The Winter Sea

My mother was, predictably, less concerned with family history and the book that I was working on than why I’d moved so suddenly from France, and why on earth I’d picked a cottage on the Scottish coast in winter, and whether there were cliffs. ‘On second thought,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me.’

‘There are no cliffs where my cottage is,’ I promised her, but she was far too sharp to fool.

She said, ‘Just don’t go near the edge.’

That made me smile when I remembered it a little while later, when I made myself another cup of coffee. You couldn’t get much closer to the cliff ’s edge than the ruins of Slains castle, and my mother would have had a minor heart attack if she had seen me climbing round them Monday. Better that she didn’t see the things I did, sometimes, for research.

The fire had died down a bit in the stove, and I threw on a shovel of coals from the big metal coal hod that Jimmy had left for me, not really knowing how many to put on to last through the night. I poked at them inexpertly, and watched the new coals catch and hiss to life with clear blue flames that seemed to dance above their darkness. And while I watched the fire I felt the writer’s trance take hold of me. I seemed to see, again, the dying fire within that castle chamber, and to hear the man’s voice saying, at my back, ‘We will have warmth enough.’

I needed nothing more. I firmly closed the Aga’s door, and taking up my coffee went to set up my computer. If my characters were in a mood to speak to me, the least that I could do was find out what they had to say.

I

SHE FOUGHT THE NEED to sleep. It caught her up in rolling waves, in rhythm with the motion of her horse, and lulled her weary body till she felt herself relaxing, giving in. The blackness flooded round her and she drifted in it, slipping in the saddle, and the loss of balance jerked her into wakefulness. She clutched the reins. The horse, who must have surely been as tired as she was, answered with an irritated movement of its head, and turned a dark reproachful eye towards her before swinging its nose round again to the north.

The eyes of the priest who was riding beside her were more understanding. ‘Do you grow too tired? We have not far to go, and I would wish to see our journey end tonight, but if you feel that you can ride no further…’

‘I can ride, Mr Hall.’ And she straightened, to prove it. She had no desire to stop so near the goal. It had been two weeks since she had set out from the Western Shires, and every bone within her ached from traveling. There had, of course, been Edinburgh—one night upon a proper bed, and water hot for bathing—but that memory seemed distant, four long days since.

She closed her eyes and tried to conjure it: the bed with its crimson and gold hangings, the fresh-ironed linens that smelled sweetly scorched against her face, the smiling maid who brought the jug of water and the basin, and the unexpected kindness of her host, the Duke of Hamilton. She’d heard of him, of course. There were few people in these times who didn’t have a firm opinion of the great James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, who’d all but led the Parliament in Edinburgh and had been long considered one of Scotland’s fiercest patriots.

His sympathies towards the exiled Stewart king in France were widely whispered, if not openly expressed. He’d been arrested in his youth, so she’d been told, for his connection to a Jacobite conspiracy, and held prisoner in the Tower of London, a fault which could do nothing but endear him to his fellow Scots, who had no love for England or its laws— and even less since this past winter’s Act of Union, which in one swift, bloodless strike had stripped the Scottish people of what shreds of independence they had clutched as their inheritance from Wallace and the Bruce. There was to be no government in Scotland now; no parliament in Edinburgh. Its members would disperse to their estates, some made the richer by the lands they had been granted in return for their approval of the Union, others bitter and rebellious, talking openly of taking arms.

Alliances were forming where they never had before. She’d heard the rumors that her own kin from the Western Shires, all staunchly Presbyterian and reared to loathe the Jacobites, were seeking now to join them in conspiring to restore the Catholic king James Stewart to the throne of Scotland. Better a Catholic Scot to rule them, so they reasoned, than Queen Anne of England or, worse still, the German prince the queen had named as her successor.

She had wondered, when she’d met the Duke of Hamilton, just where he’d stood upon the matter. Surely there could be no restoration of the Stewarts without his knowledge of it—he was far too well-connected, too powerful in his own right. There were voices still, she knew, that called him Jacobite, and yet he had an English wife, and English lands in Lancashire, and seemed to make himself at home as well at Queen Anne’s court as here in Scotland. It was difficult to judge which side he’d choose if it should come to war.

He hadn’t talked of politics while he had been her host, but then she hadn’t thought he would. She had been thrust upon him suddenly, and, for her part, unwillingly, when the kinsman who had ridden with her from the west, as chaperone and guide, had fallen ill upon their entry into Edinburgh. Her kinsman claimed some slim acquaintanceship with the duke, having once served the dowager duchess his mother, and from that had gained for his young charge a bed for the night at the duke’s grand apartments at Holyroodhouse.

She had been accepted kindly, and been fed such food as she’d forgotten in the long days of her journey—meat, and fish, and steaming vegetables, and wine in crystal goblets that reflected back the candlelight like jewels. The room she’d been shown to had been the chamber of the duke’s wife, who was visiting relations in the north of England at the time, and it had been a gloriously rich room, with its gold and crimson bed curtains, and the Indian screen, and the paintings and tapestries, and on the one wall, a looking-glass larger than any she’d seen.