The Winter Sea (10 page)

That reminded me. ‘Do you, by any chance, know where I could find out about Scottish naval history in the early eighteenth century?’

He smiled, and setting down his glass, looked over to his bookcases. ‘Well, now, I might have a few odd volumes on the subject.’

Elsie said, ‘He has a shelf full. Were you wanting information on the ships?’

‘The people, mostly. I need to do research on one of the captains Nathaniel Hooke writes about.’

‘Ah, Captain Gordon, is it?’ Dr Weir glanced at me to make sure it was, then stood to search the shelves. ‘There’s quite a lot on Gordon in
The Old Scots Navy
. I did have a copy here…aye, here it is. You can take that with you, if you like, and read it over, see if what you want is in there. If not, I have other books that you can—’

Someone knocking at the front door interrupted.

‘Do excuse me,’ said the doctor, and he went out to the entry hall. I heard the door swing open, and the muffled voices of the doctor and another man, a burst of laughter, and the stamp of feet as someone crossed the threshold.

Dr Weir returned, all smiles. ‘Your driver’s here.’

‘My driver?’

Stuart Keith came close behind him, handsome in his leather jacket, with his near-black hair. ‘I was just on my way home, and I thought you might need a lift down to the harbor. The wind’s picking up something fierce.’

I hadn’t noticed it earlier, while we’d been talking, but now I could hear the wind raging against the front window behind me. And I thought of walking back in that, alone, past Castle Wood, and of that dark and lonely stretch of path that led from Harbour Street up to my cottage on the hill, and having Stuart take me home seemed suddenly a very good idea.

So I thanked the Weirs for what had been a really useful evening, and I finished off my whisky in a rather too-large swallow, and with borrowed book and files in hand, I said good night.

Outside, the wind rocked Stuart’s low-slung car as I slid into it. ‘How did you know where I’d be?’ I asked.

‘Someone mentioned it tonight in the pub.’ When he saw my expression he said, ‘Well, I told you, now, didn’t I? One hour at the St Olaf Hotel and my dad can spread any news round half the village. Has he got you on a schedule, yet?’

‘Not quite. He just gave me a list of people he thought could help.’

‘Oh, aye? Who were they?’

‘I can’t remember their names, honestly. But I think I’m supposed to be getting a driving tour this weekend, from either a plumber or a schoolteacher.’

He smiled. ‘That would be the plumber. You don’t have to go—I can give you a driving tour.’ He turned the wheel smartly as he said that, and the back tires swung out as we made the turn down into Main Street.

I gripped my armrest. ‘I think that my odds of survival are better,’ I said, ‘with the plumber.’

He laughed, and I went on, ‘Besides, you’re off again this weekend, aren’t you? Down to London.’

‘Aye, but not for long.’ I felt his glance, although I couldn’t see him clearly in the dimness of the sports car’s warm interior. ‘I will be back.’

I knew he liked me. And I liked him, too, but not that way. Despite his looks, there wasn’t any spark, and although it had been some time since I’d felt a spark with anyone, I knew enough to know when it was missing. So I felt a little guilty when I let him park the car and walk me up the muddy footpath to my cottage. I didn’t want to lead him on, or give him false encouragement, but neither did I want to be alone. Not here. Not in the dark, when every hair along my neck was rising with the sense of something wicked on its way.

‘Mind how you go,’ said Stuart, reaching out to grab my arm. ‘That’s the second time you’ve done that, nearly stepped clean off the path.’ He stopped. Looked down at me. ‘What’s wrong?’

I couldn’t answer him. The moment that he’d grabbed me, I’d been gripped by panic, sudden and unreasoning. My heart was beating so hard in my chest that I could hear it, and I didn’t have the least idea why. I took a breath, and forced a smile. ‘You just…surprised me,’ was the only explanation I could offer.

‘I can see that. Sorry.’

‘Not your fault. I hate this path at night, to tell the truth,’ I said, as we fell back in step. ‘It’s all right in the daytime, but at night it always spooks me.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘I don’t know. Curse of my profession, I suppose. I have a wild imagination.’

‘Well, you can call me any time you like, I’ll come and walk you home.’

