The Winter Sea

My eyes must have begun to lose their focus because Graham smiled and rose and reached to take my empty coffee cup. ‘I’ll make some more. You don’t look like you’re done yet with your writing.’

I pulled myself back. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t have to, really, not if you were wanting to do something else.’ I saw his mouth quirk and I hastened to add, ‘What I meant was—’

‘I know what you meant.’ There was warmth in his eyes. ‘Write your book. It’s no bother. I’ve twenty more papers to mark, and I’ll not get them done if you let me keep talking about the invasion. Besides, it’s just talk. Just my theories. I can’t say for sure why it failed, why the French made the choices they did. No one can,’ he admitted. ‘It’s hard enough judging the motives of people who live in our own times, let alone the motives of those who’ve been dead three hundred years. They can’t come back and tell us, can they?’

Handing him my coffee cup, I thanked him and sat back and gave the spaniel’s floppy ears a scratch and counted myself lucky that he’d asked that question in a general sense, and hadn’t been expecting me to answer.

XVIII

THE HARBOR AT LEITH was a maze of great ships and small vessels, some anchored, others moving between and around them at various speeds and in varied directions, so that the oarsman seated opposite Sophia in the rowboat had to choose his course with care and change it often. This was Edinburgh’s harbor and would at any time be crowded, but today the traffic was so thick it seemed that one could almost walk from oar to oar across the deep green water to the cheers of those who called to one another from their passing craft, in hearty voices made more boisterous with drink.

Sophia wrapped her hood more closely round her face and made an effort not to look beyond the oarsman to the crippled hulk of the French ship that rode nearby at anchor, marked with scars of heavy fighting, and its rigging all in tatters. She had seen it from the shore and been affected by it then, and it was worse to be this close and see the charred and jagged edges of the holes left by the cannon blasts, and know the men who had been standing where the holes now were would have been killed.

There were no scars that she could see upon the ship they were approaching. It rolled languidly upon the water like the great cat that it had been named for—the Leopard—and it seemed to overlook the harbor as a wild leopard might when resting from a recent hunt, self-satisfied, content to let the smaller prey pass by. Yet there was something predatory in its shadow as it fell across Sophia, and the scraping of the two hulls growled a warning as the oarsman brought the rowboat alongside. He reached to take hold of a hanging rope ladder and called to hail a crewman on the deck above.

‘Here is a lady for your captain,’ he said with a smirk that plainly showed what purpose he believed she’d come to serve.

She did not seek to change his mind—her own was set so fixedly she did not care what others thought. She landed steady on her feet upon the creaking deck, and bore the crewman’s leering scrutiny with patience, only seeking to remind him when it seemed he had forgotten that the captain would be waiting for her.

She felt the stares as they passed by, and heard the voices of the other men call out and laugh and speak in rude suggestive language, but she took no more notice of them than she did of the ship itself, of the great rising masts and the knots of the rigging and wet canvas scent of the slumbering sails. She had wondered for so long just how it would feel to set foot on a ship and to walk on its decks, and now here she was walking upon one and none of her senses took note of the fact. She might have been walking the road of a town, and the steps to the door of the captain’s cabin might have been but the steps to a house. All that mattered to Sophia was the man inside, and what she’d come to say to him.

The cabin had a bay of casement windows curving round its farther end, through which the afternoon’s strong light poured in to warm the paneled walls and spill across the smooth edge of the desk at which the captain sat.

He had not looked up at the crewman’s knock, he’d only said a curt ‘Come in’, and gone on looking at the spread of papers that so held his interest.

‘Your visitor, sir,’ said the crewman, and coughed, and discreetly withdrew.

And the captain raised his head then, faintly frowning, and seeing Sophia he stopped short as though he’d been struck.

‘Captain Gordon,’ she greeted him levelly.

Recovering himself, he rose and came across to take her hand and raise it to his lips, too much the gentleman to cast aside formalities in even such an unexpected circumstance. But clearly her appearance had surprised him, and he did not try to hide it. ‘How the devil came you here?’

‘It was not difficult,’ she lied. She did not tell him the excuses she had made to Mrs Malcolm and to Kirsty of her need to come to town, nor of the earliness with which she had set out by hired coach, nor of the trouble it had caused her to negotiate her way around the busy port. ‘I asked which ship was yours, and found a boatman who would carry me.’

‘I meant how came you here to Leith? Why are you not at Slains?’

She drew her hand away from his. ‘The countess thought a change of air might do me good. I have been staying some few weeks with friends of hers, not far from here.’

‘Oh, aye? What friends would those be?’

Once Sophia might have told him, but not now. ‘I do not think that you would know them.’