The Winter Sea

I was clearly expected. I barely had to knock before the door was opened to me. Dr Weir looked like a gnome himself: not tall, moon-faced, with round, old-fashioned spectacles. I couldn’t judge his age. His hair was white, but his complexion had a healthy, ruddy smoothness, and the eyes behind the spectacles were clear and sharp. He’d been a surgeon, Jimmy had explained, and had just recently retired.

‘Come in,’ he said, ‘come in.’ He took my coat and shook the dampness from it, hanging it with care upon the antique mirrored hall tree. I could see, in every corner of the entryway, the evidence of good taste and a love of timeworn things. There was no clutter, but the fading prints hung on the wall, the Persian carpet runner on the floor, and the soft light from old glass sconces on the walls, all lent the space an atmosphere of permanence and comfort.

And that atmosphere was stronger in the narrow, lamplit study that he showed me to. One wall was lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases, their shelves packed tight with volumes old and new, hardback and paperback. And where he had run out of room to stand a book up properly on edge, he’d laid it horizontally across the top of its companions and stacked others over that, so there were books wedged in wherever there was space. It had the same effect on me as the sight of a candy store had on a six-year-old.

But because I didn’t want to seem like a six-year-old, I held in my enthusiasm and let him introduce me to his wife, who had been sitting in a chintz-upholstered chair, one of a pair that flanked a small round table at the narrow end wall. Behind these, a fall of striped, pinch-pleated curtains had been drawn across the room’s one window, shutting darkness out and keeping in the warm glow of the reading lamps. A leather wing chair with a smoking table at its side completed the room’s furnishings, and on the wall that didn’t have the bookcases, a handful of seascapes and nautical prints caught the light in the glass of their frames.

The doctor’s wife, Elsie, was compact like him, and white-haired, but not round in the slightest. More a fairy than a gnome, I thought. Her blue eyes seemed to dance. ‘We were about to have our evening whisky,’ she informed me. ‘Will you join us? Or perhaps you’d like some tea?’

I told her whisky would be fine.

Because the wing chair was so obviously the doctor’s, I took the other chintz-covered chair, angled with the bookcases to my one shoulder and the curtains of the window to my other, and the small round table set between myself and Elsie Weir.

Dr Weir stepped out a moment, and returned with three large tumblers of heavy cut glass, each a third of the way filled with rich amber whisky. He handed mine to me. ‘So, Jimmy said you were a writer. Historical fiction, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m that ashamed to say I didn’t recognize your name.’

Elsie smiled. ‘He’s a typical man. Never picks up a book if the writer’s a woman. He always expects it to end with a kiss.’

‘Well, mine usually do,’ I admitted. I tasted my whisky, and let the sharp warmth sear a path to my stomach. I loved the pure taste of a single malt Scotch, but I had to consume it in small, measured sips, or it did me in quickly. ‘The book that I’m working on now has to do with the French and the Jacobites trying to bring James VIII back to Scotland, in 1708.’

‘Does it, now?’ He had lifted his eyebrows. ‘That’s a lesser-known skirmish. What made you choose that one?’

I wasn’t sure myself. The main ideas for my novels never struck me like a lightning bolt. They formed themselves in stages, like a snowball packed in layers, with clumps padded on here and lumps scraped away there, till the whole thing was rounded and perfect. But by then, I could no longer see the shape of that first handful I’d scooped up, that first small thought that had begun the process.

I tried to think of what had started this one.

I’d been working on my last book, which was set in Spain, and, needing to find out some minor detail about eighteenth-century hospitals, I’d come across the memoirs of a doctor who had lived in France about the time I needed. That doctor had done surgery on Louis XIV—the Sun King—and had been so proud of it that he’d written several detailed pages on the incident. And that had got me interested in Louis XIV.

I’d started reading up on him, and on his court and all its goings-on. For pleasure, nothing more. And then one night I’d turned my television on to catch the news and got the channel wrong and tuned in an old movie—Errol Flynn in ‘Captain Blood’—and because I’d always had a thing for Errol Flynn I’d watched him instead, enjoying the swordfights and the romance and the swashbuckling, and at the end he’d leapt onto the foredeck of his ship and told his fellow pirates they could all return to England, now that bad King James had fled to France and good King William ruled the country.

And that had set me thinking, idly, of what rotten luck the Stewart kings had suffered, King James in particular, and how it must have felt for him to lose the crown, give up his throne, and have to live in exile.

And, still thinking this, I’d turned the television off and opened up the book that I’d been reading, a biography of Louis XIV, and on the page where I’d left off there’d been a mention of the palace, Saint-Germain, that Louis had loaned to the Stewart kings in exile, so they still could keep a royal court. Intrigued, I’d started reading up on that—on all the Scottish nobles coming in and out of Saint-Germain, and all the plotting that went on. I’d found it all so fascinating.