The Winter Sea (46 page)

The king looked down at Moray, and his youthful face belied the steady wisdom in his eyes. ‘I thank you for your offer, Colonel, but till I am safely back in Scotland I cannot allow you to return there, with so great a price upon your head.’

‘I do not speak of Scotland.’ Moray winced again and had to wait a moment for the stabbing pain within his chest to pass, before he could go on. ‘The man who fell beside me was an Ulsterman. We talked. I do remember all his stories, all the details of his life. He has no kin.’ He fixed his gaze upon the king. ‘I could become him for a time. Move among the Scots in Ulster. Let ye ken their thoughts and plans.’

He saw the thought take hold. The Irish were important to King James’s cause, and knowing how the Irish Protestants were thinking would be valuable. The king said slowly, ‘You would do this?’

‘Aye. If it will help to speed ye home to Scotland.’

Colonel Graeme interrupted. ‘Think, lad. Think, for this is not a move that should be lightly made. If ye would take this path, then none can learn ye are yet living. Till the king’s return, lad, all your kin and all who love ye must believe John Moray died in that infernal wood, and that is what your mother and your brothers and your sisters will be told.’ His grey eyes serious, he added, ‘And your lass.’

The pain wrapped still more tightly round him, and it came not only from his wounds this time but from a deeper place within his chest, so each breath burned. ‘It is for her sake I would do this. So that we may one day be together.’

The king looked down in sympathy. ‘I did not know you had a woman.’

Colonel Graeme, noticing that Moray had begun to fight against the darkness and was past the point of answering, looked down as well and asked permission of the pain-filled eyes before he turned towards the king and said, correcting him, ‘He has a wife.’

The light within the room had altered with the passing of the afternoon, and it no longer reached the bed on which they lay. Sophia touched the black stone on its cord that rested now against the pulse of Moray’s throat.

‘Ye kept me safe.’ His eyes were steady on her face. ‘The thought of ye did keep me safe and living, these past months, just as my uncle said it would.’

She did not want to think about the past few months. She nestled close to him. ‘Your uncle also said that it was by the queen’s design that I was brought here to Kirkcudbright.’

‘Aye. A great romantic, is Queen Mary. I was made to understand that when she learned I had a wife, she thought it only right that I should have ye with me when I went to Ireland, although I do confess I see my uncle’s hand in this, as well. He thought it very hard of me to leave you for so long alone.’

Sophia closed her eyes a moment, trying to decide how best to tell him. ‘I was not alone.’

It was no easy thing to speak of Anna, but she did it, and he listened to her silently, and held her while she cried. And when she’d finished, he stayed silent for a moment longer, looking down at Anna’s small curl tied with ribbon lying soft within his calloused hand.

Sophia asked, ‘Can you forgive me?’

Moray closed his hand around the curl and brought his arm around Sophia, holding her so tightly that no force could have divided them. ‘’Tis I who should be asking that of you.’ His voice was rough against her hair. ‘Ye have done nothing, lass, that needs to be forgiven.’ Then he kissed her very tenderly and eased his hold, and opened up his hand to look again at that dark curl that was the color of his own.

Sophia watched him, and she sensed the struggle in his heart as reason sought to overcome the pain of knowing his own child might never know his face, that she must live so far away from him. So far from his protection.

‘We could send for her,’ Sophia said. ‘Now that you are returned and are alive, she could come with us…’

‘No.’ The word was quiet, but she knew from hearing it how heavily it cost him. ‘No, ye did right to leave her where she was. There will be danger still, in Ireland.’ Regretfully, he closed his hand upon the little curl of hair, then found a smile and trailed his knuckles softly down Sophia’s cheek. ‘I have no right to take ye with me either, but it seems I’ve grown to be a selfish man and cannot let ye go.’

She lay warm in his embrace. ‘You will not have to.’

‘Well, I will for this first while,’ he conceded, ‘else the fine upstanding people of your house may be offended.’

She’d forgotten them; forgotten that the Kerrs would soon be home from kirk to find she was not there. ‘But John—’

He took her face in both his hands and stopped her protest with a kiss of promise. ‘Wait a few days more, and then I will be well enough to come and pay a call, and I can court ye then in public.’ In his eyes she saw a glint of his old humor, gently teasing. ‘Will ye wed me for a second time, or have ye had a chance to see the folly of your choice?’

And it was she this time who kissed him in her turn so that he would not doubt her answer. And she felt his smile against her lips, and in that moment she believed she understood at last what Colonel Graeme had been saying on that day when they had stood together at the great bow window of the drawing room at Slains, and gazed together at the winter sea. For now she knew he had been right—the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes…and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.

It might be that the king would come, and it might be that he would not. It scarcely mattered to her now, for she had Moray back. He’d promised he’d return to her, and so he had. He’d promised her that one day she would stand upon a ship’s deck, and she knew that she would do that too, and he would be beside her. And wherever that ship took them, and however far it carried them from Scotland and from Slains, she would be bound to both by memory.

