Shadowy Horses (12 page)

"You were that sure?"

"Oh, aye." She suddenly seemed ageless, and very wise. "Robbie's never wrong, lass. If he sees something in that field, it's there. It's the rest of us who are blind."

And then, remembering the red-handled screwdriver, she tightened her grip on the tool and sent us a purposeful nod. "Right, I'll just fix that wee hinge and then we're away. You two can leave that haggis and the dictionary in behind the desk, there, and I'm sure Verity won't want to drag Davy's wet raincoat around with her ..."

Jeannie's dark eyes caught mine, laughing, and their message was a silent
See? I told you so.

Ignoring her, I dumped my things behind the desk and, gathering my dignity, began my proper tour of the museum.

XII

Touring a museum was, for me, a busman's holiday.

My idle mind took note of every detail of design: did the gallery flow nicely from one section to another? Was the flooring easy on the feet, or did one's knees begin to ache before the tour was over? Were the labels written clearly, plainly, cleanly, and with care? And the artifacts themselves, were they displayed with thought, and properly protected? This final point was my obsessive passion.

In Paris my one and only visit to the Louvre had been spoiled by windows—rows of lovely windows pouring deadly direct sunlight on the priceless paintings opposite. And I'd never quite recovered from the horror of the flashbulbs popping around the
Mona Lisa,
when the guard whose job it was to drone out "pas de flash" was off on tea break. All those tourists, all those flashbulbs, all that stupid, stupid ignorance, destroying the painting as surely as if they'd slashed it with a knife, and all for a snapshot that wouldn't hold a candle to the postcards one could buy for next to nothing in the gift shop.

I tended to avoid museums, when I wasn't working.

But this, I reasoned, was a special case. I would be living out at Rosehill for the digging season anyway—it followed
I should do my best to learn the local history. And to my relief, I found that there was nothing here to set my teeth on edge. Someone had done a professional job of presenting the town's past in a well-defined sequence of information panels and displays.

Border lords and Jacobean conspirators, boatbuilders and smugglers, the men who fished the North Sea for herring and the "fisher lassies" whose job it was to clean and salt the catch—all of them had their place in the Eyemouth Museum. And room had been made for the odd outsider.

David's mother paused before one panel. "And this, of course, commemorates the day the bard himself came here, to be made a Royal Arch-Mason."

My eyebrows rose. "What, Shakespeare came here?"

"Robbie Burns, you heathen," she corrected me, rolling her eyes good-naturedly in response to my English ignorance. "Our national poet, no less."

Jeannie thought it was a wonder Robert Burns had lived to tell the tale. "Coming to a smuggling town like Eyemouth, and him an exciseman."

I fancied even smugglers harbored some respect for genius. The poet's image kept proud company with nets and the herring barrels and the whopping great cannonball Jeannie showed off with a smile. "That came from the Fort."

"And where is the Fort?"

"Over there," she said, pointing in the general direction of the sea. "On the top of the cliffs at the end of the beach. You can see it from where we parked the car."

"Not a Roman fort, I take it?"

"Tudor," Nancy Fortune told me. "Built in the days of the boy king Edward of England, and torn down under Elizabeth. The French and the English kept fighting us for it. There's no telling whose cannon that came from."

Jeannie looked down at the heavy cannonball. "The two cannon still up there aren't Tudor, are they?"

"No, folk set those up on Fort Point in the French invasion scare, we think—the middle of last century."

Invasion, I reflected, was a constant theme along this stretch of coast. Invasion and slaughter and swift retribution.
an unending cycle of fire and sword. Small wonder the soil here was red.

"The Fort," said Nancy Fortune, "was my Davy's favorite place, when he was younger. He did all his thinking there. It's peaceful, like—just grass and mounds and those two cannon looking on the sea."

Jeannie nodded, straight-faced. "And it's a rare fine spot to see the haggis."

"Oh, aye," agreed the older woman. "Wild haggis everywhere. They like to dig their burrows in the mounds."

