The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “A queue?”

  “Aye, that’s it. It goes well with the cape and the sword.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. “He’s wearing a cape? In the summer?” I couldn’t quite picture that.

  “Only a short cape,” said Rob. “It’s attached to his coat at the back, at the shoulders, and hangs to his knees. And his coat’s a bit shorter than that again, maybe to here.” His one hand brushed his leg at mid-thigh. “It looks more like a really long waistcoat, without any sleeves, and he’s wearing a plain white shirt underneath that, and a plain pair of breeks, and high boots.”

  “In the summer?”

  “I’m not the one dressing him.” Rob’s voice was dry.

  “Is he really her uncle, then?”

  “Great-uncle, aye. Anna’s father was his sister’s son, if ye work it all out.”

  I was thinking. “If he was a colonel, I wonder if there’d be some record of him somewhere, then? It’s a fairly high rank, colonel, isn’t it?”

  Rob shrugged and said, “He’d have been in the French army, likely, if he was a Jacobite. I no ken what kind of records they kept.”

  “He said that his father was somebody famous. Black somebody.”

  “Black Pate,” he said. “As in black head, so I’m guessing that his hair was black. And aye, I mind his name getting a mention or two in the history books.”

  “Maybe the history books mention his sons, as well.”

  “What would that prove?”

  “Well, for one thing,” I said, “it would prove Colonel Graeme existed.”

  Rob countered with logic, “I ken he existed. He’s walking right there.”

  “But no one else can see him, Rob. And knowing something’s not the same as proving it. I mean, right now we can’t even prove Anna Logan existed,” I pointed out. Stumbling over a rock in the path, I stopped walking and sighed. “This is probably hopeless, you know, what we’re doing. A fool’s errand.”

  Rob had stopped walking as well, and was standing a half step behind my right shoulder, from where he could easily keep me from tumbling over the cliff if I slipped. “How’s that, then?”

  “It just is. We can’t prove anything, this way. How can we?” With a sigh, I tried explaining. “All I really wanted was for you to hold the Firebird so you could tell me something of its history—who had made it, and how Empress Catherine came by it, and when and why she’d given it to Anna, or at least where Anna lived, there in St. Petersburg, and those would have been things I could investigate. But this…” Lifting one hand in the general direction of where Colonel Graeme and Anna had gone, I said, “We’re following a little girl, Rob, and you said yourself she can’t be more than ten years old, which means it’s ages yet until she gets the Firebird. Besides which, we’re in Scotland, not in Russia.”

  “Well, she obviously got from here to there,” said Rob. “If I can find her house, find where she lived, then I can skip ahead so maybe we can see her leaving.”

  When he stated it like that, so calm and practical, it almost made me think it was that easy. “And just how would we prove that, on paper? She’s a fisherman’s daughter, she’s not likely to have left a record of her life behind.”

  “She’s no fisherman’s daughter,” Rob reminded me. “Her father was the Laird of Abercairney’s son, the colonel said. Black Pate was her great-grandfather, and she herself can roam the Earl of Erroll’s castle as though she were part of his own family. For a lass so small, I’d say she had connections.”

  I turned so I could see his face, the faintly stubborn jawline. “Do you always see the positive in everything?”

  “I see the possibilities.” His eyes were narrowed slightly as he scanned the fields ahead. “They’ll soon be out of sight, if we stop here.”

  I turned again, and went on walking, taking more care with my footing as the path came very close now to the edge.

  Rob followed silently at first, then unexpectedly he said, “I was a lad of six, ye ken, when I first saw the Sentinel. Kip saw him, too—my collie, Kip—and they’d be walking side by side out in the field, and every time the Sentinel came close to me he’d smile and try to speak, except he’d speak in Latin and in those days I’d no way to understand him. But I saw him. Saw the camp as well, or bits of it. And when the archaeologists came looking for the lost Ninth Legion, I could tell them where a wall had been, or where they ought to dig. They had no proof,” he pointed out, “afore they started digging. Even when they found the wall, the camp, they really had no proof the Ninth had been there. Not at first. It came in pieces, so it did, and never where they’d been expecting it. An edge of broken pottery, a coin, all scattered pieces, yet together it was proof enough to satisfy the academics.”

  I was far too focused on my feet to turn around again. I asked, “Is this your way of saying I should have more faith?”

  “I’m saying proof may not be lying in plain sight, all neat and tidy, as ye say. And aye, it may be that we never find a document that helps, but if we dig enough we may just find enough of those small pieces to convince whoever needs convincing.”

  I felt the warmth of reassurance, less because of what he’d said than from the fact he’d used the pronoun “we” while he was saying it. I found I liked that “we.”

  “It’ll be me alone,” Rob told me, “if ye don’t mind how ye go.” I felt his hand against my elbow as he guided me a half step farther from the cliff’s edge. “There, that’s safer.”

