The Winter Sea

He was testing her, she knew. It was another of those challenges with which he seemed determined to present her, as if seeking to discover just how far she could be pushed beyond propriety.

She raised her chin. ‘I’ll have to take my slippers off.’

‘I’d think it most advisable.’

He turned his head and watched the hills while she rolled off her stockings, too, and tucked them in her slippers, which she left upon the sand beside his boots. There could be no disgrace in going barefoot, she decided. She had known of several ladies of good quality who went unshod within their homes and in full view of company, though that, she did admit, was for economy, and not because they wished to show a man he could not best them.

In the end, though she had come to it reluctantly, it proved to be the greatest pleasure that she could remember since her childhood. The water was so cold it struck the breath out of her body when she stepped in it, but after some few minutes it felt warmer to her skin, and she enjoyed the wetly sinking feel of sand beneath her feet and was refreshed. Her gown and skirts were an impediment. She lifted them with both hands so the hemline cleared the waves, and like a child, cared little that it gave a wanton view of her bare ankles. Moray seemed to take no notice. He was walking slowly through the water, looking down.

‘What are you searching for?’ she asked.

‘When I was but a lad, my mother told me I should keep my eyes well open for a wee stone with a hole in it, to wear around my neck, as it would keep me safe from harm. ’Tis but a tale, and one she likely did invent to keep her wild lad occupied, and out from underfoot,’ he said. ‘But having once begun the search for such a stone, I do confess I cannot end the habit.’

She looked at him, barefooted in the sea and with his head downturned in concentration, and it was not difficult to glimpse the small, determined lad he must have been once— perhaps walking on a beach like this one, with the sun warm on his shoulders and his breeks rolled to his knees, and with no worry in his mind save that he had to find a pebble with a hole in it.

He cast a brief look back at her. ‘Do I amuse ye?’

‘No,’ she said, and dropped her own gaze. ‘No, I only—’ Then she stopped, as something in the water drew her eye. She quickly bent to scoop it up before the sand should shift again to cover it. She’d let go one side of her gown to have a hand free, and she let drop both sides now, and raised the other hand to turn her find against her palm.

It gleamed like black obsidian, an oblong pebble half the size of her own thumb, held by its weight within her hand while grains of wet sand trickled through her fingers to all sides.

Moray turned. ‘What is it?’

And Sophia, with a smile of triumph, stretched her palm towards him. ‘Look.’

He looked, and with a cheerful oath splashed back to have a better look. He did not take the stone from her, but cupped his larger hand beneath her wet one and with gentle fingers turned the stone, as she had done, to see the hole carved through it by some trick of nature, just above its centre.

She said, ‘Now you have your stone.’

‘No, lass. It does belong to you.’ He closed her fingers round it with his own, and smiled. ‘Ye’d best be taking care of it. If what my mother said was true, ’twill serve ye as a talisman against all evil.’

His hands were warm, and spread their heat along her arm so that she scarcely felt the wet cold of the waves that dragged against her heavy gown. But still she shivered, and he noticed.

‘Christ, you’re wetted through. Come out and let the sunshine dry you, else her ladyship will have my head for giving ye the fever.’

In the shelter of the dunes, she sat and spread her gown upon the sand while Moray pulled his boots back on and came to sit beside her. ‘There,’ he said, and tossed her slippers and her stockings in her lap. ‘Ye’d best put those on, too. The wind is chill.’ Again, he turned his eyes away to let her keep her modesty, but commented, ‘If ye do mend those slippers any more, they’ll be but seams of thread.’

She only said, ‘They were my sister’s.’ But she fancied, from his silence, that he understood why she had sought to keep them whole.

More soberly, he asked, ‘How did she die?’

Sophia did not answer him for so long that she knew he must be wondering if she had heard him, but the truth was that she did not know the way to tell the story. In the end, she tried beginning with, ‘Anna was thirteen, two years my elder, when my mother went aboard the ship to Darien. We were then living with our aunt, my mother’s sister, and a woman of good heart. And with our uncle, who was—’ Breaking off, she looked away, across the endless water. ‘He was nothing like my aunt. He was a Drummond, and it is by grace of his connection to the countess that I now do find myself at Slains, but that is all the kindness he did ever show me, and he did not show me that till he himself was dead.’ She turned her sleeve above the elbow, so that he could see the slash of puckered skin. ‘He showed me this, instead.’

She saw the flash of something dark in Moray’s eyes. ‘He burned you?’

‘I was slow,’ she said, ‘in bringing him his ale. This was my punishment.’

‘Was there no one to aid you?’

‘He did use my aunt the same. He had been careful not to do so when my mother had been with us, for my father had left money for our keeping and he did not wish to lose so great an income. But when news came that my parents both were lost…’ She raised one shoulder in a shrug, to hide the pain that had not eased. ‘His rages did increase with my aunt’s illness and her passing, but my sister bore the worst of it to shield me. She was beautiful, my sister. And she might have made a loving wife to any man, had not—’ She bit her lip, and called upon her courage to go on, ‘Had not my uncle used her in that way, as well.’