Refusing to rise to the bait. I drifted on toward the next display.

It was dead clever, this display. In all the local history museums I had visited I'd never seen its match. Instead of relying on pictures alone to give one the feel of a fishing boat, they'd brought the boat itself inside. The front half of a boat, at any rate.

Stepping onto the bridge, I played like a child with the polished wheel and gazed in admiration through the glass window, at the ropes and nets and fish boxes piled on "deck," and the real stuffed herring gull riding the jutting bow into an imaginary wind. I thought the whole thing brilliant, and said so.

"Aye, it's fair impressive," David's mother said. "But ye've not yet seen our greatest achievement. That we save for last."

With great expectations I followed her around the remaining few displays until we arrived at the end of the loop, within sight of the lobby.

"There." She stopped dramatically before the final wall.
"That's
the treasure of our museum."

I saw only a tapestry, and a modern one at that. Attractive, yes, but hardly what one thought of as ...

"The Eyemouth Tapestry," my guide's voice sliced evenly into my thoughts. "It took twenty-four ladies two years to make this, for the one hundredth anniversary of the Disaster." Her sideways glance was self-assured. "You'll have heard about the Disaster?''

"Heard it mentioned, yes, but—"
Jeannie interrupted me as Nancy Fortune's eyebrows rose. "We thought we'd let you tell her, since you tell the story best."

"Och, it's not so difficult. Any bairn here in Eyemouth could tell you about the Disaster. That's the Great East Coast Fishing Disaster," she explained for my benefit, speaking in obvious capitals. "Black Friday, they called it. And though it's been more than a hundred years since, you'll still hear folk talk like it was yesterday." She folded her arms and gave a small sigh before smoothly beginning the story. "It happened in October. A stretch of bad weather had kept all the boats in the harbor a few days, but the morn of Black Friday was fair bright and sunny, with never a breath of wind. The fishermen's wives set to baiting the lines, and their menfolk prepared for a fine day of fishing, though the old public weather-glass, down by the pier-end, was lower than any had seen." She shook her head. "It made some of the fishermen wary, that glass being low. Still, the day looked so grand and the sea looked so calm that the younger lads started on out." A practiced storyteller, she paused and let the sentence dangle until I gave her the prompt.

"What happened?"

"Well, it's a point of honor, like, that if the one boat goes out all the rest go, too. So at eight in the morning they sailed from the harbor and made their way out to the fishing grounds. Four hours they fished, then at midday the sea changed. It was the stillness that warned them ... a horrible stillness ... but afore they could move the whole sky turned to black and the wind rose up screaming and wild."

She pointed to the first panel of the tapestry. Against the vivid blue background of the sea, two terror-stricken fishermen clung desperately to the lines of their sinking vessel, struggling to guide it into shore. "Whole boats were tossed up from the water, their masts torn away, and their sails ripped to shreds, and the sea took the ones who were heading for harbor and dashed them apart on the rocks. Those on the shore tried everything—tossed out lines and made human chains, reaching out hands for the struggling men, but the waves took them anyway."

I stared, transfixed, at the tapestry's second panel, a more symbolic rendering of the tragedy, with seven childlike figures scattered around the outline of a boat, watched by a wailing line of human-faced cliffs. "How terrible."

"Aye. One hundred and eighty-nine men were taken in the Disaster, from all four local harbors—Burnmouth, Cove, St. Abbs and Eyemouth. That's what the four maps show, in this third section. And the sea wall, just here, has one stone for each Eyemouth man lost. One hundred and twenty-nine stones," she gave me the tragic count. "Half the men of the town gone, and all in one day. That was the toll of the Eyemouth Disaster ... October the fourteenth, eighteen-hundred-and-eighty-one.''

Embroidered with painstaking care on the tapestry were the names of all the fishermen who died in the Disaster, along with the names of their boats. It made a chilling record.

