The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “That’s a mystery, still. But we do know the Sentinel stayed.” The sea cast up an arc of spray that spattered cold against my face. Like tears it clung, and tasted salt.

  “Love and honor,” Nancy Fortune told me, “are a complicated mixture. If he really did promise his sister that he’d keep her man from harm, then he might well have felt he could never go home, that she’d never forgive him for failing.”

  “Or he might have been mortally wounded, himself,” I suggested. “Who knows?”

  “He does, I’ll wager.”

  We thought about that for a moment, both of us, in silence, and then she said: “It is a shame you can’t use Robbie.”

  “Yes, I know, but after what happened…” I shook my head, slowly. “No, it’s too risky, really. And I’m not sure even he could pin down evidence of mass cremation—bits of charred bone and ashes all over the field, they’d be murder to find. Still, if we’re patient, and stick to our digging, I’m sure we’ll come up with proof.”

  The restless wind tore at my hair, and I felt the warm touch of her eyes on my face. “You believe Peter’s theories, then.”

  “Yes, I do. But then it’s rather hard not to believe Peter, isn’t it? I mean, he only has to look at you and give an explanation, and you can’t imagine any other way it could have happened. You know?”

  The faint smile gentled her expression. “Aye, that’s what Davy says, too.”

  I stayed silent a moment longer, thinking, then bit my lip and said, rather tentatively: “They’re very much alike, aren’t they, Peter and David?”

  “Very much,” she agreed.

  Our eyes met for the briefest instant, then I turned my face away again. It was nothing to do with me, I reminded myself. Whatever suspicions I might have, whatever questions I might want to ask, the answers were none of my business.

  Instead I fixed my eyes on the incoming waves, watching the long curling crests of white foam that formed along their tops before they crashed themselves to death upon the sand. They did remind one of the manes of wild horses, I thought, just like Peter had said. The Irish horses of the sea, coming to gather their dead.

  David’s mother watched me in her turn, and after a long pause she said, very simply: “He doesn’t ken.”

  My head turned. “I’m sorry?”

  “Davy. He doesn’t ken who his father is. That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it?” In the face of my guilty silence she smiled and went on. “It’s no shame for me to tell you, lass. You’ve more right to the truth than anyone, and if ye no ken why,” she said, cutting me off as I opened my mouth to protest, “then you’re not near as clever as I had you pegged.” Her gaze raked me rather fondly. “You’re very much as I was, Verity Grey. And if you’d gone to work for Peter Quinnell, years ago…”

  “If I had worked for Peter then,” I told her, honestly, “I should have been in love with him.”

  “Aye. So you would. And so I was. Only of course, he was married at the time.”

  “Not happily.”

  “No, not happily. But there it was.” She raised a shoulder dismissively and turned her face seaward.

  “Could he not…” I paused to clear my throat. “Surely mental illness, even then, was just cause for divorce.”

  “Oh, aye,” she said. “But there was Philip, too, you see.”

  “Well yes, but—”

  “Philip saw us,” she said, slowly. “One day, quite by accident. He had something of his mother’s illness, Philip did, and seeing me with Peter made him crazy. It was an awful thing, for Peter—Philip never did forgive him. All his life, if anything went wrong, it was his father’s fault. His mother’s death, his own bad marriage, all his money problems, everything.” She shook her head. “He had a talent, Philip did, for hating.”

  “All the more reason for Peter to leave,” was my comment.

  “Perhaps. But Peter loved the lad, I saw the pain it caused him. And I didn’t want him torn in two. I kent, see, that he would divorce Elizabeth, if he’d kent I was carrying Davy.”

  I blinked at her. “If he’d…?”

  “He’d have wanted to marry me,” she said. “To take care of me. It’s his nature. And I’d have hated that.”

  “But you loved him.”

  Her eyes shifted, and I could see her trying to find the right words to explain. “Love and marriage, they were two different things to me, then. Marriage meant settling down, giving yourself over to a man… losing your independence, like. Much as I loved Peter—and I did love him terribly—I loved my own self more,” she said. Again the flicker of a smile. “I was young.”

