clever, this display. In all the local history museums I had visited I’d never seen its match. Instead of relying on pictures alone to give one the feel of a fishing boat, they’d brought the boat itself inside. The front half of a boat, at any rate.

  Stepping onto the bridge, I played like a child with the polished wheel and gazed in admiration through the glass window, at the ropes and nets and fish boxes piled on “deck,” and the real stuffed herring gull riding the jutting bow into an imaginary wind. I thought the whole thing brilliant, and said so.

  “Aye, it’s fair impressive,” David’s mother said. “But ye’ve not yet seen our greatest achievement. That we save for last.”

  With great expectations I followed her round the remaining few displays until we arrived at the end of the loop, within sight of the lobby.

  “There.” She stopped dramatically before the final wall. “That’s the treasure of our museum.”

  I saw only a tapestry, and a modern one at that. Attractive, yes, but hardly what one thought of as…

  “The Eyemouth Tapestry,” my guide’s voice sliced evenly into my thoughts. “It took twenty-four ladies two years to make this, for the one hundredth anniversary of the Disaster.” Her sideways glance was self-assured. “You’ll have heard about the Disaster?”

  “Heard it mentioned, yes, but—”

  Jeannie interrupted me as Nancy Fortune’s eyebrows rose. “We thought we’d let you tell her, since you tell the story best.”

  “Och, it’s not so difficult. Any bairn here in Eyemouth could tell you about the Disaster. That’s the Great East Coast Fishing Disaster,” she explained for my benefit, speaking in obvious capitals. “Black Friday, they called it. And though it’s been more than a hundred years since, you’ll still hear folk talk like it was yesterday.” She folded her arms and gave a small sigh before smoothly beginning the story. “It happened in October. A stretch of bad weather had kept all the boats in the harbor a few days, but the morn of Black Friday was fair bright and sunny, with never a breath of wind. The fishermen’s wives set to baiting the lines, and their menfolk prepared for a fine day of fishing, though the old public weather-glass, down by the pier-end, was lower than any had seen.” She shook her head. “It made some of the fishermen wary, that glass being low. Still, the day looked so grand and the sea looked so calm that the younger lads started on out.” A practiced storyteller, she paused and let the sentence dangle until I gave her the prompt.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it’s a point of honor, like, that if the one boat goes out all the rest go, too. So at eight in the morning they sailed from the harbor and made their way out to the fishing grounds. Four hours they fished, then at midday the sea changed. It was the stillness that warned them… a horrible stillness… but afore they could move the whole sky turned to black and the wind rose up screaming and wild.”

  She pointed to the first panel of the tapestry. Against the vivid blue background of the sea, two terror-stricken fishermen clung desperately to the lines of their sinking vessel, struggling to guide it into shore. “Whole boats were tossed up from the water, their masts torn away and their sails ripped to shreds, and the sea took the ones who were heading for harbor and dashed them apart on the rocks. Those on the shore tried everything—tossed out lines and made human chains, reaching out hands for the struggling men, but the waves took them anyway.”

  I stared, transfixed, at the tapestry’s second panel, a more symbolic rendering of the tragedy, with seven childlike figures scattered round the outline of a boat, watched by a wailing line of human-faced cliffs. “How terrible.”

  “Aye. One hundred and eighty-nine men were taken in the Disaster, from all four local harbors—Burnmouth, Cove, St. Abbs, and Eyemouth. That’s what the four maps show, in this third section. And the sea wall, just here, has one stone for each Eyemouth man lost. One hundred and twenty-nine stones,” she gave me the tragic count. “Half the men of the town gone, and all in one day. That was the toll of the Eyemouth Disaster… October the fourteenth, eighteen hundred and eighty-one.”

  Embroidered with painstaking care on the tapestry were the names of all the fishermen who died in the Disaster, along with the names of their boats. It made a chilling record.

  I stood a moment, deeply moved, reflecting on the ironies of history. Nearly two thousand years ago, if Quinnell’s theories were right, another group of men had faced their own Disaster day in this same place—men who spoke a different language, served a different god, but who had dreams and wives and mothers, like the fishermen of Eyemouth.

  And the shadowy horses had come for them, too, to carry them off to the land of the dead. I had a sudden and disturbing sense of something evil, undefined… some dark and vengeful entity that lay in wait to ambush all who passed this way, whether they traveled by land or by sea, chasing men down through the centuries.

  The silence clutched at me and held a moment, and then Jeannie nudged me forward to the light, and shaking off the foolish vision I turned my back to the Eyemouth Tapestry and the terrified stares of its drowning men.

  ***

  The weather had cleared a little by the time Jeannie and I finally left the museum. In the parking lot, we found Wally Tyler waiting for us.

