The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  David glanced across the harbor at the Fleetwing’s gleaming red-and-white hull. “Are you taking her out the night?”

  “Planning on it,” Brian answered, pitching his spent match into the black water. “I’m a man short at the moment, but I’m working on it.”

  David frowned. “Who’s away, then?”

  “Mick.” The boy from Liverpool that no one liked, as I recalled. Brian’s shrug held no regret. “He took a swing at our cook, this morning. It was either me give Mick the shove, or Billy would have killed him.” He pulled at his cigarette, blowing out smoke. “But I’ve got a lad lined up to take his place, so we might get a few days’ good fishing in, before the weather turns. That front brewing down to the south hasn’t shifted—it’s still only sitting there, doing no harm.”

  I looked at him. “There’s a storm coming?”

  “Maybe,” said Brian. “Might come north, or go elsewhere. You never can tell. Why, are you worried the Fleetwing’ll roll belly-up?” His eyes surveyed me mockingly as he exhaled a drifting smoke ring. “We’ve come a long way since the days of the Disaster—we’ve got sonar, radar, everything, these days. If a storm cloud so much as burps I’ve got the weather service on the phone to warn me.”

  “And if you did get stuck,” said Robbie, “I could come out with the lifeboat men, to rescue you. I’ve been watching them right careful, like.”

  “Have you, now?” Brian’s hard eyes softened on his son’s upturned face.

  “So,” David asked Brian, “which of them do you want?”

  “Eh?”

  “You said you’d take one of these two off my hands,” David said, standing between Robbie and me, “but you never did tell me which one.”

  “Oh. This one,” Brian said, claiming his son with a hand on the boy’s narrow shoulder. “He’s not so much trouble.”

  “Right then, we’re away. We want to catch the last part of the crowning.” David took my hand again like a teenage lover and, whistling tunelessly, led me back onto the middle pier. “See your swan,” he said, pointing, “I wonder what he thinks of all this activity.”

  I ignored the swan. “Do you know,” I told him, putting my head to one side in a pretense of thought, “I’m not sure which was the more insulting—having you offer me to Brian, or having him refuse me.”

  “Aye, well, if I’d thought he’d choose you I’d never have asked him.”

  “I mean, it’s not as though I’m difficult…”

  The tuneless whistling became a chuckle. “Maybe I like a difficult woman.”

  “Well, keep it up,” I dared him, “and you’ll find out just how—”

  “Careful,” he cut me off, putting a hand out to hold me back as a young man came vaulting over the Fleetwing’s railing onto the pier, landing directly in our path.

  He looked an ordinary young man, with cropped ginger hair and a long face that was neither handsome nor ugly, but his eyes made me uneasy, and I didn’t need to hear the Liverpool accent to recognize him as the lad that Brian’s mate Billy had wanted to kill. “Did I give you a scare?” he asked, adjusting the bulging daysack slung over one shoulder. “Sorry.”

  “No harm done,” David told him. “Only look where you’re going, lad, next time.”

  “I’ll do that.” There was something almost evil in the way he smiled at David, and I felt cold until the young man had moved past us, heading down the pier. I watched him out of sight.

  “And that, I take it,” I said, “would be Mick.”

  “Aye.” David arched an eyebrow. “Clearing off with his things, from the look of it. Either that, or he’s been robbing Brian blind.”

  I frowned. “Should we tell Brian, do you think?”

  “There’s not much point. Brian can hardly report a theft to the police, now, can he? One look below deck and they’d have the boat swarming with excisemen,” David said, grinning. “Come on, we’ll be missing the crowning.”

  The crowning ceremony had, in fact, ended by the time we made our way back to Gunsgreen, and the Herring Queen was being settled in a horse-drawn carriage while the pipe band started up again, preparing to lead her away on parade.

  David’s eyes teased me for jigging in place. “If I’d kent you liked the pipes so much, I’d have taken lessons.”