She would see in dreams the dark red castle walls that rose so proudly from the cliffs, and hear the roaring of the sea below her tower chamber, and Kirsty’s bright voice calling in the morning to awaken her. She’d feel the warming sunlight spilling through the windows of the corner sewing room where she had sat so often with the countess, and the closer warmth of horses dozing upright in their stalls while Hugo kept his faithful watch beside the stable door.

She would no more forget these things than Slains itself would lose its memory of herself and Moray, for she knew that they had left their imprint there as well, and left it deep enough that one day Anna, walking on the beach, might hear the windborne echo of their laughter from the dunes, and glimpse their shadows on the shore, and wonder at the lovers who had left such ghosts behind. She would know little else except that they’d been happy. And in truth, Sophia thought, there would be nothing else to know.

Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.

C
HAPTER
19

I
T WAS COLD, BUT
in the shelter of the dunes there was no wind, and for an hour I sat and watched the sunrise. It was beautiful—the first small glint of gold that split the dark clouds to the east above the water, growing steadily until the sky caught fire and flamed to brilliance for a breathless moment.

From here on the beach I could not see the walls of Slains, but I imagined them. I roofed the castle in my mind and gave it life again, and saw a couple strolling far off on the pathways of the garden, and the countess coming down the steps to greet her latest visitors who’d just arrived on horseback, riding hard to bring the hopeful word from France.

And if I turned my head I saw the phantom of a running sail against the grey horizon, as I’d seen so often in my childhood from a different shore. And now I understood why I had seen it, and why even now I felt the strange pull of the sea that drew me like an outstretched hand and called me back when I had been too long away.

My father had been right: the sea was in my blood, and had been put there by Sophia’s thoughts, her memories, all that she had sent to travel down through time to me. I felt the bond between us as I sat and watched the sunrise fade to morning light above the sea that seemed now to be casting off its winter face, the long waves rolling in to dance more lightly on the sand.

I sometimes felt a sadness when I’d reached the ending of a book, and had to bid the characters goodbye. But I could find no sadness in this story’s end, and I knew Jane would find none either, and be pleased with it, as I was. And that sense of pleasure stayed with me as, finally giving in to the demands of my half-frozen body, I got up and slowly walked across the beach and up the path to where my cottage waited on the hill.

It had looked glad to see me yesterday when I’d arrived back from Kirkcudbright, and I felt the same sense now of welcome when I came in through the door to find the Aga warmly burning and the papers spilling over on the table where I’d spent the long night writing. Though I knew I’d soon be moving down to Aberdeen to Graham’s house—
our
house, he had corrected me—I’d still arranged with Jimmy for the cottage to be here for us to use when we came down weekends. I’d come to think of it as mine, and while I would have gone with Graham anywhere, just as Sophia went to follow Moray, I felt comfort in the knowledge that I didn’t have to lose my views of Slains and of the sea.

And Graham seemed to understand my feelings, even though he didn’t know the reason for them, and he maybe never would. I hadn’t yet decided if I’d tell him what had happened to me here, for I felt certain if I did he’d only laugh and kiss my face and call me crazy.

Bad enough I’d have to tell my father that we might not be McClellands after all, but Morays. It was too early in the morning yet to place a call to Canada, he’d still be fast asleep, but I would have to do it sometime. He would read it in the book when it came out and be suspicious, and although it wasn’t something I could prove I knew him well enough to know that once he’d got his mind around the possibility, he’d do his best to find his own proof. He had always loved a challenge, had my father. He’d be hunting through the records of the Royal Irish Regiment, and tracking down descendants of the male line of the Abercairney Morays to compare their DNA with his.

I smiled faintly as I filled the kettle for my morning coffee, thinking that if nothing else, my father might uncover some new relatives a little less eccentric than the ones we had— Ross McClelland exempted, of course. I was keeping Ross, no matter what.

He’d seen me to the station yesterday, and sent me off with homemade fudge that I’d forgotten until now. Remembering, I rummaged in my suitcase, which was sitting where I’d dropped it just inside the door when I’d come in. I found the bag that held the fudge, and as I tugged it out the little auction catalogue that Ross had given me came with it, so I took it, too. I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet, to see what heirlooms our New York McClellands would be selling off this time. Nothing too terrible, obviously, or else my father would have called me to complain about it.

Waiting while my kettle boiled, I took a bite of fudge and turned the pages of the catalogue. There wasn’t much. A table and a mirror, and two miniature portraits of McClellands from a different family tree branch than our own, and some assorted jewelry: rings, a necklace of pink pearls, a brooch…

I paused, and felt a chill chase up my spine as though a sudden wind had struck between my shoulder blades and lifted all the hair along my neck. Forgetting both the kettle and the fudge, I moved to lean against the counter for support as I looked closely at the picture of the brooch.

It was a simple thing—a small but heavy square of silver with a red stone at its centre.

No, I thought. Not possible. But there it was. Beneath the photograph, a brief description of the item stated that, in the opinion of the jeweler who’d appraised it, this appeared to be an old ring that had been made over as a brooch, most likely in the later Georgian period.

