The Winter Sea

Kirsty came, too, though she stayed one step back. ‘’Tis the Bullers o’ Buchan,’ she named the strange, open-roofed cavern. ‘We call it “The Pot”. Many times a ship chased on this coast by a privateer makes for the Pot, and slips in here to hide.’

It would not, thought Sophia, as she watched those waves beating wild on the rocks, have been her choice of where to seek shelter. But surely no privateer would have attempted to follow.

‘Come,’ said Kirsty, tugging at Sophia’s cloak. ‘I’ll nae be forgiven if I lose ye into the Pot.’

So Sophia came away reluctantly, and in a quarter of an hour they had arrived at Kirsty’s sister’s cottage and were seated by the fire, admiring Kirsty’s newest nephew, ten months old, with ready mischief in his eyes and dimpled cheeks to rival those of his two sisters and his elder brother, none of whom was yet six years of age. But Kirsty’s sister seemed to take the challenge of so many children cheerfully. Like Kirsty, she was fair of face and quick to speak and quicker still to smile, and as Sophia had been promised, her kail—the dinner broth—was richer and more flavorful than any she had tasted.

The children were delighted by the presence of the mastiff, Hugo, and tumbled anyhow about him, fearless of the jaws that could have crushed a man, and he, in turn, lay lordly on the hearthrug and accepted their affections and their play with stoic patience.

Time passed happily, and when Sophia finally left with Kirsty in mid-afternoon, she counted those few hours well spent. ‘Your sister seems to have a pleasant life,’ she said, and Kirsty answered, ‘Aye, she chose her husband well. He is a good man, with a world nae wider than his farm and family. He disna seek adventure.’

With an eyebrow raised, Sophia asked, ‘And Rory does?’

‘Why would ye think I’d be speaking of Rory?’

‘Kirsty, I have eyes.’

The housemaid blushed. ‘Aye, well, ’twill come to naethin. I wish for bairns, a hearth and home, but Rory dreams of things beyond that. When he sees the open road, he wonders only how far it will carry him. There is nae future in a man like that.’

‘My father was a man like that,’ Sophia said. ‘But he craved not the open road. For him, it was the sea. He always marveled at the sea, and how its waves appeared to have no ending, and he longed to follow on with them, and touch a foreign shore.’

‘And did he?’

‘No.’ The mastiff dragged a little at his lead, head bent to sniff a clump of grass, and so she slowed her steps to let him. Her cloak dragged heavily behind her, and she lifted it a little from the ground. ‘He died on board the ship that would have carried him to Darien. They put his body overboard.’

The mention of the Darien disaster sobered Kirsty, as it did all Scots. She would have been still younger than Sophia when it happened, but the sad details of Darien were scribed into the memory of the nation that had pinned its hopes of future wealth and independence on those few ships of settlers who had sailed to found a colony intended to control the route of trade through the Americas to India.

‘It must have been a hard blow for your mother,’ Kirsty said.

‘She never learned of it.’ Long months had passed before the news had found its way to Scotland, with the rumors that the colony itself had failed, and been abandoned. By that time, a second eager wave of colonists had sailed. Sophia’s mother, bright and fair, had been among them. ‘She was fortunate,’ Sophia said, when she’d told this to Kirsty, ‘she did not survive the voyage.’ Those who had survived found only bitter disappointment, for the settlement in truth was left defenseless and deserted, and the land that had been promised to bear riches offered nothing more than pestilence and death.

And James and Mary Paterson were now but names amid the countless others broken by the dream that had been Darien.

‘How could ye bear so great a loss?’ asked Kirsty.

‘I was young.’ Sophia did not say that she had borne much more in the unhappy years that followed. Kirsty looked too sad already, and this day was not a day for sadness. ‘And I did hear a minister who preached once that there never was a tragedy except the Lord had some great plan for turning it to good. And here I am,’ she said, ‘so it is true. Had both my parents lived, I never would have come to Slains, and we should not have met.’

Kirsty, presented with this, answered, ‘Aye, that would have been a tragedy indeed.’ And taking up Sophia’s hand, she swung it while they walked and chattered on about less dismal things.

They passed the Bullers by this time and did not stop to look, but when they reached Dun Buy, and Hugo tried again to make them pause and let him chase a seabird supper, Kirsty stopped, pointed down the coast and said, ‘There is a ship off Slains.’

Sophia looked, and saw it, too—the furled sails and the rocking hull that rode upon its anchor, some fair distance from the shore. ‘Is that the Royal William?’

Kirsty raised one hand to shade her eyes, and slowly shook her head. ‘No. That ship is nae Scottish.’

Sophia’s hand was tugged more firmly, not by Hugo this time but by Kirsty. ‘Come, we canna tarry here. We must get back.’

Sophia did not fully understand the urgency, but she could feel it surging through her own self as she ran along the clifftop, keeping breathless pace with Kirsty while the mastiff strained against the lead and pulled her onward ever faster.

She could see the ship’s hands lowering the jolly boat with several men aboard it, and her run, without her knowing why, became a race to reach the castle first, before the jolly boat’s strong oars could land its men upon the shore.