  “It’s not the bagpipes, really,” I confessed, “so much as the kilts.”

  “Oh, aye? My mother,” he informed me, “doesn’t think most men these days should wear the kilt. She says they’ve not got the behind for it.” I could easily picture her saying that, though one could hardly accuse David of being inadequate in that department. He caught me looking and smiled more broadly. “I’ll wear mine tonight, if you want, to the ceilidh.”

  “What does it look like, the Fortune tartan?”

  “There isn’t one. I wear the Hunting Stewart,” he informed me. “Sort of an all-purpose tartan, for those whose families never claimed their own.”

  But then he wasn’t a Fortune anyway, I reminded myself. Not really. What did the Anglo-Irish have, I wondered, in place of the Scottish tartan? What was the mark of the Quinnell family?

  “You’re doing it again,” said David.

  “What?”

  “Staring.”

  “Ah.” There was no trace of Peter in his features, I thought. None at all. Except, perhaps, in the sure, unhurried way his eyes slid sideways, angled down to lock with mine.

  “Keep looking at me like that,” he promised, “and we’ll not make it to the ceilidh.”

  I smiled. “And you call poor Adrian vain.”

  “Nothing vain about it. It’s simple fact. I’m no saint,” he said, pulling me close with one arm round my waist.

  “Careful,” I warned, as his head began to lower. “Your mother might be looking out her window.”

  David said something decidedly rude about his mother, and kissed me anyway.

  The voice that spoke behind us wasn’t Nancy Fortune’s, but it nonetheless brought us apart like a pair of guilty schoolchildren.

  “Verity, my dear,” said Peter, his richly theatrical tone cresting the music with ease, “you do have the most appalling taste in men.”

  Chapter 33

  “No, no,” he went on, casting a critical eye over David, “I’m sure you can do better than this. I’ll admit, a Scotsman is a marginal improvement on an Englishman, but my dear, what you really want now is a nice Irish chap.”

  David grinned. “Away with your Irishmen.”

  “Scoff if you will. But if I were some thirty years younger, my boy, I’d leave you at the post.” His suave smile proved the point as he came to stand at my other shoulder, his hands clasped behind his back. “So,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “how are you enjoying your day so far?”

  I assured him I was enjoying it very well. “We’ve been all over. I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into you, before now.”

  “I’ve been well hidden.” Peter angled a confiding glance at me. “The young people quite wore me out, I’m afraid, so I gave them the slip and went up to see Nancy. Had a cup of coffee and a very jolly game of chess. And of course, one can see everything from her room, you know, without having to endure the crowds. She’s got a lovely big window.”

  David winked at me. “What did I tell you? My mother’s a regular spy.”

  “Well,” I remarked, “she has to do something with her time, since the two of you insist on keeping her in the dark about the dig.”

  Both of them turned to stare at me. “My dear girl…” Peter began, but I didn’t let him finish.

  “She’s longing to know what we’re doing. And I must say I think that it’s dreadful, your shutting her out.”

  Peter tried again. “But her doctors…”

  “Are idiots,” I told him bluntly. “Sh
e’s not made of glass. I would think the frustration of not knowing would do more harm than the ounce of excitement you’re liable to give her.”

  Smiling, David lifted his gaze over my head to meet Peter’s. “She may have a point, there.”

  “Perhaps,” Peter said, “but she doesn’t know your mother, my boy. One might begin by simply telling Nancy things, but it wouldn’t end there. She would want to be out in the field, you see. Just to have a better view of things, that’s what she’d say. And the minute I turned my back she’d be in there with trowel in hand…”

  “She could work with me,” I offered. “Nothing strenuous about what I do. And it certainly wouldn’t be any more tiring than the work she does for the museum.”

  “She works two afternoons a week at the museum,” David informed me. “If we had her up to Rosehill she’d be there from dawn to dusk.”