I stood a moment, deeply moved, reflecting on the ironies of history. Nearly two thousand years ago, if Quinnell's theories were right, another group of men had faced their own Disaster day in this same place—men who spoke a different language, served a different god, but who had dreams and wives and mothers, like the fishermen of Eyemouth.

And the shadowy horses had come for them, too, to carry them off to the land of the dead. I had a sudden and disturbing sense of something evil, undefined ... some dark and vengeful entity that lay in wait to ambush all who passed this way, whether they travelled by land or by sea, chasing men down through the centuries.

The silence clutched at me and held a moment, and then Jeannie nudged me forward to the light, and shaking off the foolish vision I turned my back to the Eyemouth Tapestry and the terrified stares of its drowning men.

The weather had cleared a little by the time Jeannie and I finally left the museum. In the car park, we found Wally Tyler waiting for us.

He pitched his cigarette away when he saw us coming, and Kip, at his heels, jumped up joyfully. Behind them, through the thinning mist, I saw the long dark promontory
where the Fort had stood, jutting out into the waves, and below that the waves themselves, white-capped and swirled by salt-sprayed wind that carried still the bone-chilling dampness of rain.

"Heyah," Jeannie greeted her father. "Where's Robbie?"

"Asleep in the car."

"Wore him out, did you? Where did you go?"

"Round aboot. Had a few pints, like, wi' Deid-Banes."

"Oh, aye? Well, we'd best get the two of you home, then."

The collie, soaking wet, brought an indefinable odor into the car, and Jeannie wrinkled her nose. "Och, Kip, you're mingin."

I sniffed myself, and decided that "mingin" was one word I needn't look up in my dictionary. "Deid-Banes," though, was something different. I flipped the pages casually, eventually translating the term into the equally unhelpful English "Dead-bones."

Jeannie, glancing in the rearview mirror, fixed her father with a stern accusing eye. "Granny Nan smoked a cigarette this morn."

"Oh, aye?"

"You gave it to her, didn't you?"

The old man shrugged, all innocence. "I might have left yin lying aboot, where she could find it."

"But Dad, the doctor said—"

"I mind whit the doctor said," he cut her off, his gray eyes unimpressed. "But Nancy Fortune's always done as Nancy Fortune pleases, and she wasna in the grave last time I looked."

Two hours later, sipping tea with Peter in the cozy red-walled sitting room, I learned that his opinion took a slightly different twist.

"A difficult woman," he mused, with a shake of his head. "Most difficult. She simply will not listen to advice, you know. She never has. Her doctor says she must slow down, but Nancy . .. Nancy never listens."

He'd been drinking, from the looks of it. The glass beside his teacup held a half-inch of clear liquid that I guessed
would not be water. But his sigh implied his own health habits were above reproach, a pure example to be followed, if only David's mother would be reasonable ...

"Well, she looked perfectly healthy to me," I said. “I quite liked her. And I liked the museum, it's very well organized."

“You saw the tapestry, of course? The Disaster tapestry?''

"Yes."

"They do remember their Disaster, here in Eyemouth." Scooping Murphy from the arm of the leather chair, he re-positioned the creature so it draped across his knees. "Not that I've a problem with people living in the past," he went on, stroking the black cat absently. "I'm all for it, actually. · My Irish blood, perhaps." He smiled. "I've always liked what that one writer said—that chap who wrote
Trinity
—"

"Leon Uris."

"Is that his name? He said there was no future in Ireland, only the past happening over and over. I get that feeling here, as well. The past is never far away, at Rosehill. Never far away."

Beneath his hand the cat yawned, turned staring eyes upon me for a moment, then shifted its gaze to the window. It didn't hiss, or make a sound, but the dark hair lifted all along its spine.

"You see?" said Quinnell, lightly. "Look, our Sentinel is passing."

I believe he meant it as a joke, but through the moaning of the wind I fancied that I heard the footsteps walking, walking, steadily, along the gravel drive.