The Winter Sea

Angus, who’d stretched out along his blanket on the back seat, raised his head to note the changing of our course, and by the time we’d reached the farm’s long lane was standing on the seat, tail wagging, obviously pleased by where he was.

The lane was rutted deep and muddy, ending in a neat square yard with sheds joined in a squat row to the front of us, and barns along our right hand side, and to the left a low-walled whitewashed farmhouse with a bright blue door.

‘Sit tight,’ said Graham, pulling up his jacket’s hood, ‘I’ll see if they’re about.’

He stood at the farmhouse door, with water sluicing down a drainpipe at his shoulder, and knocked. No one came, so with a shrug and quick smile of encouragement, he jogged across the hard-packed yard and through the open doorway of the nearest barn.

He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that Angus hated being left behind. The dog had merely sat and whimpered while his master had been knocking at the blue door, but when Graham disappeared into the barn, the spaniel stood and scrabbled at the window of the back seat and began to howl, a piteous, heart-rending noise designed to move the listener to action. I could only stand a minute of it—then I turned and rummaged for his leash. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘all right, we’ll go, too. Just hold on.’

I didn’t have a hood. But I had boots, which I was thankful for, because my first few running steps were ankle-deep in rainwater. With Angus pulling hard against the leash, we moved with near-Olympic speed across the courtyard, and were through the door and in the barn before the rain had soaked me.

It was warmer inside, dusty from the hay and from the movement of the animals, and smelling sharply of straw and manure. After what I’d written last night, it seemed fitting, somehow, that I should now find myself confronted by a row of tidy horse stalls—three with horses, and one empty— and that one of the three equine faces turned to watch my entrance should look strangely like the mare that I’d created for Sophia, with the same great liquid eyes and coal-black mane and gentle features.

Graham wasn’t anywhere in sight. He must, I thought, have gone the full way down the barn and round the corner, to the sheds, which I could see now were connected at the far end. Angus would have followed, but I held him back a moment, keen to have another minute with the horses.

I loved horses. Every young girl did, so I’d been told, and I had never totally outgrown the phase. My more discerning readers sometimes commented on how I always managed to work horses into all my plots, though I at least could claim that I could hardly write historicals without a horse or two. Truth was, they were my private weakness.

There was no great black gelding in any of the stalls, like the one I’d given to Nathaniel Hooke, and no bay gelding either. Only a tall chestnut hunter who eyed me, aloof, and a curious grey in the end stall, and standing between them, the mare—or the horse that I thought was a mare, since she looked like the one I’d imagined. She stretched out her nose as I offered my hand and with pure joy I petted the velvety hair by her nostrils and felt the warm push of her breath in my palm.

‘That one’s Tammie,’ Graham said. He had, as I’d deduced, been in the sheds, and was returning now with his unhurried stride. ‘You want to watch him, he’s a ladies’ man.’

I turned, surprised. ‘He?’

‘Aye.’ Coming up, he took the dog’s lead from me so I’d have both hands free for the horse.

I rubbed the side of Tammie’s neck. ‘He’s much too pretty,’ I declared, ‘to be a boy.’

‘Aye, but you’ll wound his pride by saying so.’ He glanced at me with interest. ‘D’ye ride?’

‘Not really.’

Grinning, he asked, ‘What does that mean?’

‘That means I can sit on horses if they let me do it. I can even hold on if they’re only walking, but beyond a trot I’m useless. I fall off.’

‘Well, that can be a problem,’ he agreed.

‘I take it no one’s home?’

‘No.’ He glanced briefly at the open double doorway, where the rain was coming down now in an almost solid sheet, and then looked back at me and, seeing how absorbed I was in petting Tammie, said, ‘But we can wait. We’re in no hurry.’ And he hitched a rough stool forward with one foot, and took a seat, while Angus settled on the straw-strewn floor beside him.

It was almost like my book, I thought. The stables, and the mare—well, Tammie, looking like the mare—and me, and Graham, with his clear grey eyes that looked, by no coincidence, a lot like Mr Moray’s. We even had the dog, curled up and sleeping in the straw. Life echoed art, I thought, and smiled a little.

‘What about yourself ?’ I asked. ‘Do you ride?’

‘Aye, I won ribbons in my youth. I’m that surprised my dad’s not had them out to show you.’

His voice, behind the dryness, held such fondness for his father that it made me wonder something. ‘Maybe,’ I ventured, ‘he’ll show me tomorrow. You know he’s invited me over for lunch?’

‘He did mention it.’

‘You’ll be there, too?’

‘I will.’

‘That’s good. Because your dad’s been trying very hard to help me with my research, and he seemed keen to have me meet you so we could talk history.’ Pretending a deep interest in the horse’s face, I asked him, without looking round, ‘Why didn’t you tell him we’d already met?’