The Winter Sea

He meant the king, of course, Sophia told herself. He meant the king would come. And yet she thought she saw a fleeting something in his eyes before they slid away from hers again to make a new assessment of the snow clouds that were drifting ever closer to the shore, and in that instant she could not be sure he had not spoken to her, purposely, of someone else.

They never mentioned Moray. Having learned his nephew had been well when he had been at Slains, the colonel seemed to be content to rest with that. He had not asked for any details of what Moray did, as though he deemed it not his business. They were very much alike, Sophia thought, these two men—bound by rules of honor that prevented them intruding into someone else’s privacy, and made them guard their own.

It was as well, she thought, he did not know her private thoughts this moment. She was thinking of the desperate flight of Mary of Modena, of the fear and faith and hope that must have driven such a queen to brave a winter crossing with her baby son. And now that infant, grown to be a king, stood poised to cast his own spare fortunes on those same cold, unforgiving waves that seemed determined to divide the Stewarts from their hopes, and from their royal destiny.

She tried, as Colonel Graeme had advised, to see the promise in the winter sea, but she could not. The water, greenly grey and barren, stretched away to meet the shoreward rolling clouds whose darkness only spoke of coming storms.

In all the time since she had come to Slains and first learned of the planned invasion to return the king, Sophia never once had paused to think the plan might fail. Until this moment.

From my window, I could see the breaking waves against the harbor wall. The wind was strong this morning, and the waves were coming high and fast and casting up an angry spray that made a hanging mist to all but hide the curve of snowbound beach. I couldn’t see it clearly. Further out, the sea had turned a deeper color in the shadow of the dark grey-bottomed clouds that were now gathering and blotting out the sun.

It wasn’t difficult, while standing here, to feel the way Sophia must have felt. This winter sea was not so different from the one that I had pictured through her memory. Through her eyes.

Nor was it difficult to feel the shade of Colonel Graeme close beside my shoulder. I could feel them everywhere around me, now, the people who had lived at Slains that winter. They were with me all the time, and it was harder to detach myself, to pull away. They pulled me back.

Especially this morning. I had meant to take a break and get some badly needed sleep, but all I’d managed was to make a piece of toast, a cup of coffee. And I hadn’t even finished that, and here the voices were again, beginning to get restless.

I could have closed them out, but at the window glass the wind rose to a wail and forced its way around the frame to swirl its cold around me and it breathed, ‘Ye have no choice.’

And it was right.

XV

SHE’D THOUGHT TO SPEND an hour in the stables with the horses, but she’d given up that plan when she had happened upon Kirsty standing close against the stable wall with Rory, their heads bent close in earnest conversation. Sophia would not for the world have interrupted such a private moment, so she stopped, and turned away before they saw her. Taking care to keep her footsteps soft so she would not distract the couple, she went round again the long way past the malthouse and the laundry.

It had snowed, as Colonel Graeme had predicted, and the branches of the sleeping trees that showed above the garden wall were frosted thick with white, and further down she saw the thin smoke twisting upwards from the chimneys of the bothy at the bottom of the garden. She had not set eyes on Billy Wick since Captain Gordon’s visit weeks ago, and she had no desire to meet him now, so it was with dismay that she caught sight of his hunched figure standing black against a snowy shrub whose crooked branches arched and reached towards the inland hills as though attempting to escape the fierce winds blowing off the bleak North Sea.

Sophia was about to seek escape herself, and carry on along the laundry wall and round the corner to the kitchen, when another movement from the garden made her pause, and look more closely. Billy Wick was not alone. A second man, much larger and well-wrapped against the cold, a thick wool plaid drawn cloak-like round his head and shoulders, had come now to stand beside the gardener. There was no mistaking who it was—the only question, thought Sophia, was what business Captain Ogilvie could have with Billy Wick.

Whatever it was, they took some few minutes about it; in that time her troubled frown grew still more troubled when the hands of both men moved and some unknown object passed between them.

It was only when the two men parted, disappearing from her view so that she could but guess that Captain Ogilvie was making his way back along the path towards the house, and might at any moment come upon her without notice, that she moved. Her steps were ankle-deep in snow but quick with purpose, and the hands that drew her cloak more tightly round her sought to warm the chill she felt within, as well as from without.

She found the colonel, as she’d hoped she’d find him, in the library. He smiled above the pages of his book as she came in. ‘Have ye returned so soon? I would have thought ye’d had enough defeat for the one day.’

Ignoring the chess board, she asked, ‘May I speak with you?’

He straightened as though something of her urgency had reached him. ‘Aye, of course.’

‘Not here,’ she told him, knowing Ogilvie would soon be back and often chose this room himself to sit in. She needed someplace private, where they would not risk an interruption. As her fingers met the thick folds of her cloak, she asked on sudden inspiration, ‘Will you walk with me?’