  He pitched his cigarette away when he saw us coming, and Kip, at his heels, jumped up joyfully. Behind them, through the thinning mist, I saw the long dark promontory where the Fort had stood, jutting out into the waves, and below that the waves themselves, whitecapped and swirled by salt-sprayed wind that carried still the bone-chilling dampness of rain.

  “Heyah,” Jeannie greeted her father. “Where’s Robbie?”

  “Asleep in the car.”

  “Wore him out, did you? Where did you go?”

  “Round aboot. Had a few pints, like, wi’ Deid-Banes.”

  “Oh, aye? Well, we’d best get the two of you home, then.”

  The collie, soaking wet, brought an indefinable odor into the car, and Jeannie wrinkled her nose. “Och, Kip, you’re mingin.”

  I sniffed myself, and decided that “mingin” was one word I needn’t look up in my dictionary. “Deid-Banes,” though, was something different. I flipped the pages casually, eventually translating the term into the equally unhelpful English “Dead-bones.”

  Jeannie, glancing in the rearview mirror, fixed her father with a stern accusing eye. “Granny Nan smoked a cigarette this morn.”

  �
�Oh, aye?”

  “You gave it to her, didn’t you?”

  The old man shrugged, all innocence. “I might have left yin lying aboot, where she could find it.”

  “But Dad, the doctor said—”

  “I mind whit the doctor said,” he cut her off, his gray eyes unimpressed. “But Nancy Fortune’s always done as Nancy Fortune pleases, and she wisnae in the grave last time I looked.”

  Two hours later, sipping tea with Peter in the cozy red-walled sitting room, I learned that his opinion took a slightly different twist.

  “A difficult woman,” he mused, with a shake of his head. “Most difficult. She simply will not listen to advice, you know. She never has. Her doctor says she must slow down, but Nancy… Nancy never listens.”

  He’d been drinking, from the looks of it. The glass beside his teacup held a half inch of clear liquid that I guessed would not be water. But his sigh implied his own health habits were above reproach, a pure example to be followed, if only David’s mother would be reasonable…

  “Well, she looked perfectly healthy to me,” I said. “I quite liked her. And I liked the museum, it’s very well organized.”

  “You saw the tapestry, of course? The Disaster tapestry?”

  “Yes.”

  “They do remember their Disaster, here in Eyemouth.” Scooping Murphy from the arm of the leather chair, he repositioned the creature so it draped across his knees. “Not that I’ve a problem with people living in the past,” he went on, stroking the black cat absently. “I’m all for it, actually. My Irish blood, perhaps.” He smiled. “I’ve always liked what that one writer said—that chap who wrote Trinity—”

  “Leon Uris.”

  “Is that his name? He said there was no future in Ireland, only the past happening over and over. I get that feeling here, as well. The past is never far away, at Rosehill. Never far away.”

  Beneath his hand the cat yawned, turned staring eyes upon me for a moment, then shifted its gaze to the window. It didn’t hiss, or make a sound, but the dark hair lifted all along its spine.

  “You see?” said Quinnell, lightly. “Look, our Sentinel is passing.”

  I believe he meant it as a joke, but through the moaning of the wind I fancied that I heard the footsteps walking, walking, steadily, along the gravel drive.

  Chapter 13

  David was already hard at it when I went up to the Principia on Wednesday, before breakfast. He swiveled in his chair as I came in, and his face, bathed in the hard blue light of the computer screen, looked beastly tired. “Morning,” he greeted me, his jaw stiffening as he held back a yawn. He reached for the mug of coffee on the desk before him. “You’re up early.”

  “Look who’s talking.” I took my own seat in the stall-cubicle opposite and hitched my chair sideways to face him. “Are you actually doing work at this ungodly hour?”

  “Well, I’m not playing computer games.” He seemed in good spirits this morning, relaxed. “Those are all on Adrian’s machine. He’s got the golf and everything. Me, I’m just entering my field notes from Saturday, afore I forget what I was thinking.” The blue eyes flicked me with a friendly challenge. “So what’s your excuse?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” I thought of asking him if he had ever heard the horses running in the fields beyond, but after one more quick look at those sensible eyes, I decided against it. “Do you not teach on Wednesdays?”

  He shook his dark head. “We have meetings and such, in the afternoon, but I do feel a wee cough coming on.” He winked. “Anyway, Peter’s been wanting to show me the things that he found when he widened the trench.”

  “Oh, yes. Potsherds.” I fetched them from the finds room, to show him. “We found four, yesterday. I’ve not had much of a chance to look at them, myself, really. I’d have worked a little longer on them last night, only Peter wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Aye, well, he has a thing about us working late. It’s like his Sunday holiday, you’ll find—meant to be strictly observed by everyone but Peter himself.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. He was puddling round up here on Sunday morning, but he sent me off with Jeannie. We went down to the museum.”

  “So I heard.” He raised his coffee mug to hide the slanting smile. “Behaved herself, did she?”

  His smile had distracted me. “Who, Jeannie?”