  “I just think you’re both being very unkind.” I said nothing further, but even I could feel the rigid set of my jaw as I turned to watch the Herring Queen parade pass by. Above my head, David and Peter exchanged glances again.

  “We’ve been told,” Peter said.

  “So we have.”

  “Perhaps… perhaps we ought to pay your mother a visit, after this”—Peter nodded at the passing parade—“is over. She’ll have had enough of my company for one day, but I’m sure she’d be pleased to see the two of you.”

  But when we stopped in at Saltgreens half an hour later, Nancy Fortune was not in her room.

  One of the nursing staff, bustling past, paused long enough to explain. “Oh, she took herself off home, for the weekend. Said she wasn’t too keen on the crowds, and with the ceilidh tonight there was bound to be noise. And anyway, she wanted to collect some things from her cottage, like.”

  “Oh, aye?” David’s face settled into a resigned expression. “Took the car, did she? The white car from the parking lot of the Ship?”

  “Aye, that’s right. Coughing a bit, it was, but she reckoned it would run all right once it got going.” The nurse smiled broadly. “She’s wonderfully thrawn, your mother, isn’t she?”

  I had to look that one up. My dog-eared dictionary informed me that a “thrawn” person was one who delighted in being difficult and obstinate, and David agreed that the word was an apt summing up of his mother’s disposition. “You’ll want to put a star beside that word,” he told me, stabbing the page with a finger. “It’s a good one for you to learn.”

  “And why is that?”

  He grinned. “Because you’ll probably be hearing it a lot from me, this summer. My mother’s not the only woman I ken who’s wonderfully thrawn.”

  Peter took the news less lightly. He stayed the nurse with one hand on her arm, his forehead creased in anxious lines. “But surely… that is, will she be all right up there, do you think? Alone?”

  “Och, she’ll be fine.” The nurse smiled again, confident. “There’s a telephone at her cottage, isn’t there? And she’s got her medication. It’ll do her a world of good, getting away for a wee while—she’s not one to sit watching the television all day.”

  I did my best not to look smug as the three of us came out of Saltgreens and stood blinking in the sunlight. Peter’s eyes adjusted first, and settled on the brilliant white walls of the Ship Hotel.

  “I say,” he said, forgetting his concern for David’s mother, “does anyone fancy a drink?”

  I wouldn’t have minded a half pint myself, but a glance at my watch convinced me I didn’t have time. “If I want to be ready for the ceilidh tonight, I really ought to head back now. I still need to bathe and wash my hair, and I thought I might ring my sister, since it’s Saturday—see how she’s getting on.”

  “Ah yes, your sister Alison,” said Peter, with an understanding nod. He had the most amazing faculty for names, I thought.

  “That’s right. But you two go ahead and—”

  “She’s of an age with Fabia, as I recall.” Peter looked to me for confirmation. “Yes? Oh, dear. Very brave of you, letting her live in your flat.”

  “You haven’t met Alison. She thinks cleaning is jolly good fun. I doubt I’ll recognize my flat when I get back to it.”

  And then suddenly the very idea of getting back to my flat seemed bleak and unappealing, and I didn’t want to think about it, and with a mumbled parting word I turned and started back along the harbor road.

  ***

  “Oh,” said my sister, “I nearly forgot. Howard rang.”

  “Howard?”

  “From the museum. He said you’d know who he was.”

  “Oh right, Howard.” My old friend and colleague, the pottery expert—the one who’d given me his opinion on our first finds here. “What did he want?”

  “Just your number in Scotland. He said you gave it to him once but he’s mislaid the paper it was written on, and could I give it to him again?”

  “So did you?”

  “Heavens, no.” Alison’s tone was crisply practical. “He might have been a psychopath. One never knows, these days. No, I took his number instead, and promised to pass it on. Have you a pencil handy?”

  I cradled the handset against my shoulder and took the number down. “Got it. Thanks. Is there anything else? No? Because I really ought to go and run my bath…”

  “Got a hot date, tonight?”

