The Winter Sea

The hardened footpath stretched ahead of them, towards the sea, and at its end I saw the castle ruin standing stark and square and roofless to the swiftly running clouds, and as I looked at it I felt a sudden pulling urge to stay—to leave the car parked where it was and follow man and dog where they had gone, and hear the roaring of the sea around those crumbled walls.

But I had promises to keep.

So with reluctance, I got back into my rental car, turned the key and started off again towards the north.

‘You’re somewhere else.’ Jane’s voice, accusing me but gently, broke my thoughts.

We were sitting in the upstairs bedroom of her house in Peterhead, the bedroom with the little chains of rosebuds on the wallpaper, away from the commotion of the gathering downstairs. I gave myself a mental shake, and smiled. ‘I’m not, I—’

‘Carolyn McClelland,’ she said, using my full first name in the way she always did when catching me about to tell a lie, ‘I’ve been your agent for nearly seven years, I can’t be fooled. Is it the book?’ Her eyes were keen. ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you over here like this, should I? Not when you were writing.’

‘Don’t be silly. There are more important things,’ I said, ‘than writing.’ And to show how much I meant that, I leaned forward for another close look at the sleeping baby wrapped in blankets on her lap. ‘He’s really beautiful.’

‘He is, rather, isn’t he?’ Proudly, she followed my gaze. ‘Alan’s mum says he looks just like Alan did.’

I couldn’t see it. ‘He’s got more of you in him, I think. Just look at that hair.’

‘Oh, the hair, God, yes, poor little chap,’ she said, touching the bright copper-gold softness of the small head. ‘I did hope he’d be spared that. He’ll freckle, you know.’

‘But freckles look so cute on little boys.’

‘Yes, well, be sure you come and tell him that, when he’s sixteen and cursing me.’

‘At least,’ I said, ‘he won’t begrudge the name you gave him. Jack’s a nice, good, manly name.’

‘The choice of desperation. I was hoping for something that sounded more Scottish, but Alan was so bloody-minded. Every time I came up with a name he’d say, “No, we had a dog called that”, and that would be the end of it. Honestly, Carrie, I thought for awhile we’d be having him christened as “Baby boy Ramsay”.’

But of course they hadn’t. Jane and Alan always found a way around their differences, and little Jack Ramsay had made it to church today, with me arriving in time to stand up as his godmother. That I’d managed to do it only by breaking every speed limit between my stop in Cruden Bay and here had left the baby so supremely unimpressed that, when he’d first laid eyes on me, he’d yawned and fallen fast asleep, not even waking when the minister had doused his head with water.

‘Is he always so calm?’ I asked now, as I looked at him.

‘What, didn’t you think I could have a calm baby?’ Jane’s eyes teased me, because she knew her own nature. She wasn’t what I would have called a calm person. She had a strong will; she was driven, and vibrant, so very alive that she made me feel colorless, somehow, beside her. And tired. I couldn’t keep up.

It didn’t help that I’d been struck by some virus last month that had kept me in bed over Christmas and taken the fun out of New Year’s and now, a week later, I still wasn’t back to full speed. But even when I was in good health, Jane’s energy level was miles above mine.

That was why we worked so well together; why I’d chosen her. I wasn’t any good myself with publishers—I gave in far too easily. I couldn’t stomach conflict, so I’d learned to leave it all to Jane, and she had fought my battles for me, which was why I found myself, at thirty-one, with four bestselling novels to my credit and the freedom to live anywhere, and anyhow, I chose.

‘How is the house in France?’ she asked me, coming back, as she inevitably would do, to my work. ‘You’re still at Saint-Germain-en-Laye?’

‘It’s fine, thanks. And I’m still there, yes. It helps me get my details right. The palace there is central to the plot, it’s where the action mostly happens.’ Saint-Germain had been the French king’s gift of refuge to the Stewart kings of Scotland for the first years of their exile, where old King James and young King James by turns had held court with their loyal supporters, who’d plotted and schemed with the nobles of Scotland through three luckless Jacobite uprisings. My story was intended to revolve around Nathaniel Hooke, an Irishman at Saint-Germain, who seemed to me to be the perfect hero for a novel.

He’d been born in 1664, a year before the Plague, and only four years after the restoration of King Charles II to the battered throne of England. When King Charles had died and his Catholic brother, James, came to the throne, Hooke had taken up arms in rebellion, but then had changed sides and abandoned his Protestant faith for the Catholic Church, becoming one of James’s stout defenders. But it wasn’t any use. England was a nation full of Protestants, and any king who called himself a Catholic couldn’t hope to keep the throne. James’s claim had been challenged by that of his own daughter, Mary, and William of Orange, her husband. And that had meant war.

Nathaniel Hooke had been right in the thick of it. He’d fought for James in Scotland and been captured as a spy, and held a prisoner in the fearsome Tower of London. After his release he’d promptly taken up his sword again and gone to fight for James, and when the battles all were over, and William and Mary ruled firm on their throne, and James fled into exile, Hooke had gone with him to France.