‘You won’t be here,’ I pointed out.

‘Aye. I’m away tomorrow morning, early. But I’ve told you, I’ll be back.’

We’d reached the cottage. Stuart watched me fit my key into the lock, and asked, ‘D’ye want me to come in and see you don’t have any monsters in your cupboards?’

From his smile I thought it far more likely that he had a mind to look for monsters underneath my bed, and I was not about to fall for that. I took his offer lightly. ‘No, you don’t have to do that, I’m OK.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

I saw how he was watching me, and knew he was considering attempting a good night kiss, but before he followed through with it, I reached instead to hug him—just a friendly hug that made no promises and wouldn’t be misunderstood. ‘Thanks again for bringing me home,’ I said. ‘Have a safe trip down to London.’

The hug seemed to surprise him, but he took it all in stride. ‘I will,’ he said, and let me go, and took a backwards step onto the path. ‘And I’ll be seeing you,’ he promised, ‘very soon.’

For all the complications that I knew I’d just avoided, I was sorry to see him go. The cottage felt lonely when I went inside. And cold. The coal fire in my Aga had burned so low that it took an hour of concentrated effort to revive it, and by then I was so chilled and tired I wanted just to fall into my bed, and go to sleep.

I took the book with me—the one that Dr Weir had loaned me, on the Scottish navy, because, tired or not, I felt I should do
some
work, since I clearly wasn’t going to write tonight. It was an older book with blue board covers, and the title page read helpfully: ‘The Old Scots Navy, From 1689 to 1710, Edited by James Grant, L.L.B.’ The frontispiece was black and white, a portrait of a white-wigged naval officer in an authoritative stance, his finger pointing to a sailing vessel in the background. There was something in his eyes, his face, that struck me as familiar, so I peered more closely at the light italic script beneath the portrait, looking for his name. I found it.

Thomas Gordon.

Admiral Thomas Gordon, to be sure, but every Admiral was a captain, once.

I sat upright. Cold rushed in beneath the blankets, crept around me, but I hardly felt it. Flipping to the index, I began a careful reading of the references to Thomas Gordon.

‘Thomas Gordon had,’ the book informed me, ‘a remarkable career…His voyages embraced such distant places as Shetland, Stockholm, Norway, and Holland. On 17th July, 1703, he received a regular commission in the Scots Navy as captain of the
Royal Mary
.’

Well, I thought, I’d almost got it right. The
Royal Mary
. William and Mary had reigned as a couple—I’d just picked the wrong half, when I’d named my fictional ship.

I kept reading. And here was the transcript of part of a letter Nathaniel Hooke wrote, of his first visit over to Scotland, two years before my story started: ‘While I stayed with my Lady Erroll, our frigate [the
Audacious
] was within musket shot of the castle. The day after my arrival Mr Gordon, captain of a Scotch frigate commissioned to guard the coast, appeared in the southward. My Lady Erroll bid me be under no apprehensions, and sent a gentleman in a cutter to desire the captain to take another course, with which he complied. The lady has gained him over, and as often as he passes and repasses that way he takes care to give her notice…’

I knew I’d read that bit before, because I’d remembered his role in avoiding the French ship that carried Hooke over.

And after that came other varied documents: Sailing orders to Captain Gordon, and more sailing orders; a warrant to Captain Gordon to sail to Scarborough; a commission to Captain Thomas Gordon in 1705 to be commander of the ship the
Royal William
…

I read that last one over, to be certain I’d made no mistake. But there it was, as plain as plain. And right below it on the page, a similar commission to James Hamilton of Orbieston, to be commander of the ship the
Royal Mary
.

In my mind, I played the scene that I’d just written, with the countess saying, ‘I confess I did forget your Captain Hamilton.’

And Captain Gordon—Captain
Thomas
Gordon, yet— replying, confident, ‘I know. But I did not.’

No more, it seemed, had I. But how on earth had I remembered such a tiny, minor detail as the name of Captain Hamilton? I must have read it somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me think where. I kept a written record of each document I used in my research, in case I missed a fact and needed to go back again to check it, and I knew I hadn’t read one single thing about the Scottish navy apart from what Nathaniel Hooke had written, and that hadn’t been much. Still, you couldn’t just remember something if you hadn’t had it in your memory to begin with.