  A gull swooped in front of me, hanging in the wind, and I frowned at it. “And yet, you did get married.”

  “Aye, on paper. Billy Fortune was an old friend, and a good man. It was his idea, like—to save my reputation, and to give the bairn a name. We only meant to keep it up two years, and then divorce, but Billy died afore that.” Her voice, I thought, was so amazingly calm. She might have been telling me someone else’s story, and not her own. “Poor Billy,” she said. “Peter never did care for him, much. Couldn’t fathom why I’d married a fisherman.”

  I struggled to make sense of it all. “So Peter… Peter doesn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “After Billy died he took a hand in Davy’s bringing up—he couldn’t help himself. But Davy’s Billy Fortune’s son, so far as Peter kens.”

  “And David doesn’t know.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Why tell you?” The clear blue eyes, so like her son’s, touched mine knowingly. “Because, as you say, my Davy’s a lot like his father. And you, lass, like me, are a difficult woman.”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “I took one road, that’s all I’m saying. I went down the one road and, now that I’m old, I can see that it wasn’t the best road to take.”

  The herring gull cried and she followed the flight of its shadow with thoughtful eyes, watched it pass over waves rolling in with such force that the sand beneath them boiled and the narrow strip of beach dissolved in foam.

  “It’s never too late, though, is it?” I ventured. “I mean, you and Peter, you’re both single now, and living here, and surely if you wanted to…”

  She shook her head, and for the first time since I’d met her she looked her full age. “You can never go back.” Far out beyond the harbor mouth the sea-god’s horses tossed their curling manes and rushed in on the inevitable tide, and Nancy Fortune stood and watched them come. “Life moves on,” she said gently, “and ye cannae go back. You’ve only got one chance to get it right.”

  Chapter 32

  The inside of the tent was much more comfortable than I’d imagined, high-ceilinged and spacious with a camp bed in one corner and even a small wooden desk, buried of course beneath papers. The flaps, tied back to catch the breeze, let in a spear of morning sun and when I breathed, the pungent scents of leather and warm canvas rose up to mingle pleasantly with fainter smells of soap and aftershave.

  David, bent over his bootlace, flicked a glance upwards. “Have I grown an extra head?” he asked me.

  “Sorry?”

  “You’ve been staring at me strange since you came in.” Straightening, he tucked his shirttails into the waistband of his khaki shorts and shot me a wicked grin. “Or is it just that I’m so irresistible?”

  He was looking rather irresistible, actually, fresh from his morning shower with his hair still damp and rumpled like a boy’s. I had a momentary urge to comb my fingers through the curls to tidy them, but instead I answered his question with a noncommittal smile and tipped my head back, admiring the canvas overhead.

  “I do like your tent,” I said.

  “Aye. Pure Abercrombie & Fitch, don’t you think? Lik
e being on safari. I wake up every morning with the feeling that I ought to go and shoot something. Of course,” he qualified the statement, “I’d be bound to feel like that anyway, wouldn’t I, working with Adrian. Tent or no.”

  I laughed. “Adrian’s not so bad.”

  “Is he not?” He strapped on his wristwatch, considering. “Well, maybe you’re right. But his mouth’s been making my hand fair itch these past few days.”

  “He always turns sarcastic when he’s foiled in love.”

  “Oh, aye?”

  “And it isn’t me he’s pining for, whatever you might think,” I set him straight. “He’s head over heels for Fabia.”

  David grinned again, more broadly. “Is he, poor sod? He and Brian ought to form a club, then—cry into their beer together. She’s got a new lad in her snares. One of these sub-aqua nutters come down for the diving.”

  I’d suspected as much myself, but I’d never seen her with anyone. I wondered that David had—he almost never left the site now, so absorbed was he in the dig. “You seem to know an awful lot about it.”