  “My mother. She didn’t try to bully you into helping out at the next coffee morning, or anything? No? Eh well, it’s early days yet. Give her time.”

  I looked at him with interest. “Do they have coffee mornings?”

  “Aye, on a Saturday. All the local clubs and groups hold coffee mornings turn about, in the Masonic Hall. This next one coming’s for the heart fund, and my mother’s sure to be involved with that. Ye ken she had a heart attack?”

  I nodded. “Jeannie told me. Very recently, was it?”

  “Last July. Scared me more than it did her, I think.”

  “She seems to have made a full recovery,” I commented. “I could barely keep up with her yesterday; she moves at a fearful pace.”

  “Aye, she does that.” The big Scotsman’s eyes held affection. “It’d take being struck by lightning to slow my mother down.” The sound of an engine speeding up the long drive seemed to emphasize his statement. “That’ll be Adrian,” he told me, as I heard a car door closing. “Either that, or Nigel Mansell’s come for breakfast.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch, surprised. “Adrian’s normally still half asleep, at this hour.”

  “Well, we’ll be starting to map out the ramparts today, and Peter was keen on an early start. It’s a time-consuming process, but it shouldn’t be too difficult, assuming that we really have a marching camp. We ken the shape a camp would be—we only have to find the corners.”

  I nodded understanding. Roman marching camps, and forts, and fortresses, tended to follow a playing-card kind of design—square or rectangular, with rounded corners. The Romans, being Romans, had imposed their rigid structure on whatever land they passed through, instead of letting nature dictate what design they ought to use. And so, as David said, once any section of the rampart had been found, one had only to follow the predicted shape around to plot the whole site’s boundaries.

  There were several methods they could use, to do this. Adrian, I thought, could take his ground-penetrating radar equipment and run it along inside the line of the southern ditch that we’d already found. Eventually, by taking measurements, his readings should show two marked anomalies, one at either end—two parallel blips on the computer map, to tell us where the eastern and western ditches had been. And then, by heading northwards along either one of those, he should be able to locate the fourth and final ditch, revealing the marching camp’s outline.

  David, when I asked him, confirmed that this would be their main approach. “But we’ll probe as well, just to be sure.”

  Probing, I knew, was the tried and tested method—I’d seen a hollow probe used many times, to good effect. Though it sometimes could do damage to a fragile buried feature, most archaeologists relied on it to confirm the often ambiguous results of modern geophysical surveys.

  The probe itself was nothing more elaborate than a narrow tube of hard steel with a sharp bottom edge and a cutaway gap down one side, topped by a T-shaped handle that helped the user force it downwards, deep into the earth. Withdrawn, the gap in the probe’s side displayed a core sample of the layered soil deposits. In our case, the dark silt that filled a ditch would show up very clearly against the surrounding soil.

  It was tedious work, though, and ramming the probe down again and again through tangled turf and heavy subsoil demanded a fair bit of strength.

  David flexed his broad shoulders and stifled a yawn, linking his hands behind his head. “It’s a shame that Robbie can’t go round and mark the ramparts for us. It’d save a
lot of bother.”

  It was the first time I’d heard anybody tell me something Robbie couldn’t do. “Why can’t he?”

  “Because he’s not so accurate, with things like that. He has his hits and misses. Most of what he tells you he just gets at random, walking over things. If you ask him the right questions, he can tell you quite a lot. But if you push him, and he tries too hard…” David shrugged, dropping his hands again to reach for his coffee mug. “He’s only a lad, not some kind of machine.”

  I studied him a moment, weighing my next question. Since coming to Rosehill, I’d grown used to David keeping his distance, polite and professional, his manner not inviting any personal intrusion. But Saturday in the kitchen with Jeannie, and now again this morning, he’d been so easy to talk to that I thought he might not mind if I just asked for his opinion.

  “David…” I found I liked the feel of his name, familiar on my tongue.

  He drained his coffee, pulling a face at the taste. “Aye?”

  “You’re a scientist.”

  “Aye?”

  “Well…” I steepled my fingers, and frowned. “How do you explain what psychics do?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But you believe in them.”

  He swiveled slowly in his chair, considering the matter. “That depends on what you mean by belief. If you mean, do I accept the concept without question… no, I don’t. But questioning things is the root of all science. Something happens we don’t understand, so we test it, experiment, study the evidence.”

  “And is there evidence?”

  “Oh, aye. You want to have a chat with a friend of mine who lectures in our psychology department, at the university. Did his PhD mainly on parapsychology—he’s been studying psychics for years.” David’s eyes touched mine, smiling. “He’ll take you right back to the Oracle of Delphi, if you’ve the patience to listen. Thousands of years of reported occurrences. Mind you, it’s only been since the last century that anybody took a scientific interest. The Society for Psychical Research, and all that. Flash cards in the laboratories.”