The Shadowy Horses

''Fine, thanks." I took a sip of the steaming sweet Nescafe to prove it. "Did you want me to take these albums back again to Rosehill, then?"

"Oh, no, I'll find space. I've a dressing table in my room, and a lockable cabinet. I'm sure these will fit somewhere." She touched one battered cover fondly. "It's mad the things we worry about, isn't it? My cottage is jammed to the rafters, and all I could think was that someone might break in and steal my old snapshots."

I told her I didn't think her worries were the least bit odd. "After all, you can't replace photographs, most of the time. And they're memories, aren't they? Worth keeping."

"Worth keeping," she echoed. Leaning forward to tap the ash from her cigarette, she glanced across at me with a conspirator's eyes. "Would you like to see what Peter looked like, when he was a younger man?"

I had known he would be handsome. To see him in his seventies was to know that much. And yet I was still unprepared for the reality of Peter Quinnell, thirty-something, leaning jauntily against a gatepost, with a spaniel at his knee.

His hair had been blond, as I'd known it would be. And he'd been riding, from the looks of things. Wearing a thick-knit jumper over breeches and boots, he stood hatless, laughing at the camera, his long, lean frame propped casually against the five-barred gate behind. It was the same sort of lazy and effortless pose he still struck, out of habit, yet here in this snapshot one had a strong sense of the energy burning behind it, a restless and magnetic energy like that of some great lion poised upon a windswept plain. The edges of the photograph seemed much too small to keep him in. At any moment, I thought wonderingly, he will leap out of this image altogether, and shake his golden hair and laugh, and lead us all off on some glorious adventure.

"He was a handsome devil," Nancy Fortune said.

"Yes, he was." I touched a comer of the photograph with one finger, as if to make absolutely certain it wasn't alive. I'd always found it fascinating, especially with faces that I'd only ever known as being old, to see how people looked when they were young. When I was very small myself, my parents had for some occasion held a fancy-dress ball, and I could vividly recall the moment when the pirate I'd been so sure was my father let his mask slip unexpectedly, to show a stranger's features underneath. Magic, I had thought it at the time. Looking at old photographs was like that. Magic.

I slowly flipped to the next page in the album, and saw Peter crouched in a field, taking notes; Peter sitting on a dry-stone wall; Peter sleeping on a garden bench, hat tipped down to cover his eyes, a book propped open on his chest. It was as well, I thought, that I had only come to work for him when he was old. If I had known him in those days, when he looked like that, I would have fallen hopelessly in love with him.

I wondered how David's mother had managed to avoid it, and then she said: "That's me," and pointed to a photograph, and I saw that she hadn't avoided it at all. The vibrant, dark-haired woman standing next to Peter in the garden of a big house was looking at him in a way I recognized at once. That could be me, I thought, feeling an instant sympathy for Nancy Fortune. That could be me standing there, looking at David.

"And that," she said, her finger moving on the page, "is Peter's wife, Elizabeth."

An unstable woman, I decided, my eyes already prejudiced. "Is this their son, then?"

"Aye. Young Philip. He'd have been about Robbie's age, I think, when I took that. Very proud of that pony, he was. Whenever he came for a visit, the first place he went was the stables."

My brow creased in mild confusion. "When he came to visit? Did he not live at home?"

"Oh, aye, but not in Scotland. Not with Peter. Philip stayed in Ireland, with his mother. Elizabeth," she said, "wasn't well. You kent that?"

"No, I didn't."

“Manic depressive, is what the doctors called her. She'd had a breakdown, ken. She didn't like to travel. Philip came to us like clockwork every August and at Easter, but Elizabeth always worsened with him gone, and Peter didn't like to keep the laddie from his mother. Bit of a mistake, that,'' she reflected. "If he'd grown up with Peter, Philip might have turned out differently. Less wild, like."

I thought of Fabia, and was rather inclined to disagree. Some things, I reasoned, simply ran in a person's blood. Like Jeannie said, some folk were just born twisted. Keeping my opinion to myself, I turned another page of the photograph album. "So this is Philip as a baby?"

She looked. "Och, no. That's Davy."

"Really?" I peered with greater interest at the wrinkled bundle sleeping in its pram. The problem with babies, I thought, was that one looked very much like another. It took a few more photographs before I could distinguish David's features, roughly formed in miniature—the slanting fall of eyelashes, the broad and sloping smile, the little jaw already growing stubborn. And the hair, of course. One could hardly mistake all those tumbled dark curls.

He looked more like his mother than his father, I decided—assuming that the cheerful-looking chap in fisherman's clothing who held David in several of the snapshots was his father. I didn't like to ask. I remembered David telling me his father had died young, and I had no desire to rake up painful memories.

Instead, I opted for the somewhat safer comment that David had been a beautiful baby. "Aye," his mother agreed, "he was a bonny wee thing. And he's not lost his looks, has he?"