The Winter Sea (26 page)

The countess asked, ‘But would he risk our own?’

‘I do not know.’ An honest answer, thought Sophia. She could see it in his eyes, which were no longer set to charm, but held the doubts of all the others round the table. ‘I only know that if we do not seize this moment, if we do not try, then it will pass, and may not come again. I do not think your Robert Bruce was certain he would win, when he did set his foot upon the field at Bannockburn, but he did set his foot upon it, all the same. And so must we.’

By which he meant, Sophia knew, the safer path did rarely lead to victory.

She’d thought on that herself the day she first had taken Moray’s invitation to go riding. She had known that she was choosing an untraveled path that did not promise safety, but she’d set her course along it and her life had been forever changed. There was no turning back.

She felt a warmth upon her face and knew that he was watching her, and bravely lifting up her chin, she met his steady eyes and drew her courage from the light in them that burned for her alone.

No turning back
, she thought again, although, like all the others at the table who would choose the yet untrodden way and follow young King James, she could not see along the winding path to know the way that it would end.

Mr Hall came two days later.

He stayed closeted some time with Colonel Hooke and then departed, pausing only long enough to pay his respects to the countess, who was sitting reading with Sophia in the sunlight of the drawing room.

‘You will stay and dine with us, surely?’ she asked him.

‘Forgive me, but no. I must start back as soon as I am able.’

With an eyebrow arched, the countess said, ‘Then do at least allow my cook to make a box for you. It will take no more than a few minutes, and the duke will surely not begrudge you that.’ She called to Kirsty, and with her instruction given, asked the priest to sit. ‘I have been reading to Miss Paterson some pages of Mr Defoe’s excellent reportage of the hurricane in England, of a few years back. She did lead a sheltered life before she came to us and had not heard the fullness of the tales.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, it was God’s punishment upon a sinful people who have put away their rightful king and will not see the error of their ways.’

The countess looked at him, and glancing up, Sophia saw the humor in her eyes. ‘Good Mr Hall, you cannot think that God would send so fierce a wind against a country for its sins? Faith, all the world would be so plagued with winds no house would stand, for we are none of us unstained. ’Twas not the English who sold Scotland’s independence, in our Parliament.’ She smiled, to soften her reminder of the way the duke had voted. ‘Still, if God does send us wind, we can but hope he’ll put it at the back of young King Jamie’s sails, to bring him to us faster.’ Turning the book in her hand, she regarded it. ‘Mr Defoe is a very good writer. Have you had occasion to meet him, in Edinburgh?’

‘Daniel Defoe? Yes, I have met him a few times,’ said Mr Hall. ‘But I confess I do not like the man. He is canny, and watchful. Too watchful, I thought.’

She took his meaning, and, with interest, asked, ‘You do believe he is a spy?’

‘I’ve heard he owes much, for his debts, to Queen Anne’s government, and is not to be trusted. And the duke does share my views.’

‘No doubt he does.’ The countess closed the book and set it to one side. ‘Perhaps the duke will see his way to warn me if he knows of any others who are spying for the queen,’ she said, ‘so that I may be careful not to have them here at Slains.’

Sophia held her breath a moment, because she felt sure that from the smooth challenge of the countess’s tone, Mr Hall could not have failed to guess the countess’s opinion of his master and of where the duke’s own loyalties did lie. But Mr Hall appeared to miss the thrust entirely. ‘I shall ask him to,’ he promised.

Whereupon the countess smiled, as though she could not find the heart to spar with such a gentle man. ‘That would be kind of you.’

The conversation ended there, for Kirsty reappeared with a packed box of Mrs Grant’s good food—cold meat, and cakes, and ale to keep him nourished on his journey.

They went out into the yard to see him off, as did the earl and Colonel Hooke—and even Moray, who stayed back a pace. The mastiff, Hugo, having come to view him with affection, circled round and barked as though to call him to a game, but Moray only gave the dog an absent pat. After watching Mr Hall ride out of sight, he turned on his heel and, with a few words, took his leave with a shuttered sideways glance toward Sophia that she knew was his unspoken signal she was meant to follow.

Hugo helped. He was still circling, and the countess, taking pity on him, said, ‘Poor Hugo. Every time young Rory goes away, he is fair desolate.’

It wasn’t only Hugo, thought Sophia. Kirsty, too, had been at odds these past two days, with Rory sent to carry messages to all the lords on whose behalf the Earl of Erroll had just signed his name to Hooke’s memorial, so they would know the business was concluded. But Kirsty, at least, had her work to attend and Sophia to talk to. The mastiff was lost.

‘Shall I take him for a walk?’ Sophia offered, on a sudden inspiration. ‘He would like that, and we’d not go far.’

The countess gave consent, and having fetched Hugo’s lead from the stables, Sophia set forth with the great dog beside her, taking care to appear to be taking a different direction than Moray had. ‘Now, then,’ she said, to the mastiff, ‘behave yourself, or you’ll be bringing me trouble.’

But Hugo, so happy to be in human company, seemed perfectly content to go wherever she would lead him, and when they came out at last upon the beach, amid the dunes, and he discovered Moray sitting waiting for them, Hugo’s joy exploded in a burst of body-wagging gladness. Groveling in the sand, he stretched his full length with a grunt of satisfaction, rolling to be petted.

‘Away with ye, great foolish beast,’ said Moray, but he gave the massive barrel of a chest a scratch. ‘I’m not so fooled. Ye’d tear me limb from limb if someone told you to, and never shed a tear.’

Sophia took a seat beside them. ‘Hugo would not do you harm,’ she said. ‘He likes you.’

