The Winter Sea

‘Aye, the grey stone of Ardendraught. It used to lie in that field, up at Aulton farm,’ he said, pointing out a spot above the far curve of the beach. ‘A great granite boulder, so large that the sailors at sea steered their course by it.’

‘Where did it go?’ I asked, gazing upwards at the empty hillside.

Graham smiled at me, and whistled for the dog. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

The ancient church sat in its own little hollow of trees, with bare farmland rising all round and no neighbors except for a plain-looking house and grander home built of red granite that stood on the opposite side of the narrow curved road, which was edged by the high granite wall of the kirkyard so closely that Graham had to park the car a short way down, beside a little bridge.

He wound the windows down a bit for Angus, who looked weary from his run along the beach and seemed content to lie back, uncomplaining, while we left him there to walk back up the winding road.

It was a peaceful place. There was no sound of traffic, only birds, as Graham swung the painted green gate open and stood back so I could go ahead of him into the quiet kirkyard.

The church was graceful, built with rounded towers at each side, with pointed tops that made it look a lot like the old pictures I had seen of the Victorian façade of Slains. Around the church and out behind, the standing headstones stretched in ordered ranks though some were old and weathered, spotted white with lichen, and some leaned, and some had fallen altogether with their age and had been taken up and propped against the inside of the kirkyard wall.

The setting was familiar, and yet somehow wrong.

Behind my shoulder, Graham said, ‘This entire church was built out of that one great stone of Ardendraught, which gives you some idea of the size of it.’

It also explained why I hadn’t recognized it, I thought. The stone had still been on the hill overlooking the shore, when Sophia and Moray had walked there. It hadn’t been broken away yet by stonemasons’ hammers.

‘What year was the church built?’ I asked.

‘In 1776. There was a church here before that, but no one knows exactly where.’

I could have told him where. I could have traced the outline of its walls beneath the present ones. Instead, I stood in silent thought while Graham showed me some of the more interesting features of the parish church.

I didn’t catch it all—I drifted in and out of daydreams, but a few things stuck. Like when he pointed out a marble slab that had been sent across the sea to mark the grave site of a Danish prince, killed in the battle that had given Cruden Bay its name in the eleventh century.

‘It means “the slaughter of the Danes”, does Cruden,’ Graham told me. ‘Cruden Water runs close by the battlefield.’

I looked where he was looking, at the quiet stream that ran beneath the bridge where we had parked the car—a little unassuming one-arched bridge that struck a stronger chord within my memory when I viewed it from this angle.

Curious, I asked, ‘Is that an old bridge?’

‘Aye. The Bishop’s Bridge. It would have been here at the time your book is set. You want to take a closer look?’

I did, and so we left the quiet of the kirkyard and walked the winding road that made a narrow S-curve at the bridge itself. It wasn’t more than ten feet wide, with worn and crusted sides of stone that rose to Graham’s elbow height. The Cruden Water underneath was muddy brown and gently running, swirling into eddies that moved lazily along the reedy shore beneath the overhanging bare-branched trees.

Graham stopped halfway across, leaning over the edge like a schoolboy to watch the water slipping into shadow underneath us. ‘It’s called the Bishop’s bridge for Bishop Drummond, since he was the one who had it built, although it wasn’t finished until 1697, two years after he was dead. He retired up to Slains,’ he offered.

But that would have been before the time I needed. Bishop Drummond would have died more than ten years before Sophia had arrived. Besides, there wasn’t anything about his name that rang a bell for me. Another name was rising in my mind, and with it came a hazy image of a kind-faced man with weary eyes.

I asked, ‘Was there a Bishop Dunbar?’ When I spoke the name I knew that it was right, somehow. I knew it before Graham answered, ‘William Dunbar, aye. He was the minister of Cruden at the time of the ’08.’ The look he angled down at me appeared to be acknowledging the thoroughness of my research. ‘By all accounts, he was well-liked. It caused a bit of a stir when the Church forced him out of the parish.’

‘Why did they do that?’

‘He was Episcopalian, as was Drummond before him, and as were your Errolls at Slains. If you lean over here, in fact, you can still see what’s left of the Earl of Erroll’s coat of arms, carved in the side of the bridge. See that square?’

I leaned over as far as I dared, and Graham kept a safe hold on my shoulder, and I saw the square he meant, although the carving was so worn inside I couldn’t see the detail. I was about to say so when the movement of the water underneath me stirred a sudden memory of a different stream, a different bridge, and something that had happened…

Damn the Bishop, Moray’s voice said calmly, and I tried to catch the rest of it, but Graham pulled me back. When I was standing upright once again he asked me, ‘D’ye deal with that, then, in your book? The religious divisions?’

It took me a moment to bring my thoughts back, but my voice sounded normal when I said, ‘They’re there, yes. They have to be.’