The Shadowy Horses

In Paris my one and only visit to the Louvre had been spoiled by windows—rows of lovely windows pouring deadly direct sunlight on the priceless paintings opposite. And I'd never quite recovered from the horror of the flashbulbs popping around the Mona Lisa, when the guard whose job it was to drone out "pas de flash" was off on tea break. All those tourists, all those flashbulbs, all that stupid, stupid ignorance, destroying the painting as surely as if they'd slashed it with a knife, and all for a snapshot that wouldn't hold a candle to the postcards one could buy for next to nothing in the gift shop.

I tended to avoid museums, when I wasn't working.

But this, I reasoned, was a special case. I would be living out at Rosehill for the digging season anyway—it followed I should do my best to learn the local history. And to my relief, I found that there was nothing here to set my teeth on edge. Someone had done a professional job of presenting the town's past in a well-defined sequence of information panels and displays.

Border lords and Jacobean conspirators, boatbuilders and smugglers, the men who fished the North Sea for herring and the "fisher lassies" whose job it was to clean and salt the catch—all of them had their place in the Eyemouth Museum. And room had been made for the odd outsider.

David's mother paused before one panel. "And this, of course, commemorates the day the bard himself came here, to be made a Royal Arch-Mason."

My eyebrows rose. "What, Shakespeare came here?"

"Robbie Burns, you heathen," she corrected me, rolling her eyes good-naturedly in response to my English ignorance. "Our national poet, no less."

Jeannie thought it was a wonder Robert Burns had lived to tell the tale. "Coming to a smuggling town like Eyemouth, and him an exciseman."

I fancied even smugglers harbored some respect for genius. The poet's image kept proud company with nets and the herring barrels and the whopping great cannonball Jeannie showed off with a smile. "That came from the Fort."

"And where is the Fort?"

"Over there," she said, pointing in the general direction of the sea. "On the top of the cliffs at the end of the beach. You can see it from where we parked the car."

"Not a Roman fort, I take it?"

"Tudor," Nancy Fortune told me. "Built in the days of the boy king Edward of England, and torn down under Elizabeth. The French and the English kept fighting us for it. There's no telling whose cannon that came from."

Jeannie looked down at the heavy cannonball. "The two cannon still up there aren't Tudor, are they?"

"No, folk set those up on Fort Point in the French invasion scare, we think—the middle of last century."

Invasion, I reflected, was a constant theme along this stretch of coast. Invasion and slaughter and swift retribution. an unending cycle of fire and sword. Small wonder the soil here was red.

"The Fort," said Nancy Fortune, "was my Davy's favorite place, when he was younger. He did all his thinking there. It's peaceful, like—just grass and mounds and those two cannon looking on the sea."

Jeannie nodded, straight-faced. "And it's a rare fine spot to see the haggis."

"Oh, aye," agreed the older woman. "Wild haggis everywhere. They like to dig their burrows in the mounds."

Refusing to rise to the bait. I drifted on toward the next display.

It was dead clever, this display. In all the local history museums I had visited I'd never seen its match. Instead of relying on pictures alone to give one the feel of a fishing boat, they'd brought the boat itself inside. The front half of a boat, at any rate.

Stepping onto the bridge, I played like a child with the polished wheel and gazed in admiration through the glass window, at the ropes and nets and fish boxes piled on "deck," and the real stuffed herring gull riding the jutting bow into an imaginary wind. I thought the whole thing brilliant, and said so.

"Aye, it's fair impressive," David's mother said. "But ye've not yet seen our greatest achievement. That we save for last."

With great expectations I followed her around the remaining few displays until we arrived at the end of the loop, within sight of the lobby.

"There." She stopped dramatically before the final wall. "That's the treasure of our museum."

I saw only a tapestry, and a modern one at that. Attractive, yes, but hardly what one thought of as ...

"The Eyemouth Tapestry," my guide's voice sliced evenly into my thoughts. "It took twenty-four ladies two years to make this, for the one hundredth anniversary of the Disaster." Her sideways glance was self-assured. "You'll have heard about the Disaster?''

"Heard it mentioned, yes, but—" Jeannie interrupted me as Nancy Fortune's eyebrows rose. "We thought we'd let you tell her, since you tell the story best."

"Och, it's not so difficult. Any bairn here in Eyemouth could tell you about the Disaster. That's the Great East Coast Fishing Disaster," she explained for my benefit, speaking in obvious capitals. "Black Friday, they called it. And though it's been more than a hundred years since, you'll still hear folk talk like it was yesterday." She folded her arms and gave a small sigh before smoothly beginning the story. "It happened in October. A stretch of bad weather had kept all the boats in the harbor a few days, but the morn of Black Friday was fair bright and sunny, with never a breath of wind. The fishermen's wives set to baiting the lines, and their menfolk prepared for a fine day of fishing, though the old public weather-glass, down by the pier-end, was lower than any had seen." She shook her head. "It made some of the fishermen wary, that glass being low. Still, the day looked so grand and the sea looked so calm that the younger lads started on out." A practiced storyteller, she paused and let the sentence dangle until I gave her the prompt.