A Strange Scottish Shore Read online

  And this time, he might not find a way to return.

  Max was wrong in his predictions; I spent the better part of an hour studying the paper, until the coffee was finished, and then I stole into the breakfast room, wrapped a sausage and a boiled egg in a napkin, and stole out again to study it anew.

  I knew what it was, of course. I recognized the drawing immediately, even if the Duke of Olympia had not. But how had this thing come to rest inside the false bottom of an ancient Scottish chest? Who had put it there?

  And the question that turned my stomach cold, turned my brain light with a peculiar mixture of fear and anticipation: When?

  By the time I finished my breakfast, the castle was beginning to stir again. The ladies were arriving downstairs—that is, those who had not troubled to see off the gentlemen in the shooting party, as Lady Annis had—passing outside the Oriental library as they went. Fearing for my privacy, restless with a premonition both thrilling and confounding, I went upstairs for my shawl and my hat and then took myself outside for a walk.

  Inevitably, the clouds had moved in. A thick, chill, overcast blanket slid over yesterday’s blue sky, and the sea went dull and flat beneath it. I was glad for my shawl as I crept along the cliff path, keeping carefully to the wall, for the dampness in the air chased away whatever sunshine had penetrated the fog above. As I rounded the tip of the headland, I saw a party of ladies emerge from the castle’s side entrance to embark on the path that led to the sandy cove north of the headland. I watched them descend the slope, which was much gentler on that side, and when they had safely achieved the beach, I found a small bench cut into the rock and settled myself to observe the remote seascape around me.

  To my right, around the south face of the headland, lay the place where the ginger-haired man had fallen to his death last night. I glanced warily at the scene below me, but there was no sign of his remains, no bit of clothing or the body itself: only the North Sea waves, much becalmed, washing against the immovable rock. If I squinted my eyes against the horizon, I could just see the shadow of what must be the Orkney Islands, from which the wooden chest had lately arrived, under the supervision of Mr. Magnusson.

  For a moment, I closed my eyes. I stretched out my mind across the gray water, as if I could actually search for him by the force of my own concentration. As if I could, like Max, penetrate these static Newtonian dimensions of time and distance and bend them to my will. Find him, wherever he was.

  Him. Silverton.

  But I felt nothing. Not a whisper. Only the slight breeze on my cheek.

  I reached in my pocket and drew out the paper. I have something of a talent for drawing, and this sketch, inscribed by my own hand, depicted the cliffs of Naxos in pretty exact detail. Even the duke must at least have recognized the scene, for he had spent some time a prisoner in those caves, and had battled on the beach below in order to win his freedom.

  There, too, a young woman who called herself Desma claimed she had crossed three thousand years of history in an instant, to escape the man who pursued her and thus emerge in our own century, though her heart remained lost behind her. Lost in the keeping of Tadeas, who did eventually rejoin her, by the Duke of Olympia’s own hand.

  No, Max must have recognized the scene itself, even if he didn’t know the artist’s identity, or where it had come from. He must have identified the subject of the drawing, even if he didn’t realize that I myself—Emmeline Truelove—had carried this very paper with me from London, hidden inside my locked leather portfolio among the other documents related to our research.

  That I had lost this paper during the night in Edinburgh, at the moment when the Marquess of Silverton vanished into the air.

  “Why, there you are, Miss Truelove! I hope you don’t mean to jump.”

  I startled toward the voice, which belonged to Lady Annis, standing to my right in a walking dress of Scottish plaid and a trim bonnet, though without a shawl or a jacket of any kind.

  She smiled at my confusion. “We’ve already had our quotidian of that sort of thing, wouldn’t you say? Jumping, I mean. May I sit with you?”

  “Of course.” I moved to my left and shoved the paper back in my pocket.

  “I’ve been out looking for the body,” she said. “Did he really just plunge through the window?”

  “Yes. It was that or Mr. Magnusson’s pistol.”