‘It’s got naught to do with liking. He’s a soldier like myself. He follows orders.’ He looked seaward, and Sophia did not ask what his own orders were. She knew, with Mr Hall gone, there was no cause now for Colonel Hooke to linger here at Slains, and when the French ship came again it would take Hooke and Moray with it.

But he had not brought her here to tell her what she knew already, and she’d learned his moods enough to tell that something else lay heavy on his mind. ‘What is it, John? Do the proposals Mr Hall brought with him worry you?’

He seemed to find some cynical amusement in the thought. ‘The Duke of Hamilton’s proposals were a waste of ink and paper, and he knew it when he wrote them.
That
,’ he told her, ‘is what has me worried.’

‘Do you still believe that he did mean but to delay you?’

‘Aye, perhaps. But it is more than that. I’ve no doubt the duke has been gained over by the court of London, and that he seeks to play us all as neatly as a deck of cards—but what his own hand is, and what the rules, I cannot yet discover.’ The frustration of that limitation showed upon his face. ‘He knows too much already, but he knows that he does not know all, and that, I fear, may drive him to new treachery. Ye must be careful, lass. If he does come here, guard your words, and guard your feelings. He must never learn,’ he said, ‘that you are mine.’

The deep, protective force with which he said that warmed her spirit, even as his words ran cold across her skin, more chilling than the swift breeze from the sea. She had not thought of danger to herself, but only him. But he was right. If it were known that she was Moray’s woman, she would be a playing piece of value to the men who wished to capture him.

He held her gaze. ‘I would not have ye suffer for my sins.’

‘I promise I’ll be careful.’

Seeming satisfied, he gave the mastiff lying at his side another thump, and in a lighter tone remarked, ‘I had a mind to tell ye not to walk so far from Slains, while I’m away, without this beastie with ye, but I’m thinking now he’d be of little use.’

She couldn’t help but smile. ‘You said before you had no doubt he’d kill you, if he were so ordered.’

‘Aye, but look at that.’ He rocked the lazing dog from side to side, in evidence. ‘He’s barely conscious.’

‘’Tis because he trusts you,’ said Sophia, ‘and he knows that I am safe. If I were truly threatened, he would be the first to rise to my protection.’

‘Not the first,’ said Moray. Then he looked away again, towards the distant line of the horizon, and Sophia, falling silent, looked there, too, and found some peace by watching swiftly scudding clouds, small wisps of white, dance in their free and careless way above the water, running races with each other as they caught, and held, and changed their shapes at will.

And then one cloud, which seemed more steady than the others, drew her eye, and as it moved, she saw it was no cloud. ‘John…’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I see it.’

Hugo caught the change in Moray’s tone, and rolled in one long motion to his feet, nose raised to test the wind— the same wind that was bearing those white, billowed sails toward them.

‘Come,’ said Moray, standing, holding out his hand. ‘We’d best get back.’

His voice was clipped, as though he wished to waste no time, and dreading as she did the time that he must leave, she could not help but find his cold reaction to their sighting of the ship a disappointment.

‘I had hoped that you might not be so pleased,’ she told him, stung, ‘to see Monsieur de Ligondez return. Are you so eager, then, to be away?’

His gaze had narrowed on the distant ship, and now it swung to hers with patient tenderness. ‘Ye know that I am not. But that,’ he said, and nodded seaward to the swift-approaching sails, ‘is not Monsieur de Ligondez.’

The ship was yet too far away for her to see its ensign, but she trusted Moray’s eyes enough to scramble to her feet and take the hand that he was offering, and feeling as a fox might when it runs before the hounds, she followed him, with Hugo, back along the path that climbed the hill above the shore.

‘I wonder why your Captain Gordon does not come ashore to us,’ the Earl of Erroll asked his mother, who, like him, was standing at the window of the drawing room, her hands behind her back, brow furrowed slightly as she gazed in consternation at the ship that lay now anchored off the coast.

‘I do not know,’ the countess said. Her voice was quiet. ‘How long has it been, now, since he did appear?’

‘An hour, I think.’

‘It is most strange.’

Sophia did not like the tension that had fallen on the room. It was not helped by Moray’s choice to stand so close behind her chair that she could all but feel the restless energy within him, held contained by force of will.

Colonel Hooke had given up on standing and was sitting now beside Sophia in a rush-backed chair, his face still bearing witness to the illness that had plagued him through this journey, and which would, no doubt, be worsened by his passage on the sea. His mood had altered since his talk with Mr Hall. He seemed less patient, and had gained the air of one who had been sorely disappointed.

This new turning of the tide, with Captain Gordon’s ship, bearing all its great guns and its forty-odd soldiers, appearing from nowhere to stand between Slains and the open North Sea, all but drove Hooke’s raw temper to breaking point.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘can we not send a boat out ourselves to ask what he intends?’

The countess turned, and in the face of Hooke’s impatience seemed herself more calm. ‘We could, but I have never yet had cause to doubt the captain’s loyalties. If he does keep himself aloof, I’m sure he has good reason, and if we were to blunder in, we may yet do ourselves the greater harm.’

Her son agreed. ‘We would be wisest,’ said the earl, ‘to wait.’

‘Wait!’ echoed Hooke, in some disgust. ‘For what? For soldiers to approach by land, and trap us here like pigeons in a dovecote, with no window left to fly through?’

Moray’s voice, behind Sophia, held a quiet edge. ‘If we are trapped, ’tis no fault of our hosts,’ he said, as though he would remind Hooke of his manners. ‘They had no part in keeping us at Slains these few days past our time. That was, as I recall, your choice, and ye’d do well to pick that up and carry it yourself, not seek to lay the burden and the blame on those who’ve shown us naught but kindness.’