  Up ahead I saw a square of closely pressed small cottages. “Where are we now?”

  “At the Bullers of Buchan.”

  I glanced at the curve of the cliff, and the white spray and foam of the water below, but it didn’t look anything like the framed photograph hanging above us at dinner last night. I was going to say so when Rob said,

  “The actual Bullers, the sea-cave, is just a few steps past those cottages, see where the sign is? But we’re going this way.” His arm brushed my own as he pointed along the short track that connected the cottages to the main road.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Aye, of course I’m sure. D’ye not trust me?”

  “It’s only that last night I thought you saw something to do with the Bullers of Buchan.”

  “I’m not sure of what I saw last night,” Rob told me, “but just the now I’m seeing your Anna legging it up the road there. We can stop on the way back,” he promised, as I took a final look over my shoulder.

  Rob moved to the front when we walked at the side of the road, so that any approaching cars had to go round him first. I tried to look at the scenery. I did. We were close to the sea, still, and watching the changeable clouds chase their shadows toward the horizon should really have been more diverting, but always my gaze was pulled back to the roll of Rob’s shoulders, and the dark curl of his hair against his collar, things I had no business noticing.

  Of course I found him physically attractive. I had always been attracted to him, but that didn’t change the deep divide between our lives. Up here, with nobody around, it was an easy thing for me to talk with Rob about the things he saw and heard, and let him lead me after phantoms from the past, but in public it would be a different story—I’d be too embarrassed, too afraid of everybody judging me and thinking me a fool, or worse. And Rob could never be less than he was, I knew, or hide his gifts. It wasn’t in his nature.

  It would never work between us, but the logic of that knowledge didn’t stop me watching him so closely that time telescoped so when he left the road’s edge and turned off toward the cliffs again it took me by surprise to see how far we’d come.

  I could no longer see the jagged shape of Slains behind us, nor the houses at the Bullers, though ahead along the coast I saw what looked to be a large town or small city.

  Rob identified it. “Peterhead.”

 
; But Anna and the colonel hadn’t gone the whole way there. They’d stopped, as we had, at this little sloping hollow near the road. I saw the scattering of granite stones that still stood at right angles to each other in one corner and I guessed before Rob told me that this once had been a cottage.

  Rob built the walls again for me with words, their heavy sturdiness topped with a low thatched roof and pierced by little unglazed windows with their shutters left unfastened to the daylight. It was hard to think a family could have lived here, all five children and their parents, in what Rob said was a single open space inside, with swept dirt floors and whitewashed walls, no room at all for privacy. And yet I felt the comfort they had felt here, and the happiness. It resonated round me like a singing voice heard faintly on the wind, from far away, and without meaning to I placed one hand upon the stone beside me and I closed my eyes and stretched my mind toward that distant feeling.

  Reading Group Guide

  1.The notion of someone having “second sight” is more widely accepted in Scotland, where it was never really associated with witchcraft and so was seen as something that didn’t need to be hidden. The Gaelic term for it is An Dà Shealladh, and it features frequently in Celtic mythology and historical accounts. What do you think of the Sight, and how do you think you’d react if you met a boy like Robbie?

  2.At least one highly-respected archaeologist, the Canadian J. Norman Emerson, publicly acknowledged his use of psychics to aid him on digs through what he called “intuitive archaeology.” Bestselling historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick publicly uses a psychic to help unearth details for her research. Can you think of any other areas in which a true psychic might be useful?

  3.Did anything surprise you about the way the archaeologists conducted the dig? Did you learn anything about archaeology that you hadn’t known before?

  4.There were a lot of pets in this novel—two cats and a dog. What purposes, if any, do you think they served, in terms of revealing character or helping the plot?

  5.What did you think of the author’s use of the Scots language in the book? Did you find it annoying, or interesting?

  6.There are many family relationships present in the story, from Verity and her sister to Quinnell and his dead son Philip. Which family bond did you feel was the strongest, of all the ones shown?

  7.Do you think David’s mother made the right decision, to not tell Quinnell about David? How long do you think Quinnell’s known the truth?

  8.The book was first written and published in the mid-1990s, and for this reissue the author chose not to update any of the technology used, but to leave the text in its original form. Did you find this distracting at all? How might the plot have changed if everyone had been carrying cell phones, for example?

  About the Author

  After studying politics and international development at University, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Susanna Kearsley worked as a museum curator before turning her hand to writing. Winner of the UK’s Catherine Cookson Fiction prize, Susanna Kearsley’s writing has been compared to Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. She recently hit the bestseller lists in the U.S. with The Winter Sea, which was also a finalist for both a RITA award and the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award. Her books have been translated into several languages, selected for the Mystery Guild, condensed for Reader’s Digest, and optioned for film. She lives in Canada, near the shores of Lake Ontario.

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