Could you?

At my back, the window rattled fiercely from a gust of wind that sent me sliding underneath my covers, seeking warmth. I closed the book and set it safely on the table at my bedside, but it didn’t leave my thoughts, and by the time sleep finally claimed me I’d have paid a lot for one more glass of Dr Weir’s good whisky.

C
HAPTER
7

I
WAS MY FATHER’S
daughter in more ways than one. When something made no sense, I tried attacking it with logic. When that failed—when I’d read through all my notes, and all Hooke’s papers, and could find no mention there of either Captain Gordon’s first name or his ship’s name, or of any Captain Hamilton—I moved on to my second coping tactic: putting something in order.

What I chose to do was take my observations of the castle ruins, and the pages I had written, and attempt to draw a floor plan of the castle I’d imagined. Until I got the proper one from Dr Weir, it would at least help keep the daily movements of my characters consistent, so I wouldn’t have them turning left into the drawing room one day, and right the next.

My father would have called what I was doing ‘coloring maps’. That was what he called it when I filled in time and wasted effort, in his view, by taking lots of trouble to do something wholly unessential, as when I had colored maps in high school for geography, feathering blue round the shorelines and shading in valleys and hills. But he always said it fondly, as though he also knew and understood that there were times when what the brain most needed was to simply color maps.

It did, in fact, bring me a certain sense of satisfied accomplishment to draw my castle floor plan, all those neatly ruled lines on the page, and the room names spelled out in block capital letters. I didn’t have crayons, or else I’d have colored it, too, for good measure. But when it was done, I felt better.

I set it to the side of my computer, where I’d see it while I worked, and went to make myself a sandwich. I was standing at my window, eating lunch and looking out to sea, as I so often did, my mind on nothing in particular, when I first saw the dog.

A small dog, running down the beach, ears flapping happily as it splashed through the foam-edged tracks of waves as though it scarcely felt the cold, pursuing something round and bright that rolled along the sand. A tennis ball, I guessed, and watched the dog catch up the ball in triumph, wheeling back to run the way that it had come. A spaniel, spotted brown and white.

Even before I saw the man the dog was running to, the man who stood with hands deep in his pockets, shoulders braced against the wind, I’d set my plate down and was looking for my toothbrush. And my coat.

I didn’t know exactly why. I could have, if I’d wanted to, explained it in a few ways. He’d been friendly to me that first day, and after spending all this morning cooped up in the cottage, I was keen to get outside and talk to someone, and I liked his dog. That’s what I told myself the whole way down the hill and up the road, across the narrow wooden footbridge and around the looming dunes. But when I’d reached the beach myself, and when he turned his head at my approach and smiled a welcome, I knew then that none of those was actually the reason.

He looked more like a pirate this morning, a cheerful one, with his dark hair cut roughly in collar-length layers and blown by the wind, and the flash of his teeth white against the clipped beard. ‘Were my directions no help to you, then?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You were on your way to Peterhead, the last we met. Did ye not find the way?’

‘Oh. Yes, I did, thanks. I came back.’

‘Aye, I see that.’

‘I’ve rented a cottage,’ I said, ‘for the winter.’

His grey eyes moved with interest to the place where I was pointing. ‘What, the old one on Ward Hill?’

‘Yes.’

‘The word is, it’s been taken by a writer.’

‘Right. That’s me.’

He looked me up and down, with humor. ‘You don’t look much like a writer.’

My eyebrows lifted. ‘Should I take that as a compliment?’

‘You should, aye. It was meant as one.’

The dog was back, all muddied feet and wagging tail and wet nose snuffling at my knees. I scratched his floppy ears and said, ‘Hi, Angus,’ and the spaniel dropped the tennis ball, expectantly, beside my shoe. I picked it up and threw it out again for him as far as I could throw.

The man beside me looked impressed. ‘You’ve a good arm.’

‘Well, thank you. My father played baseball,’ I said, as though that would explain it. And then, because I realized that we’d never introduced ourselves, I said, ‘I’m Carrie, by the way.’

