The Shadowy Horses

I caught the keen, amused edge to her voice and glanced up swiftly, feeling my cheeks begin to redden. "No, he hasn't."

"An honest lass." Her eyes were warmly approving. "That's rare, these days. No wonder Davy fancies you."

Radish-red now, I broke free of her gaze and looked down, pretending concentration on the photographs. "And who is this?" I pointed to a snapshot showing Peter with one arm slung around the shoulders of a long-legged younger woman, her dark hair caught back neatly in a brightly patterned scarf.

"That's Pamela," said Nancy Fortune, watching my expression. "She was married onto Davy."

Making a convincing show of nonchalance, I nodded. "Oh, right. Jeannie told me he'd been married."

"Pamela came from London, too." The shrewd blue eyes stayed firmly on my face. "Not a bad lass, but she wasn't keen on Eyemouth—didn't like the quiet life. It bored her, so she took it out on Davy. Broke his heart, she did, in leaving."

I took a closer look at the young woman in the photograph, remembering what David had said that day on the middle pier, when I'd asked him if the lone swan had a mate. She'd left—that's what he'd told me. She couldn't seem to settle down to life inside the harbor.

David's mother read my thoughts, and smiled. "He'll have been fighting demons since the day you first arrived."

"Yes, well, it rather feels as though he's fighting me," I said.

"Aye, I believe he said you were a difficult woman." The smile in her voice was more pronounced. "Though when a man says that, you ken he only means you have an independent mind. I'm a difficult woman myself," she confessed, stubbing out her cigarette and settling back against the sofa cushions with the air of one well satisfied. "So tell me, now—I've been fair curious, and Peter never tells me anything for fear I'll drop down dead from the excitement— how is the excavation coming on?" The excavation was, in fact, coming along rather well. In the beginning, I'd found it strange to have so many bodies working around me in the field, but now that nearly a fortnight had passed I could come around the bend in the road by the thorn hedge and not be surprised by the sight of an army in T-shirts and denims, digging away with true militant vigor.

Two of the students had been assigned to me, as finds assistants, and another two were helping Adrian continue his electromagnetic survey of the site. The remaining fourteen wielded trowels under Peter's watchful eye, like loyal troops that moved according to their general's wishes. And if Peter was a general, I thought, my mind still playing at the military parallel, then David was his field officer, always on patrol among the rank and file.

Even from a distance, as I walked toward the house, my eyes could find him easily amid his scattered charges. I'd grown accustomed to the little tug I felt inside my chest each time I saw him as I saw him now—a tall familiar figure with a sure, unhurried stride that commanded attention. He was threading his way through the maze of activity down in the southwest comer, but when he saw me turn up the drive by Rose Cottage he altered his course, and came across to meet me at the low stone wall, beneath the rustling canopy of trees.

"You've averted the crisis, I see," he said, nodding at my bulging carrier bags. "We'll not have to plunder Jeannie's washing powder for our showers."

I smiled, hoisting the bags of soap up to rest them for a moment on the wall, giving my arms some relief from the strain. "You look as if you've had a shower already."

"If the breeze was blowing the other way, you'd ken otherwise." Grinning, he turned his back to the wall and leaned his elbows on it, so that we were both facing in the same direction with our shoulders barely a foot apart. "It's this bloody heat. I ken it's the fourth of July, but Christ! It feels like the Costa del Sol."

It was a warm day. I'd been rather enjoying the weather, myself, but then I hadn't been slaving away in an open field, under the sun. David's dark hair curled wet around his temples, and the effort of working had wilted his shirt to the muscled contours of his chest and back.

"How's it going?" I asked him, looking at the partly excavated corner of the field.

"We're making slow progress, I'm afraid."

"Because of the heat, do you think?"

"Indirectly." His eyes held amusement. "Fabia turned up after lunch, wearing shorts."

"Ah." Slow laughter simmered in my own gaze, as I watched the students working. It was generally accepted that every young man working on the dig found Fabia decidedly distracting. She had only to walk across the field to produce a rather comical effect. "It's a good thing I'm back with the soap, then," I said. "Your boys will be needing those showers."

The deep blue eyes, no less amused, came around to rest on me. "Did you buy the soap in Eyemouth?"

"Yes, of course I did. Where else?"

"I thought," he told me dryly, "that you might have walked to Berwick. You were gone a bloody age."

"Yes, well, I can explain that." I leaned more comfortably forward on the wall, confidingly. "I was looking at pictures of you in your pram."

The quick sideways glance only showed surprise for a second, then a dawning comprehension. "You've been visiting my mother."

"Mmm." I nodded. "Peter asked me to call around and give her some photograph albums he'd fetched from her cottage. She wouldn't let me leave the things and run—you know your mum. I had to stay for coffee."