The Winter Sea

‘Oh, my dear,’ the countess said, ‘I bring sad news of Mr Moray.’

And Sophia knew what it would be, and knew she ought to spare the older woman all the pain of its delivery, but in the sudden numbness that had settled on her, words were somehow far beyond her reach. She dug her fingers in the sand and tried to focus on the feeling as the countess slowly carried on, as though she felt the pain of it herself.

‘He has been killed.’

Sophia still did not reply.

‘I am so very sorry,’ said the countess.

There was sunlight in Sophia’s eyes. It seemed so strange, that there should still be sunlight. ‘How?’

‘There was a battle,’ said the countess, ‘at a place called Malplaquet. A dreadful battle, so my brother tells me in his letter.’

‘Malplaquet.’ It was not real, she thought. A distant place, an unfamiliar name that tasted strangely on her tongue. Not real.

She heard the countess talking but she could not understand the words, nor did she try. It was enough to sit there, sifting sand and gazing out towards the line where sea met sky and where it seemed at any moment she might see the first white flutter of a fast approaching sail.

The waves kept coming in their soft way up the beach and slipping backwards, and the gulls above still hung upon the wind and wheeled and called to one another in shrill voices that were lost amid the laughter of the children playing at the water’s edge.

Then Anna’s laughter rose above the others and in that one instant something tore Sophia from inside and crumpled her like paper in a careless hand. She fought against it; fought the brimming pressure of her tears until her mouth began to tremble with the effort, but it was no use. Her vision blurred until she could no longer see the far horizon, nor the countess standing closer by in sympathy, and she could no more stop the first small tear that spilled across than she could stop the final bit of sand that slipped between her fingers and would not be held.

And so she let it go.

I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had no choice. The envelope of papers was still sitting where I’d left it on the corner of my desk, as far as possible from where I sat to write. It had been sitting there all day since I’d come back from Aberdeen. I’d only taken it out of my briefcase in the first place because I’d been missing Graham after our weekend and I had found it comforting to look up now and then and see the bold and certain letters of his handwriting spell out my name across the narrow envelope.

I hadn’t changed out of his rugby jersey, either. The long sleeve slipped over my hand as I reached across my desk. I pushed the folds back to my elbow, took the envelope in hand, and drew the papers out in one determined motion, as though I were ripping off a bandage.

It was not, in actual fact, a pedigree chart, as Graham had called it. A pedigree chart would have started with one name and worked its way backward through just the direct line. What Graham had found was more useful, in my view. It was what my father would call a ‘Descendants Chart’, beginning with the earliest known ancestor and traveling forward, like the charts of English kings and queens found in the front of history books, showing the wide web of family relationships, the children of each union and who married whom and when each person died.

The Morays of Abercairney had been a busy bunch, and it had taken several pages to trace their line up to the point of John’s birth. He was easy to find, in the section that listed his brother—the 12th Laird—his sisters Amelia and Anna, and two other brothers. I narrowed my focus to his name alone.

Written down, it was painfully brief. Just the year, and the note: Died of wounds…

There was no specific mention of the battle, but I was long past questioning my memories by now and I knew without doubting that Moray had fallen at Malplaquet. That name might have meant little enough to Sophia, but I knew it well. I still remembered reading Churchill’s vivid description of that battle in his volumes of biography of his own ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. I couldn’t recall the exact numbers killed in that one day of fighting, but I knew that all of Europe had been shocked and sickened by the slaughter. Marlborough himself, a seasoned warrior, had been so deeply affected by the loss of life at Malplaquet that, according to Churchill, he had been forever altered. It would take another hundred years before that death toll would be reached upon a battlefield again.

John Moray had been only one more dead among the thousands, and Sophia only one among the wives who’d been made widows, and six months ago I might have read the papers I was reading now and noted down the facts with the detachment of a researcher, and thought no more about it.

But I couldn’t do that now. I closed the papers on their folds and laid them carefully aside. The blank computer screen was waiting for my next word, but I couldn’t do that either, not just yet. And so I rose and went to put the kettle on to make some coffee.

It was no longer night but early morning, and the winter sun was rising with reluctance. Through my windows I could see the dull light spreading grey like mist above the soggy-looking landscape, and the rolling lines of white that marked the edges of the waves along the empty curve of beach.

In my mind I almost saw the lonely figure of Sophia standing on the shore, her bright hair hidden by her shawl, her saddened eyes still gazing seaward.

Even when the kettle whistled keenly to the boil and made me turn my gaze away, I saw those eyes, and knew they’d never give me peace until I’d finished with the story.