He took the hand I offered him, and in that swift, brief contact something warm, electric, jolted up my arm. He said, ‘I’m Graham.’

‘Hi.’

He really did have the best smile, I thought. It was sudden and genuine, perfect teeth gleaming an instant against the neat beard, closely trimmed to the line of his jaw. I missed it when he turned his head to watch the progress of the dog. ‘So, Carrie, tell me, what is it you’re writing?’

I knew that everyone I met in Cruden Bay would ask that question, and eventually I’d have to come up with a tidy, single-sentence answer, something that satisfied their polite interest without boring them to sleep. I tried it now, and told him, ‘It’s a novel set at Slains, back in the early eighteenth century.’

I’d thought that he might nod, or maybe say that sounded interesting, and that would be the end of it. Instead, he turned his head again, face angled so the strong wind kept the hair out of his eyes. ‘Oh, aye? What year?’

I told him, and he gave a nod.

‘The Franco-Scots invasion, is it? Attempted invasion, I guess I should call it. It wasn’t exactly a raging success.’ He bent briefly to wrestle the ball out of Angus’s teeth and then tossed it back out, several yards past the point where my own throw had landed. ‘An interesting choice,’ Graham said, ‘for a novel. I don’t ken that anyone’s written about it, that way. It barely makes the history books.’

I tried to hide my own surprise that he would be aware of what was written in the history books. Not because I’d made any assumptions about his intelligence, but because, based on the way he looked, the way he moved, I would have expected he’d be more at home on a football field than in a library. Showed what I knew, I thought.

I hadn’t noticed that the dog was overdue in coming back, but Graham had. He looked along the shore, eyes narrowed to the wind, and whistled sharply through his teeth to call the spaniel back. ‘I think he’s hurt himself,’ he said, and sure enough, Angus came limping towards us, the ball in his mouth, but one front paw held painfully.

‘Stepped on something,’ Graham guessed, and crouched down to investigate. ‘Broken glass, it looks like. Not a bad cut, but I’ll need to get that sand out.’

‘You can use my kitchen sink,’ I offered.

He carried Angus easily against his chest, the way a man might hold an injured child, and as I led them across the white footbridge and up the steep side of Ward Hill I was thinking of little else but the dog’s welfare. But with both of them inside, the cottage felt a little smaller, and I found myself becoming more self-conscious.

‘Sorry for the mess,’ I said, and tried to clear a space for him to lay the dog down on the narrow counter.

‘That’s all right. I’ve seen it worse. Is there a towel in the airing cupboard? One of those old yellow ones will do, don’t use a good one.’

I stopped, in the middle of moving a teacup, and stared at him. And then the gears of memory clicked a notch, and I remembered Jimmy Keith describing his two sons to me. He’d said, ‘There’s Stuie, he’s the younger, and his brother Graham’s doon in Aberdeen.’

‘Your last name isn’t Keith, by any chance?’ I asked.

‘It is.’

So that was why he seemed at home in here, and why he knew his local history. He should do, I thought. He lectured in it at the university.

He glanced at me, still holding the dog’s paw beneath the running water. ‘What’s the matter?’

Looking to the side, I smiled. ‘Nothing. I’ll go get that towel.’ I found the ones he wanted, the yellow ones, tucked in the back of the cupboard, and chose one that was worn, but clean.

He thanked me for it without looking up, and went on working at the wound. He had nice hands, I noticed. Neat and capable and strong, and yet their touch upon the spaniel’s paw was gentle. He asked, ‘Has Dad been telling tales about me, then? Is that it?’

‘No. It’s just that I keep tripping over members of your family. First your brother, and now you. There aren’t any other Keiths running around here in Cruden Bay, are there?’

‘Not counting cousins, there’s only the two of us.’ Still looking down and concentrating, he asked, ‘How did ye come to meet my brother?’

‘He was on my plane. He drove me up here from the airport.’

That brought his head around. ‘The airport?’

‘Yes, in Aberdeen.’

‘I ken fine where it is,’ he said. ‘But when I saw you last week, you were on your way to Peterhead, and driving by yourself. How did ye get from there,’ he asked me, ‘to the airport?’