  “Oh, I ken everyone’s business,” he said cheerfully. “Especially now that my mother’s sitting up there at Saltgreens looking out on the harbor all day. It’s fair amazing, what she sees.”

  “Too bad you’re not still living at the Ship,” I teased him. “She might have kept an eye on you.”

  “Just as well I’m here, then.” The light in his eyes was decidedly sinful. “There are some things,” he said, “I’d not want to do, in full view of my mother.”

  “Such as?”

  He laughed, and took my face in his hands, and showed me.

  “Oh,” I said, when I could breathe again. “Those things.”

  “And others. But I’ll have to demonstrate another time. We’re running late as it is.”

  In the kitchen at Rosehill we found Robbie impatiently swinging his legs. “I’ve been waiting and waiting,” he told us. “You said ten o’clock, and it’s the back of eleven.”

  David apologized. “But we’ll not be late, I promise you.”

  Jeannie turned smiling from the stove. “You’re sure it’s nae bother, now? Brian said he’d meet you down there, when the boats all come back in.”

  The fleet had sailed this morning up to St. Abbs, near where David’s mother had her cottage, to pick up the young Herring Queen and give her a royal escort back along the coast to Eyemouth. David had explained that it was always done this way—the Herring Queen being taken by car to St. Abbs, to be met by the full fishing fleet. Their return was timed for high tide, in the middle of the afternoon. And then there’d be the pomp and circumstance of the crowning ceremony, held on Gunsgreen, right beside the harbor.

  Robbie wasn’t keen on seeing the crowning ceremony, but he was keen on the children’s races held beforehand. Jeannie would have taken him herself, only she’d been battling a headache since breakfast, and with Brian away up to St. Abbs, and Wally leaving at daybreak to help set things up in town, it was down to me and David.

  “Of course it’s nae bother,” said David. “And after the races, we’ll take Robbie round to the museum, and show him that stunning gown you wore as Herring Queen.”

  “You do and I’ll make you wear it,” she threatened him. “All those purple petticoats… and the flounces!”

  “Well, it was the fashion,” I consoled her. “I used to have a bridesmaid’s frock like that myself.”

  When she pointed out that my frock wasn’t on display for everyone to see, I shrugged. “I wasn’t a Herring Queen. How do they choose the Herring Queen, anyway?”

  “Looks,” she said, straight-faced, but David didn’t let her get away with it.

  “Wasn’t it school grades, in your day?” he asked her.

  “In my day? And what am I, a dinosaur? Which one of us is turning thirty-seven?”

  David shook his head. “Not till tomorrow. I’m a young man yet, the day.”

  Robbie grabbed his sleeve and hauled him bodily toward the door. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll be missing everything.”

  Peter and most of the students had gone into town before us, drawn more by the lure of open pubs, I thought, than by any real desire to see the Herring Queen crowned. Fabia had promised several of the young men she would follow within the hour, but she was, as usual, running late. As we passed into the front hall she was talking on the telephone.

  “…in the cellar, yes. Tomorrow? But that’s Sunday, are you…? Oh right, yes, that’s fine,” she said, turning slightly at the sound of our footsteps. “OK, I will. Thanks very much.”

  She rang off with a faintly guilty air, and David grinned.

  “You’re never ordering more supplies?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth, as if to deny the charge, then thought better of it. “Well, I need them. And anyway, Peter said that I could order anything I liked, for my darkroom.” Tossing back her bright fair hair she gathered up the keys to the Range Rover. “Are you off to this Herring Queen thing, then?”

  “Aye. Any chance of a hurl into town? We were going to walk, but Robbie’s in a wee bit of a hurry and I don’t fancy jogging the mile.”

  “With thighs like that?” Her eyes dipped down and back again, flirting from habit. “I’ll not believe it. But sure, I can give you a lift, if you want.”

  She dropped us by Market Place, in front of the museum, where a boisterous group of children appeared to have completely taken over the small paved square, laughing and jostling and chasing one another with alarming energy. David and I moved to one side, joining the ranks of the parents who stood round the edges of Market Place, keeping well clear of the rampage.

