The Winter Sea (23 page)

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.’

‘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

H
E 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.

He shifted underneath her. ‘What is that?’

‘What?’

‘That.’ His hand moved to her throat, and lower, till it felt the small, hard object pressing at the fabric of her gown. His fingers found the cord strung round her neck, and slipped beneath it to draw forth the makeshift necklace. She had lifted up her head to watch him, and she saw the change of his expression as he studied the small pebble, gleaming black, warmed by its closeness to her skin. She’d found a leather lace to string it with, and wore it tucked well underneath her bodice, where no one would chance to see it.

He seemed about to say something, then thought the better of it, and asked lightly, ‘Does it work, I wonder?’

‘It well might,’ Sophia told him, holding up her hand as evidence. ‘This afternoon has been the first time I can yet recall that I’ve not pricked myself to pieces at my needlework.’

He caught her fingers lightly, turned them as if to examine them, then flattened his own hand to hers, as if to test the difference in their sizes. She could feel the pressing coolness of the ring he always wore on the last finger of his right hand—a heavy square of silver with a red stone at its centre, on a plain, broad silver band. It had been, he had told her once, his father’s ring, a small piece of his family he could carry with him in a foreign land.

She wished she had some way to know what he was thinking, with his grey eyes fixed so seriously on their hands together, but he made no comment, and at length he simply twined his fingers through her own and brought her hand to rest above his heart.

The light was changing all around them to the light of early evening, and she knew they did not have much time before they’d be expected back for supper. She asked, ‘Shall we walk again to Ardendraught?’

‘No. Not today.’ He did not loose his hold on her, but closed his eyes again in such a way that she knew, from these past days of observing him, that he was deep in thought.

She waited, and at last he said, ‘When I am gone, what will ye do?’

She tried to keep her answer light. ‘I’ll throw myself at Rory.’

Moray’s chest moved with his laughter, but he turned her face to his. His eyes were open now. ‘I would be serious. The countess will want to be seeing ye married, for your sake. Will you take a husband?’

‘John…’

‘Will you?’

Pushing at him suddenly, she made him let her up and sat so that her back was to him and he could not see her face. ‘How can you ask me that?’

‘I think I have a right.’ His voice was quiet, and it gave her hope that he, too, might be looking on the prospect of his leaving with regret.

Head down, she answered, ‘No. When you have gone, I will not marry someone else.’

‘Why not?’ His question gave no quarter, and Sophia knew he would not let the subject rest until he’d had a truthful answer.

Sifting sand again, she watched it spilling freely from her palm, unwilling to be held. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘my sister made me promise her I’d never give my hand unless I also gave my heart. And you have that.’ She spread her fingers, setting loose the final fall of sand, and Moray, raising himself up on to one elbow, caught her hand in his again.

‘Ye give me more than I deserve,’ he said.

‘You have a poor opinion of yourself.’

‘No, lass. An honest one.’ With eyes still darkly serious, he contemplated their linked hands a second time, and then in one swift rolling motion stood, and helped her up to stand beside him. ‘Come.’

She saw their shadows stretching long across the sand, towards the sea, and knew the sun was moving ever lower in the west, above the line of distant hills. It touched the sky and clouds with gold, and caught her vision in a burst of shifting rays when Moray turned her to its light, and set her hand upon his arm, and led her back along the beach.

He did not take her by the main path that went up and through the crow’s wood, but along the shore itself and up the hill that stood between themselves and Slains. From here she saw the castle stretched before them in the distance, and the gardens running down to meet the dovecote that clung bravely to the gully’s edge, among the gorse and grasses. Then the path was leading down again. It brought them to the bottom of the gully with its quiet grove of chestnut, ash and sycamore trees blotting out all sound except their footsteps and the cooing of the wood doves and the gurgle of the burn whose water ran to meet the sea.

As they approached the footbridge set across the water, Moray asked her, without warning, ‘Do ye love me?’

She stopped walking. ‘John.’

‘’Tis but a simple thing to answer. Do ye love me?’

He was mad, she thought, completely mad, to ask her such a question in the open, here, but looking in his eyes she lost the will to tell him so. ‘You know I do.’

‘Then, since I have your heart already, let me have your hand.’

She stared, and told herself that she could not have heard him properly. He surely only meant to hold her hand, she thought, and not—

‘Sophia.’ With a careful touch he smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear, as though he wished to better see her face. ‘I’m asking if ye’ll marry me.’

A woman who was sane, she knew, would have the wit to tell him that they could not hope to marry, that the countess and the earl would not permit it, that it was a lovely dream, and nothing more…but standing now as she was standing, with her face reflected in the grey eyes fixed with steady purpose on her own, she could not bring herself to think the thing impossible. She swallowed back the sudden swell of feeling that was rising in her chest, and gave her answer with a wordless nod.

The smile that touched his eyes was one she never would forget. ‘Then come with me.’