I explained. It sounded decidedly odd to my own ears, the story of how I had looked at Slains castle and known that I needed to be here, and flown back to Paris to clear out my things and come over again, in the space of a couple of days. But if Graham thought anything of it, he didn’t say. When I had finished, he tore a long strip from one end of the towel and wrapped it with care around Angus’s paw.

‘So, you’re finished with France, then,’ he said, summing up.

‘Yes, it seems so. The book’s coming along well, now I’m here.’

‘Well, that’s good. There,’ he said, to the dog, ‘how is that, now? Feel better?’

Angus stretched his neck to lick at Graham’s face, who laughed and gave the floppy ears a tousle. ‘There now, we’ll clear off and let the lady get to work.’

I didn’t want them to clear off. I wanted them to stay. I wanted to tell him I did my writing mostly in the evenings, that my afternoons were free, that I could make some tea, and maybe we could talk…But I couldn’t think of a way I could say that without sounding forward, and he hadn’t given me any real reason to think he’d say yes, or to think that he found me one tenth as attractive as I found him.

So I just stood to the side as he thanked me again for my help, and he picked Angus up and I opened the door for them. That’s when he stopped and looked down at me, thinking.

He asked, ‘Have ye been to the Bullers o’ Buchan?’

‘The what?’

He repeated the name, taking care to speak slowly. ‘A sort of a sea cave, not far to the north.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Because I was thinking, if you’re feeling up to a bit of a walk, I could take you tomorrow.’

Surprised, I said, ‘That would be nice.’

I was kicking myself for my bland choice of words, but he didn’t appear to have noticed.

‘Right, then. How does ten o’clock suit you? You’ve no problem walking the coast path?’

‘No problem at all,’ I assured him.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Again I was hit with that flash of a smile, and as I looked at it I realized why I’d had that niggling feeling I’d seen Stuart’s face before. The brothers weren’t that much alike, but there was still a slight resemblance, although Graham’s features, to my mind, revealed a force of character, a strength, that had no echo in the face of his more handsome brother.

Stuart might be nice to look at. Graham was the kind of man I couldn’t look away from.

Maybe that was why, when he had gone, the first thing that I did was make a beeline for my workbook. In the section bookmarked ‘Characters’, I wrote three pages, longhand—the descriptive details of a man with eyes the color of the winter sea.

I didn’t know exactly how I’d use him yet, but I had a suspicion that when I began to write tonight he’d turn up somewhere, entering the story with that easy, rolling stride that said he had a right to be there.

It was nearly time for supper when the knock came at my door.

I knew it was unlikely to be Graham, but my face must still have shown at least a trace of disappointment when I saw that it was Dr Weir, because he said, apologetically, ‘I didn’t interrupt your work, I hope?’

Recovering, I said, ‘Oh, no, of course not. Please, come in.’

‘I’ll not stay long.’ He wiped his feet, and stepped inside. ‘I promised Elsie I’d be home by dark. I’ve found those plans that I was telling you about, the plans that show Slains as it was in the old days, before the Victorian earls made it over. And I found a few old photographs I thought might be of interest to you. Where did I put them, now?’ Feeling inside his coat pocket, he found the small envelope holding the photos. The plans he’d brought rolled in a brown cardboard tube that he’d put, in its turn, in a clear plastic bag so it wouldn’t get wet. A wise precaution, I decided, since the strong wind off the sea had spattered water on his eyeglasses.

He took them off and wiped them while I put the plans and photos on my work table. ‘I don’t have any Scotch,’ I said, ‘but I could make you tea or coffee.’

‘No, my dear, I’m fine.’ He looked around with open interest and approval. ‘Jimmy’s made this very cozy.’

‘He’s been wonderful.’

‘Aye, all the Keiths are fairly that,’ he told me. ‘Even Stuart, for his faults. He got you back home in the one piece, I see.’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘He’s a good lad, Stuart is, but…’ The doctor appeared to be choosing his words. ‘He’s still a lad, in many ways.’ Which, so I gathered, was meant as a fatherly warning.