  As I stood watching Robbie run wild with the rest of them, his dark curls tossed anyhow, eyes shining happily, it suddenly struck me that our child would look very much like that—David’s and mine. And then the implications of that one stray thought sank home, and I felt my face grow warm.

  “Wave to my mother,” David said, his own hand raised toward the corner of the square, where the windows of Saltgreens reflected the brilliant blue sky.

  “Where is she?” I asked him, shielding my eyes from the sun as I looked up. “I can’t see her.”

  “Neither can I. But she’ll be up there somewhere. She doesn’t miss much.”

  Smiling, I sent a general wave to all the watching windows, and turned again, expectantly. “So, if the children’s races are run on Gunsgreen,” I asked David, “then what are we doing here?”

  “Waiting for the pipe band.”

  My eyes shone. “What, bagpipes?”

  “Like them, do you?” He laughed at my reaction. “Well, you’ll not have long to wait. They come at noon, to gather up the children and pipe them over the water.”

  “A pipe band,” I repeated, unable to hide my delight. “Do we get to follow them, too?”

  “Oh, aye. You can run in the races and all, if you want to. And if you’re a good wee lassie,” he promised, “I’ll buy you an ice lolly, after.” His indulgent smile warmed me as he took hold of my hand, lacing his fingers through mine.

  I smiled back, indescribably happy, then turned away again as a rising drone of music heralded the arrival of the pipe band.

  Released from work, with no worries to think of, no ghosts to dog my steps, and the sun shining bright in a perfect blue sky, I felt younger than Robbie as we followed the skirling pipes down to the harbor and over the middle pier on to the level sweep of lawn that spread toward the sea from Gunsgreen House.

  There were people everywhere. They ebbed and flowed around us like a tidal stream, in colorful confusion. David, still holding my hand, steered me expertly through them and found a spot where we could stand and cheer the races. There was Highland dancing as well, with its bright swirl of tartan and toe-tapping music. I could
n’t remember when I’d had so much fun.

  David appeared to enjoy himself, too, though he did cast a critical eye over Robbie’s free lunch. “Soggy pie and yucky apple tart it was, in my day,” he complained. “These kids are spoiled, now.”

  It surprised me how quickly the time passed. When the first fishing boats nosed their way into the harbor, I had to check my watch to convince myself it was, in fact, the middle of the afternoon.

  David took firm hold of Robbie with his other hand and the three of us shifted with the crowd, to watch the Herring Queen set down upon the small red bridge at the end of the middle pier. She was a lovely girl, fresh-faced and fair, and her gown, though purple, was a decided improvement on Jeannie’s.

  Robbie fidgeted through the crowning ceremony, bored by the speeches, and finally tugged at David’s sleeve. “Davy, Dad’s looking for me.”

  The blue eyes slanted downwards. “Oh, aye? And where’s your dad the now?”

  “Over there.” Robbie pointed across the harbor, toward the fish market.

  “Right, we’ll go and find him.” David looked at me, apologetic. “You can wait here, if you’d rather, I’ll not be more than a few minutes.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come, too.”

  Brian McMorran, waiting in the shade of the fish market, didn’t appear to be actively looking for his son; but then again, I reasoned, perhaps when both father and son had second sight, finding one another was a simple thing to do.

  “Heyah, Dad!” Robbie went bouncing over. “Did you see the Herring Queen?”

  “I did.”

  “Was Mum that bonny, when she was Herring Queen?”

  “Your mother was the bonniest Herring Queen ever,” said Brian, firmly. He propped his shoulder against a post and looked from David to myself. “Been taking good care of my boy, then, have you?”

  “It’s no use asking Verity,” David said. “She’s ages with Robbie today, and just as much trouble. I’ve had to keep the both of them from wandering off.”

  Relaxing slightly, Brian smiled and lit a cigarette. “I’ll take one of ’em off your hands. I’ve a few hours yet before my work starts.”