I traced the outline, plain and square, of Moray’s ring, and thought of all the times that I had seen it in my mind while I’d been writing, all the times I’d almost felt its weight against my own chest, all the times I’d wondered what had happened to it.

Now I knew.

She’d kept it, and the years had sent it traveling down through the family until no one could remember where it came from, who had worn it, what it meant. It might have passed out of our family altogether and been sold to strangers, if I had not come to Slains.

But I had come. The sea, the shore, the castle walls had called to me, and I had come.

I touched the picture of the brooch with fingers that shook slightly, because Moray’s ring, too, had a voice—a quiet but insistent voice that called to me across a wider sea, and when I heard it there was no doubt left within my mind what I was meant to do.

Graham was still up and reading when I came to bed. He’d put on one of the small electric heaters to take the chill out of the room, but it was no match for the storm winds blowing strongly off the sea, so strongly that I’d spent the evening worrying the phone lines would go down and I would miss my scheduled call from New York City. But I hadn’t.

Graham looked up from his book as I came in the room. ‘Did ye get it?’

But he knew the answer from my smile as I climbed shivering beneath the covers. ‘Yes.’ I didn’t bother saying what I’d paid for it, because it didn’t matter. I had known when I’d arranged to bid by telephone tonight at auction that I wasn’t going to stop until I got the brooch. The ring. And in the end there hadn’t been that many people bidding for it, only two besides myself, and they had lacked my private motivation. To them, it had been nothing more than jewelry, but to me it was a piece of Moray and Sophia that I could hold in my hand, and keep with me for always, to remember them.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ I asked Graham, and he turned the cover round to show me.

‘Dryden’s plays. The one that you had marked,’ he said. ‘The Merlin one. Where did you dig this up?’

‘Dr Weir loaned it to me.’ I’d been at Dr Weir’s for tea two days ago, and seen the book of Dryden on his shelf—a modern volume, not an old one, but I’d asked about it anyway, and he had known the play I meant.

‘Except it was renamed,’ he’d said. ‘Yes, this is what you’re after, here.
Merlin,
or the British Enchanter
.’

Why Dryden had changed the play’s title from Arthur to Merlin I couldn’t imagine, but it
was
the same play. I’d read the lines with the warm sense of recognition that I felt when picking up a favorite novel.

Graham said, ‘I’m nearly at the end. King Arthur’s just been reunited with his Emmeline.’ He quoted smoothly from the page: ‘“At length, at length, I have thee in my Arms; Tho’ our Malevolent Stars have struggled hard, And held us long asunder”. Sounds like us,’ he said, and setting down the book he switched the lamp off, rolling over while I snuggled close against him in the dark.

It sounded more like someone else, to me. I smiled. ‘We didn’t have any malevolent stars.’

‘Well, maybe not, no. Only Stuie.’

He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he’d be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and images.

I felt his breathing slow against my neck, the heavy warmth of him behind me like a shield to block the fierceness of the storm that even now seemed bent on shaking its way through the windows of the cottage. I was lying there and thinking when I heard the click. At first I didn’t realize what had happened, till I saw the glow of the electric heater dying. ‘Oh, no. The power’s out. The storm—’

‘It’s not the storm,’ said Graham. ‘Just the meter. It was low this afternoon, I meant to fix it for you. Sorry.’

‘Well, I’ll fix it now.’

But Graham held more tightly to me. ‘Let it be,’ he mumbled, low, against my shoulder. ‘We’ll be warm enough.’

My eyes closed and I started drifting, too. Until I realized what he’d said.

I was awake again, and staring. ‘Graham?’

But he was already sleeping deeply, and he didn’t hear.

It might be just coincidence, I thought, that he had twice now used the same words that I’d written in my book, the words that Moray had once spoken to Sophia. And Moray only looked like him because I’d made him look like him…I
had
made Moray look like Graham, hadn’t I? It couldn’t be that Moray had in fact had eyes the color of the winter sea, the same as Graham’s eyes, and Graham’s mother’s eyes…

My mother’s family goes a long way back here
, he had told me.

And an image crossed my own mind of a little girl with darkly curling hair who long ago had run with outstretched arms along the beach. A girl who had grown up here and presumably had married and had children of her own. Had anybody ever traced the line of Graham’s family tree, I wondered? And if I tried to myself, would I find it included a fisherman’s family who’d lived in a cottage just north of the Bullers of Buchan?

That, too, seemed impossible. Too like a novel itself to be true. But still I saw that little girl at play along the shore. The wind rose swirling at my window with a voice that was familiar and again I heard Sophia saying, as I’d heard her say my first day in this cottage, that her heart was held forever by this place. And I could hear the countess answering, ‘But leave whatever part of it you will with us at Slains, and I will care for it. And by God’s grace I may yet live to see the day it draws you home.’

As I lay listening to Graham’s steady breathing in the darkness, I could almost feel that tiny missing fragment of Sophia’s heart rejoin my own and make it whole. Behind me, Graham shifted as though he had felt it, too. And then his arm came round me, solid, safe, and drew me firmly back against the shelter of his chest, and I felt peace, and turned my face against the pillow, and I slept.

T
HE
E
ND