  “Yes I do, actually.”

  She paused. “Not with Adrian?”

  “No.”

  “Good. With who, then?”

  “With whom.”

  “Don’t dodge the question.”

  “A dark handsome Scotsman,” I said, “in a kilt.”

  Again the pause. “You are joking?”

  “I’m not. He’s taking me to a ceilidh.”

  “A what?”

  “A ceilidh. It’s a dance.”

  “Yes, I know what it is,” said Alison. “I’m just surprised you’re going to one. You don’t dance.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Well, you’d best have someone taking photographs,” was her advice, “or else I won’t believe it. And while you’re at it, you might take a picture of your mystery man in the kilt.”

  “Don’t you believe in him, either?”

  “Of course. But I do have a thing about men wearing kilts,” my sister admitted. She sighed. “I saw Braveheart five times.”

  I laughed and rang off, thought for a moment, then dialed Howard’s number. He was out. Leaving the number for Rosehill on his answering machine, I put the receiver down again and, having done my duty by everyone, went up to have my bath.

  ***

  The ceilidh was enormous fun. At least, that was my overall impression… I had a vague awareness of flushed faces and riotous laughter and wild, reeling music played so loudly that it rumbled in my breast like thunder. I danced until I couldn’t breathe, until my head felt light and the room rolled and my legs could no longer support me.

  And then it was David’s arms supporting me, his shoulders warm beneath my hands, the walls and bright lights spinning past his dark head. I breathed again. The music slowed. People pressed in on all sides, but I saw no one else. Only David.

  I might have blamed the kilt. He did look smashing in the blended green hues of the Hunting Stewart tartan, with his white cotton shirt clinging damp to his back and the sleeves rolled up over his biceps. Only a Scotsman, Highlander or no, could wear a kilt and look like he’d been born to it. It was as if, by trading in his trousers for a length of tartan, David somehow tapped the pride and wild passion of his ancestors. He seemed to drift in time, not altogether of this century, and his gaze now and then held the glint of a warrior.

  Yes, I thought, I might have blamed the kilt; but that wouldn’t have been entirely honest. It was the man, and not the clothes, that held me fasc
inated.

  He stopped revolving, and the blue eyes smiled. Lifting one hand from my waist he brushed back a strand of my hair that had worked itself loose from its plait, and I saw his lips moving, soundlessly.

  “What?”

  This time I caught the words. “Too many people.”

  “What people?” I asked, and the smile touched his mouth.

  “Come on,” he said, turning me toward the door, “let’s get some air.”

  Outside the night was clear and warm, and the wind, for once, was still. The harbor lay like glass beneath a moon that needed one small sliver yet to make it full. High tide had come and gone six hours ago, and the Fleetwing had slipped her moorings and gone with it. In her place, a small pale specter floated on the water. It might have been a mere reflection of the moon… until it tilted up and turned and stretched a searching neck along the blackness. The swan.

  “David.” I stopped walking, and grabbed his arm. “Look at that.” A second ghost had glided from the shadows, neck arched smoothly, wings at rest. It met the first and touched it and the two moved on together. “Oh David, look—he’s finally found a mate.”

  David looked and said nothing. After a long moment he smiled faintly, and turned his face from the harbor, and started walking again, his arm settling warmly across my shoulders.

  I didn’t really notice which direction we were taking, but since David was going there, I went, too. After several long minutes the pavement ended and the ground became rougher. I sensed that the sea was below us now, the waves kicking spray on the rocks and the beach.

  Clearing my mind with an effort, I took a proper look around. “Where are we?”

  “Up on Eyemouth Fort.”

  Of course, I thought. That massive spear of land that jutted out into the sea; the red cliffs topped with long green grass. David’s childhood thinking-place.

  It didn’t take a genius to know there had once been buildings here—some of the ridges were rather steep. “Mind the haggis hole,” warned David, as he helped me over a tufted hillock.