The Shadowy Horses

Quinnell arched one eyebrow in an elegantly dismissive gesture. "Yes," he said, "I can see how she would be just fascinated..."

"... and I thought she might want to come into town with us. Granny Nan's minding the museum today. We could show Verity the tapestry."

Quinnell paused, then put about like a ship changing course with a shift in the wind. "Oh, right. Yes, that's a capita] idea," he endorsed the plan, smiling encouragement at me. "Do go, by all means. No, I shall be quite all right without you ... have you got your raincoat? There."

And seeing that my hood was up and all my snaps properly fastened, he sent me on my way, the mention of David's mother's name having clearly settled the matter.

Jeannie turned up her own hood and ran through the rain, and I followed her, down the long drive to Rose Cottage, where Robbie sat waiting for us in the kitchen, holding a red-handled screwdriver.

Jeannie laughed. "What's that for?"

"Granny Nan wants one."

"All right then, give it here, and go and get your music, or else we'll be late."

The prospect of arriving late for his piano lesson didn't seem to trouble Robbie greatly. He took a while to fetch his sheets of music from the front room. Jeannie looked across at me and shook her head. "It's the same every Sunday."

"Do you play the piano, yourself?"

"Och, no. I've not much talent. My mother played, though, and we've kept her piano."

It was a shame, I thought, that Robbie's grandmother could not have lived to teach him how to play the lovely instrument. I'd learned so many things, from my two grandmothers. But Robbie didn't seem to feel the deprivation.

As he bounced through the puddles beside me on our short walk to the shed where Jeannie's car was garaged, Robbie happily noticed that our coats looked the same. "Look, Mum, look ... mine looks just like Miss Grey's."

"Aye, I see that. Don't splash, now."

"Did you mind the screwdriver?"

Jeannie reassured him that she had indeed remembered. "Have they not got a screwdriver at the museum?"

"Not a red-handled one." Robbie leapt with both feet into one final puddle, and sloshed his way into the shed.

It took scarcely any time to drive to Eyemouth. I rubbed the condensation from my window and peered with interest at the maze of narrow, one-way streets hemmed in by roughcast square stone houses. Unlike the big posh homes that lined the main road into town, their large front gardens bursting with cascades of bright spring flowers, the houses here crowded right against the pavement, leaving little room for anything green. But they were cheerful houses all the same, solid and dependable, with bold names painted in the transom windows over gaily painted doors.

Ivy Cottage and Lily Cottage I could understand, but some of the names baffled me, rather, until I asked Jeannie.

She smiled. "They're named for boats, some of them. We passed a house a wee while back called Fleetwing—that belonged to my grandad, ken, and the Fleetwing was his fishing boat."

"It's the name of Dad's boat, too," Robbie put in.

"Aye." Jeannie's voice was dry. "My Brian's one attempt to honor the family tradition. Went over big with my dad, that did."

From which I gathered Wally Tyler wasn't pleased his son-in-law had used the Fleetwing name.

"Did your father fish, as well?"

"My dad? No, he's never been one for the sea. He hates boats, so he trained as a gardener. It was old Mrs. Finlay herself hired him onto take care of things up at Rosehill, and that was afore she was old Mrs. Finlay." Jeannie glanced across and smiled. "He's rooted there, now."

"Like the Sentinel," said Robbie.

Jeannie nodded. "Aye." Negotiating a final downhill bend and crossing another road that looked very much like the road I'd first come in on, she swung the car neatly into a large car park. "Right," she said to me, "won't be a minute. I'll just take Robbie in, then you and I can walk along to the museum. It's not far."

After waiting a few minutes, I pushed open my door and stepped outside to stretch, pulling my hood tight against the soggy weather. The rain had lightened to a spatter, but the sea, just steps away, kicked up a lively spray to wet the wind and make it taste of salt. Drawn by the thunder of the waves, I turned and tried to see, through the flat gray mist, if the foam on the crest of the waves really did look like white, manes on Manannan's horses, as Peter had said, but I only caught a glimpse of them before Jeannie's footsteps sounded briskly on the pavement behind me.

"Not too cold?" she asked, close by my shoulder. "Because we could take the car, if you want. I just thought, with it being Bank Holiday weekend, the parking might not be so simple."

I'd forgotten about the Bank Holiday. In spite of the less than perfect weather, there were a fair number of people cluttering the pavement, determined not to waste their holiday indoors. Jeannie, more sensibly, headed straight for shelter, and as I followed her along the road I felt the smug self-satisfaction of a stranger who has managed to orient herself.

Surely, I thought, this was the road I'd come in on, that first day, when the bus had brought me down from Dunbar. Which meant that the harbor lay just over there, and to reach the Ship Hotel, where Adrian and David lodged, one had only to go down that little road, and ...

"This way." Jeannie steered me past a curving sweep of shops and across the street into a small square edged on two sides by an odd array of buildings. One, with its distinctive symbol set above the wooden door, was obviously the Masonic Lodge, and beside it a white-plastered house in the old style proclaimed itself to be a fish merchant's. Set on the diagonal at the corner of the square, a towering redbrick marvel of modem architecture boasting bright green window frames and a landscaped courtyard proved more difficult to identify. But the smaller structure, dead ahead, was clearly the museum.