The Winter Sea

‘Your arrival is most fortunate,’ she told them. ‘We shall presently be sitting down to supper. Bed your horses in the stable, you will find my groom to help you,’ she instructed Mr Hall. ‘The lass can come with me. She will be wishing to refresh herself, no doubt, and dress.’ She held a hand to help the girl dismount, introducing herself. ‘I am Anne,’ she said, ‘Countess of Erroll, and, till my son’s marriage, the mistress of Slains. I do fear I’ve forgotten your name.’

The girl’s voice was hoarse from disuse, and she had to clear her throat before she spoke. ‘Sophia Paterson.’

‘Well, then,’ said the countess, with a smile that seemed at odds with the bleak landscape at her back, ‘I bid you welcome home, Sophia.’

CHAPTER 4

SOMEBODY WAS KNOCKING at the cottage door.

It took a while to register. Still half-asleep, I raised my head a little stiffly from where it had lain the past few hours across my arm, outstretched along the hard wood table. My laptop computer had grown tired of waiting for me to go on, and had switched to the screen-saver, infinite stars rushing at me and past me as though I were hurtling through space.

I blinked, and then remembering, I tapped a key and watched the words scroll past. I hadn’t really believed they would be there. Hadn’t really believed that I’d written them. I’d never been a fast writer, and five hundred words in one day was, to me, a good effort. A thousand words left me ecstatic. Last night, in one sitting, I’d written twice that, with such ease I felt sure it had all been a dream.

But it hadn’t been. Here was the evidence, plain black and white on the screen, and I couldn’t help feeling the way I might feel if I’d opened my eyes to discover a dinosaur in my front garden. With disbelieving hands, I saved the document again and hit the key to print.

The knocking came a second time. I scraped back in my chair, and stood, and went across to answer it.

‘I didna mean tae waken ye.’ Jimmy Keith was all apology, although he had no reason to be, given that it was, as near as I could tell, the middle of the day.

I lied. ‘You didn’t, that’s all right.’ I clenched my cheeks to hold the yawn back that would have betrayed me. ‘Please, come in.’

‘I thought ye micht be wanting help, like, wi’ the stove.’ He brought the cold in with him, clinging to his jacket like the briskness of the salt wind off the sea. I couldn’t see too far behind him for the fog that hung above the waves was like some great cloud that was too heavy to get airborne. Leaving his mud-bottomed boots at the doormat, he went past and into the kitchen and opened the stove door to peer at my coal fire. ‘Ach, it’s gone and deed on ye, it’s fairly oot. Ye should’ve ca’d me.’

Sweeping the dead ashes out, he relaid the coals, his rough hands so quick and neat in their movements that I wondered again what he did for a living, or what he had done. So I asked him.

He glanced up again. ‘I was a slater.’

A maker of slate roofs. So that would explain why he looked like he’d lived his whole life in the open air, I thought.

He asked what I did, and there was the ‘f ’ sound again, in the place of a ‘w’—making the word ‘what’ in Jimmy’s speech come out as ‘fit’: ‘Fit aboot yersel?’ He gave a nod to my laptop computer, its printer still humming away on the long wooden table against the far wall. ‘Fit d’ye dee wi’ that?’

‘I write,’ I told him. ‘Books.’

‘Oh, aye? Fit kind o’ books?’

‘Novels. Set in the past.’

He clanged the door shut on the Aga and stood, looking fairly impressed. ‘Oh, aye?’

‘Yes. The one that I’m working on now is set here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I wanted this cottage. My story takes place at Slains Castle.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Jimmy repeated, as though he’d discovered a thing of great interest. I had the feeling that he would have asked me more if someone hadn’t, at that moment, knocked again at the front door.

‘Yer in demand the day,’ said Jimmy as I went to open it, and found, as I had half-expected, Stuart on the doorstep.

‘Morning. Thought I’d come and see how you were getting on,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, thanks. Come on in, your father’s here.’

‘My father?’

‘Aye,’ said Jimmy, from the kitchen, his eyes crinkling at their corners. ‘I’ve nivver seen ye up sae early, loon. Are ye a’richt?’

Stuart parried the jab with a smile. ‘It’s after eleven.’

‘Aye, I ken fine fit time it is.’

He finished restoking the fire in my stove and stood when I thanked him. But he didn’t look as though he were in any hurry to go anywhere, and neither did Stuart, so I asked, ‘Does anyone want coffee? I was just about to make a cup.’

To both Keith men, apparently, a cup of coffee sounded fine. They didn’t sit while waiting. Jimmy wandered out into the main room, whistling faintly through his teeth, while Stuart came after me into the kitchen and leaned with his back to the wall, his arms folded. ‘So, how did you like your first night in the cottage? I should have warned you that the bedroom window rattles like the devil when the wind blows off the sea. It didn’t keep you up, I hope?’

‘I didn’t actually make it to the bedroom last night. I was working,’ I said, with a nod to the long wooden table.