The Winter Sea

Graham stood at my side with his hands in his pockets, and standing there he, too, seemed part of a memory, and I wondered if this was what people felt like when they started going insane.

He was talking. I could hear him, vaguely, telling me the history of the Bullers, and how its name had likely come from the French word for ‘kettle’, bouilloire, or perhaps more simply from the English, ‘boiler’, and how in the past small ships had hidden there from privateers, or if they were smugglers themselves, from the Scottish coast patrols.

On one level, I took this in quite calmly, and yet on the other my thoughts swirled as fiercely as the waves below me. I didn’t think Graham had noticed, but in the middle of telling me how he and his brother had ridden their bikes the whole way round the rim of the Bullers once, when they were younger and more daring, and how he’d almost lost control going over the thin bridge of sunken earth not far from where we were standing, he stopped talking and gave me a penetrating look.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

I lied. I said, ‘I’m not so good with heights.’

He didn’t move an inch, or take his hands out of his pockets, but he looked at me and gave his pirate’s smile and said, ‘Well, not to worry. I won’t let you fall.’

I knew it was too late. I had already fallen. But I couldn’t tell him, any more than I could tell him what I’d felt today on our walk here, and what I was still feeling. It was craziness. He would have run a mile.

The sense of déjà vu stayed with me on the long walk back, and worsened when I saw the jagged walls of Slains, and I was glad when we’d gone past and down into the wooded gully. On the little bridge that crossed the stream I thought that Graham hesitated, and I hoped he might suggest we take the pathway to the right and stop in at a pub for lunch, but in the end he only walked me back up onto Ward Hill and across the tufted grass until we stood before the cottage.

He said nothing to begin with, so I filled the pause by lamely saying that I’d had a lovely time.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I did, as well.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee, or something?’

Stuart, I knew, would have picked up on the ‘or something’, but Graham only took it at face value, and replied, ‘I can’t, the day. I have to get back down to Aberdeen. I have a stack of papers sitting waiting to be marked.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I’ll take you for that driving tour next weekend, if you’d like.’

My answer came a bit too fast. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Which would be better for you, Saturday or Sunday?’

‘Either.’

‘Then let’s make it Saturday. We’ll call for you at ten, again, if that won’t be too early.’

‘We?’ I asked him.

‘Angus and myself. He loves a drive, does Angus, and I’d never hear the end of it if I left him behind.’

I smiled, and told him ten o’clock would be just fine, and having thanked him once again and said goodbye, I went inside the cottage.

But my nonchalant attitude vanished the minute I stepped through the door, and I grinned like a schoolgirl just back from a date. Standing in my kitchen, well back from the window so he wouldn’t catch me watching him, I saw him take a pebble from the path and skip it deftly out to sea, and then he kicked one booted foot into a tuft of grass and, looking pleased himself, strolled down the hill towards the road.

I wasn’t holding out much hope, when I sat down to write.

It would be gone, I knew. The dream I’d had last night would be long gone. It was no use.

But when I turned on the computer and my fingers touched the keyboard, I surprised myself. I hadn’t lost it after all. It was all there, the whole of it, and as I wrote each detail I remembered having dreamed it. I could not recall this happening in all the years that I’d been writing. It felt…well, like I’d said to Jane, it felt the way a medium must feel, when they were channeling the dead.

The story flowed from my subconscious in an easy, rapid stream. I saw the leering face of Billy Wick, the gardener, and the smile of Kirsty’s sister in her cottage, with the children playing round the gentle mastiff, and I felt Sophia’s sadness as she spoke about her parents, and her thrill of expectation as she saw the ship at anchor near the castle, and the mad confusion of her run with Kirsty to the house, and Rory’s warning they should get inside, before the countess missed them.

And tonight, my writing went beyond the dream. And there was more.

IV

SHE HAD NO TIME to change her gown before the countess called for her. She had just reached her chamber and had seen with her own eyes, within the looking-glass, the rare disorder of her hair, the wild color that her run along the clifftop had raised in her cheeks.

And there was Kirsty, breathless too, and knocking at her door to say the countess had requested that Sophia join her downstairs in the drawing room.

‘I cannot go like this,’ Sophia said.

‘Och, ye look fine. ’Tis but your hair that needs attention.’ And with reassuring hands, the housemaid helped Sophia smooth her windblown curls and pin them back into their proper style. ‘Now, go. Ye canna keep her waiting.’

‘But my gown is muddied.’

‘She will never see it,’ Kirsty promised. ‘Go.’

Sophia went. Downstairs, she found the countess in an outward state of calm, but standing close beside the windows of the drawing room as though she were anticipating something and did not wish to be sitting when it came. She held her hands toward Sophia with a smile. ‘Come stand with me, my child. We will this day have visitors, who may be in this household for a month or more. I wish you to be at my side, when I do bid them welcome.’