The Winter Sea

‘I guess you’re right.’

He reached to open up his folder and began to sort the photocopied pages. ‘I did find some very interesting articles on the subject. For instance, here’s a piece by an American professor who believes that the abilities of some savants— autistic savants, who are mentally and socially shut off from all the rest of us, and yet have these strange, unexplainable gifts in one area, music, or maths, for example—this professor thinks their abilities may be the product of some form of genetic memory. He actually uses the term.

‘And here’s another piece that caught my fancy. I tried to keep strictly to science, but even though this is a bit more new-age, it did raise what I thought were some valid possibilities. It suggests that the entire past-life phenomenon, where people are “regressed” under hypnosis and recall what they believe are former lives in other bodies, may in fact be nothing more than their remembering the lives of their own ancestors.’ He handed me the folder, sitting back again to watch me while I sifted through the articles myself. Then he said, ‘Maybe I should start my own wee study, hmm?’

‘With me as your subject, you mean?’ I was briefly amused by the thought. ‘I’m not sure how much use I’d be to science.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Well, there’d be no way to prove just how much of the story was coming from memory, and how much was my own creation,’ I said, thinking now of how I had deliberately brought Captain Gordon back into the plot to stir the waters. That had come from my frustration with Stuart and Graham, and not from Sophia. ‘The family history details, fair enough, those can be checked, but when it comes to things like dialogue…’

“I should imagine it would be a mixture of your memory, and your writer’s art. And what of that? We tinker with our memories all the time. We add embellishments—that fish we caught gets larger, or the faults we had get fewer. But the basic event…well, that is what it is. We can’t turn sad memories to happy ones, no matter how we try. So I’d wager what you’ll write about Sophia, at its essence, will be truth.’

I thought about that later, when he’d gone and I was sitting at my writing-table, staring at the screen of my computer while the cursor blinked expectantly.

I wasn’t in the trance, tonight. My conscious mind was uppermost, and I could feel it pushing at my characters while they dug in their heels. They wouldn’t walk the path I tried to put them on. I’d meant to write the dinner scene, with Captain Gordon sitting at the table with John Moray and Sophia, so the two men could continue their competitive exchange.

But neither man was keen to speak, and in the end I had to go and fetch The Old Scots Navy book that Dr Weir had loaned me, thinking I might come across some interesting naval going-on that Captain Gordon could be telling everyone about, to get the conversation going.

I hadn’t had the nerve to read the book since that first night when I had opened it and learned that all the details I had written about Captain Gordon had in fact been real, and not of my creation. That knowledge had been too much for my troubled mind to process at the time, and after that I’d left the book untouched beside my bed.

But desperation drove me now to scan the index, searching for a Captain Gordon reference that might give me what I needed. And I found a document appended to the text, that seemed to be of the right date. It started: ‘During Hooke’s absence in Edinburgh Captain Gordon, commander of the two Scotch frigates on guard upon the coast (the one of 40, the other of 28 cannon) had come ashore to the Earl of Erroll…’

I could feel the now familiar creeping chill between my shoulder blades.

It was all there, as plain as day.

The captain promising the earl that he’d stay off the coast for fifteen days, and the exchange of signals to be used in case he met the French ship, and the fact that Captain Hamilton was bound to grow suspicious if the French ship stayed too long in Scottish waters. Even Captain Gordon’s statement that he might soon have to leave the naval service, since he would not take the oath against King James.

I read it with the same sense of surrealism I’d felt when I’d been sitting in that reading room in Edinburgh with Mr Hall’s old letter. Because I knew for certain I had never read this document before. I hadn’t gotten this far in the book on my first reading. I had gotten spooked and closed it, as I closed it now. I pushed it far away from me across the table. ‘Damn.’

I’d honestly believed that scene had been my own invention, that I’d made the captain come back just to complicate the plot. I’d been so proud of how I’d worked the whole thing in. And now I found I hadn’t done such an amazing thing.

It looked as though I’d have to face the fact that Dr Weir had hit the nail more squarely on the head than I’d have liked. It might be that I was not to have a hand at all in the creation of this story.

Maybe all that I could do was write the truth.

Deleting the few stilted lines I’d written so the cursor sat once more at the beginning of the chapter, I closed my eyes and felt the silence of the room press round me like a thing alive.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What scene should I be writing?’

VIII

THE COUNTESS LOOKED ROUND, smiling, as Sophia passed the doorway of her private rooms. ‘My dear, would you have seen Monsieur de Ligondez?’

She meant the captain of the French ship, the Heroine, which that morning had, unheralded, returned from Norway, sliding down the coast so very stealthily that none at Slains had noticed it until the boat that bore the captain had been rowed halfway to shore. The earl, who had not risen from his bed yet, had been forced to beg Monsieur de Ligondez’s indulgence for the short while it would take to dress and drink his morning draught and make himself prepared.