The Winter Sea

The king looked down in sympathy. ‘I did not know you had a woman.’

Colonel Graeme, noticing that Moray had begun to fight against the darkness and was past the point of answering, looked down as well and asked permission of the pain-filled eyes before he turned towards the king and said, correcting him, ‘He has a wife.’

The light within the room had altered with the passing of the afternoon, and it no longer reached the bed on which they lay. Sophia touched the black stone on its cord that rested now against the pulse of Moray’s throat.

‘Ye kept me safe.’ His eyes were steady on her face. ‘The thought of ye did keep me safe and living, these past months, just as my uncle said it would.’

She did not want to think about the past few months. She nestled close to him. ‘Your uncle also said that it was by the queen’s design that I was brought here to Kirkcudbright.’

‘Aye. A great romantic, is Queen Mary. I was made to understand that when she learned I had a wife, she thought it only right that I should have ye with me when I went to Ireland, although I do confess I see my uncle’s hand in this, as well. He thought it very hard of me to leave you for so long alone.’

Sophia closed her eyes a moment, trying to decide how best to tell him. ‘I was not alone.’

It was no easy thing to speak of Anna, but she did it, and he listened to her silently, and held her while she cried. And when she’d finished, he stayed silent for a moment longer, looking down at Anna’s small curl tied with ribbon lying soft within his calloused hand.

Sophia asked, ‘Can you forgive me?’

Moray closed his hand around the curl and brought his arm around Sophia, holding her so tightly that no force could have divided them. ‘’Tis I who should be asking that of you.’ His voice was rough against her hair. ‘Ye have done nothing, lass, that needs to be forgiven.’ Then he kissed her very tenderly and eased his hold, and opened up his hand to look again at that dark curl that was the color of his own.

Sophia watched him, and she sensed the struggle in his heart as reason sought to overcome the pain of knowing his own child might never know his face, that she must live so far away from him. So far from his protection.

‘We could send for her,’ Sophia said. ‘Now that you are returned and are alive, she could come with us…’

‘No.’ The word was quiet, but she knew from hearing it how heavily it cost him. ‘No, ye did right to leave her where she was. There will be danger still, in Ireland.’ Regretfully, he closed his hand upon the little curl of hair, then found a smile and trailed his knuckles softly down Sophia’s cheek. ‘I have no right to take ye with me either, but it seems I’ve grown to be a selfish man and cannot let ye go.’

She lay warm in his embrace. ‘You will not have to.’

‘Well, I will for this first while,’ he conceded, ‘else the fine upstanding people of your house may be offended.’

She’d forgotten them; forgotten that the Kerrs would soon be home from kirk to find she was not there. ‘But John—’

He took her face in both his hands and stopped her protest with a kiss of promise. ‘Wait a few days more, and then I will be well enough to come and pay a call, and I can court ye then in public.’ In his eyes she saw a glint of his old humor, gently teasing. ‘Will ye wed me for a second time, or have ye had a chance to see the folly of your choice?’

And it was she this time who kissed him in her turn so that he would not doubt her answer. And she felt his smile against her lips, and in that moment she believed she understood at last what Colonel Graeme had been saying on that day when they had stood together at the great bow window of the drawing room at Slains, and gazed together at the winter sea. For now she knew he had been right—the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes…and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.

It might be that the king would come, and it might be that he would not. It scarcely mattered to her now, for she had Moray back. He’d promised he’d return to her, and so he had. He’d promised her that one day she would stand upon a ship’s deck, and she knew that she would do that too, and he would be beside her. And wherever that ship took them, and however far it carried them from Scotland and from Slains, she would be bound to both by memory.

She would see in dreams the dark red castle walls that rose so proudly from the cliffs, and hear the roaring of the sea below her tower chamber, and Kirsty’s bright voice calling in the morning to awaken her. She’d feel the warming sunlight spilling through the windows of the corner sewing room where she had sat so often with the countess, and the closer warmth of horses dozing upright in their stalls while Hugo kept his faithful watch beside the stable door.

She would no more forget these things than Slains itself would lose its memory of herself and Moray, for she knew that they had left their imprint there as well, and left it deep enough that one day Anna, walking on the beach, might hear the windborne echo of their laughter from the dunes, and glimpse their shadows on the shore, and wonder at the lovers who had left such ghosts behind. She would know little else except that they’d been happy. And in truth, Sophia thought, there would be nothing else to know.

Whatever might become of them, she knew that there was nothing that could rob them of that happiness. For they had lived their winter, and the spring had finally come.