The Winter Sea

‘Most of my students, when they’re coming new to my lectures, don’t realize how much of an issue it was,’ Graham said. ‘How much fighting went on because somebody read from the wrong prayerbook. If you and I had lived back then, and you’d been Presbyterian and I Episcopalian, we’d not have stood together on this bridge.’

I wasn’t sure of that myself. The fear of hellfire and damnation notwithstanding, I’d have lain odds that the eighteenth-century version of myself would have had the same weakness for Graham’s grey eyes.

The hard stone of the bridge had passed its chill into my fingers, so I hugged them to my chest. ‘I am, actually.’

‘What?’

‘Presbyterian.’

He smiled at that. ‘We call it Church of Scotland here. And so am I.’

‘So we’re all right to stand on the same bridge, then.’

‘Aye.’ His glance was warming. ‘I suppose we are.’ He looked me over. ‘Are you cold?’

‘Not really. Just my hands.’

‘You should have said so. Here, take these.’ And tugging off his gloves, he passed them over.

I looked at them, remembering how Moray, in my book, had made a gesture much the same when he’d gone riding with Sophia that first time. And putting on the gloves, I found, as she had found, that they were warm, and overlarge, and rough upon my fingers, and the feeling had a certain sinful pleasure to it, as though Graham’s hands had closed around my own.

‘Better?’ he asked.

Wordlessly I nodded, struck again by all the little intersecting points between the world that I’d created and the world that really was.

He said, ‘You look half frozen. Want to get a cup of coffee?’

My thoughts were with Sophia still, and Moray, and the moment when he’d asked her to go riding, and she’d known that she was standing at a crossroads of a kind, and that her answer made a difference to the way that she would go. I could have simply told him yes, and we’d have found a place somewhere to stop and buy a cup of coffee on our way back down to Cruden Bay. But like Sophia, I decided that the time had come to choose the unknown path.

And so I told him, ‘I have coffee at the cottage. I could make you some.’

He stood there for a moment looking down at me, considering.

‘All right,’ he said, and straightened from the bridge, and held his hand to me, and smiled when I took it. And we left behind the little church that had once been the great grey stone of Ardendraught above the windblown shore, and in whose shadow other lovers, not so different from ourselves, had moved in step three centuries before.

IX

HE WAS WAITING FOR her on the beach.

He’d stretched himself full length upon the sand, boots crossed, arms folded underneath his head, and when she came around the grassy dune she nearly fell upon him.

‘Faith!’ she said, and laughed, and let him pull her down to rest beside him.

In a lazy voice he said, ‘You’re late.’

‘The countess wanted my opinion on a newly published tract that she has lately finished reading, on the Union.’

Moray’s mouth curved. ‘She’s a rare sort of woman, her ladyship.’

Sophia agreed. She had never known a woman as intelligent, or capable, or fearless, as the Countess of Erroll. ‘I do not like deceiving her.’

He rolled his head upon his arms to look at her. ‘We’ve little choice.’

‘I know.’ She looked down, sifting the warm sand between her fingers.

‘She thinks only of your happiness,’ he said, ‘and to her mind an outlawed soldier who must soon return to France, and to the battlefield, would hardly be as suitable a match as…well, the commodore, let’s say, of our Scots navy.’

‘British navy, now,’ she absently reminded him, not liking to imagine him at war. ‘And though she favors Captain Gordon, I do not.’

His smile flashed as he settled back again, eyes closed. ‘And glad I am to hear it. It would pain me to discover that I’d wasted so much effort on a lass for naught.’

Playfully, she struck him on his chest. ‘And am I so much effort, then?’

‘In ways ye can’t imagine.’ He was teasing still, but when his eyes came open to her own she saw the warmth in them, and knew what he intended even as his hand reached up to weave itself into her hair and draw her down. His kiss yet had the power to stop her breath, though she’d grown used to it by now and had the knowledge to return it.

When it ended, Moray slid his arm around her back to keep her close against him, and she rested with her cheek against the fine weave of his shirtfront, with his heartbeat sounding strongly at her ear. Above, a gull was hanging on the wind, its outspread wings appearing not to move at all. Its solitary shadow chased across the sand beside them.

Theirs was stolen time, Sophia knew. It could not last. She had not wished to think of it, herself, but since he’d raised the issue, she asked, ‘Will you leave soon, do you think?’

His shoulder moved a little in a shrug. ‘By his last letter, Hooke will be already on the road to Slains, and Captain Ligondez of our French frigate was instructed to keep off the coast three weeks and then return, which means he, too, can be expected any day.’

‘And then you will be gone.’

He did not answer her. He held her closer, and Sophia, saying nothing, closed her eyes and tried to hold the moment. She was used to losing those she loved, she told herself. She knew that when he’d gone the sun would rise and set as it had done before, and she would wake and live and sleep in rhythm with its passing. But this loss, coming forewarned as it did, evoked a different kind of sadness, and she knew that it would leave a mark upon her very different from the rest.