‘What,
now
?’ That was enough to free her from the spell. ‘Oh, John, you know that we cannot. The Bishop never will agree to—’

‘Damn the Bishop,’ was his mild reply. ‘He has no say in our affairs.’

‘And who will marry us, if not the Bishop?’

‘My brother Robert makes his living in the law, and he would tell you that a marriage made by handfast is as binding as a marriage made in Kirk.’

She knew of handfasting. She’d even seen it done when she was but a girl, and she recalled her mother’s explanation that the sacrament of marriage was the only one that did not need a priest, because the man and woman were themselves the ministers, and bound themselves together by their words. Handfast was frowned upon these days, but practised still— an old tradition of a bygone age when priests were not so plentiful, especially in lonelier locations, and the joining of a man’s hand to a woman’s was a simpler thing.

‘Sophia.’ Holding out his hand to her, he said, ‘Will ye come with me?’

‘Where?’

‘’Tis best done over water.’

In the middle of the bridge he stopped, and drew her round to face him, while beneath their feet the water, turned half-golden by the sun, slipped through the shadow of the arch of wood and flowed on without care towards the sea.

They were alone. He took her two hands in his larger ones.

‘I take ye to my wedded wife,’ he said, his voice so quiet that the water sang above it. ‘Now, lass, tell me that ye’ll have me for your husband.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That’s all.’

She raised her gaze to his. ‘I take you to my wedded husband.’ Then, because that seemed unfinished somehow, she invoked the name of God the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

‘I thought,’ said Moray, ‘ye did not believe.’

‘Then it can do no harm to ask His blessing.’

‘No.’ His fingers tightened briefly on her own, as if he understood her need to hold, by any means, this little piece of happiness. ‘No, it can do no harm.’

Sophia looked at him. ‘Are we then married?’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘We are.’ She heard the pride, and a faint challenge, in his words. ‘And ye can tell that to the countess when she comes to try to marry ye to someone else.’ His kiss was warm, and deep, and too soon ended. ‘That’s for now. The rest will have to keep, else we’ll be late to Erroll’s table.’

So then, thought Sophia, it was done. A touch of hands, words over water, and a kiss, and everything was changed. It was a little thing, and yet she felt the change within herself so very keenly she was sure the Earl of Erroll or the countess would be quick to see it also, and remark upon it. But the evening passed without an incident.

At supper, Moray and Sophia sat in their accustomed chairs, across from one another, and behaved for all the world as if things were the same as they had been that morning, though Sophia feared that, in her effort not to stare and so betray her feelings, she had erred too far the other way, and hardly looked at him at all.

The only person who had taken note was Kirsty. After supper, in the corridor, she caught Sophia passing. ‘Have ye quarreled?’

‘What?’ Sophia asked.

‘Yourself and Mr Moray. Ye were quiet all the meal. Has he upset ye, in some way?’

‘Oh. No,’ she said. ‘He has done nothing to upset me.’

Kirsty, unconvinced, looked closely at Sophia’s flushing face. ‘What is it, then? And I’ll not have ye say ’tis naethin,’ was her warning, as Sophia made to speak.

She wanted desperately to tell, to share some measure of her happiness with Kirsty, but her fear of putting Moray into danger bound her tongue. She summoned up a weary smile and said, ‘’Tis only that my head aches.’

‘And nae wonder, with the walks that ye’ve been taking in all weathers. Ye’ll be bringing on a fever,’ Kirsty chided her. ‘No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.’

It was pure instinct made Sophia lift her head. ‘What do you know about my walks with Mr Moray?’

‘Ye can put the blame on Rory. He’s aye seeing things, he is, though he’ll not speak of them to any soul but me, and that but rarely.’

Glancing up and down the corridor for reassurance that they were alone, Sophia asked, ‘And what does Rory tell you?’

‘That yourself and Mr Moray were this evening on the bridge down by the burn, and holding hands, and talking serious. ’Tis why I thought ye must have quarreled after, for ye did not seem, tonight, as if—’ She broke off, as though something had just suddenly occurred to her, and as her eyes were widening, Sophia pleaded,

‘Kirsty, you must promise me you’ll never say what you’ve just said, to anyone. Not anyone.’

‘Ye’ve married him!’ The words came in a whisper, half accusing, half delighted. ‘Ye’ve married him by handfast, have ye not?’

‘Oh, Kirsty, please.’

‘I’ll never tell. Ye needn’t fear I’ll tell, nor Rory, either. But Sophia,’ she said, in a whisper still, ‘what will ye do?’

Sophia did not know what she would do. She had not planned this. It had happened of its own accord, and she’d had little time to think about the future.

Kirsty looked at her with sympathy, and envy, and then, breaking forth a smile, reached out to grab her hand. ‘Come now, I’ve something I would give ye for a wedding present.’

‘Kirsty…’

‘Come, his lordship and her ladyship do have your Mr Moray deep in conference in the drawing room. Ye’ll nae be missed. And anyway, ye have an aching head,’ she nudged Sophia’s memory, ‘do ye not?’