  “To think I missed it all! You independent ladies have all the jolly adventures.”

  “Hardly jolly, I assure you. But why haven’t you gone walking with the others?” I nodded toward the cove to the north.

  “Oh! Them. Silly, chattering creatures. They amuse Papa, so he invites them, along with their wretched grizzled husbands. When I have my own establishment, I shall exclude anybody over the age of forty, man or beast.” She laughed. “Until my fortieth birthday, I suppose, in which case I shall offer myself a special dispensation. Now tell me what you were looking at, just now. The drawing you stuffed into your pocket. It looked fascinating.”

  “Merely a scene from the Mediterranean.”

  “Did you sketch it yourself?”

  I hesitated. “Yes. Last spring.”

  “When you tracked down Max.” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to visit the Greek islands. The sunlit shores of the Aegean. Instead I’ve got this.”

  “I think it’s beautiful.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be absurd. It’s dull and damp and chill and remote, and that’s August! Imagine it in January. No, don’t. Sometimes I find myself dreaming of color. Just color. A turquoise sea and a blinding white beach and the green leaves of the olive trees and the red tiles of the roofs, everything pungent and hot and extreme. My God, how lucky you are. You will leave this place and go off on some expedition with him, and I shall—I shall—”

  A small breeze found us, penetrating the soft wool of my shawl. Beside me, Lady Annis shivered and wrapped her arms around her waist. She smelled of roses and tea, of everything English, although of course she wasn’t English at all. She had been born in Scotland to a Scottish father. Her mother had been English, I recalled, but that unfortunate woman had died before Lady Annis could properly know her.

  I ventured quietly, “If he marries you—”

  “If he marries me, it will be much the same, won’t it? I shall be left behind with the houses and the servants and the endless charity committees, and the two of you will have all the fun. We Sinclairs, you know, are destined never to know happiness in marriage.” She rose quickly. “I wish I had your courage,” she said, and she turned back the way she had come, along the southern side of the headland, taking the path that led down to the precipice on which I had stood last night with Max and Mr. Magnusson. She moved with a splendid, nimble grace. As I watched, she unbuttoned her dress and worked herself free of sleeves and bodice and skirt, and just as I began to avert my eyes, I saw that underneath the frock she wore not the customary arrangement of corset and petticoats, but a bathing costume of dark blue serge.

  She did not pause to consider her course. She kicked the dress free, stretched her long, pale arms above her head, and dove in a perfect vertical line from the precipice into the water.

  • • •

  The shooting party did not return to the castle until past three o’clock, bearing twenty-two brace of grouse and an immense quantity of damp, muddy good spirits. I took my luncheon on a tray in the Oriental library, quite undisturbed, taking careful notes and measurements of the chest and the strange rubberlike suit inside, while the gentlemen bathed and ate and generally refreshed themselves.

  By half past five, I was ready to pack up my notebooks and ruler and repair upstairs, but just as I prepared to rise from my chair, the duke appeared around the corner of the door, his hair still damp and his face full of color.

  “There you are, Miss Truelove. I apologize for keeping you waiting. Mr. Miller had business for m
e, and I found an unexpected opportunity to speak to Lady Annis privately, which I thought I should seize.”

  “Of course. I hope the meeting was profitable.”

  The duke came to prop himself on the table nearby. “Which one?” he asked, smiling slightly, folding his arms.

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Quite profitable. I signed a great many papers to the estate’s advantage, and when I freed myself of that duty, Lady Annis was so good as to sit with me for half an hour. She spoke frankly. I believe we shall shortly come to an understanding, thank God.”

  “Excellent news.”

  He glanced at the chest beside me. “But I hope you were not working here all along.”

  “No. I took a long walk in the middle of the day, although I saw no sign of our visitor’s passing, nor did anyone else. His remains seem to have disappeared without trace.”

  “Strange. Did you find any opportunity to study the drawing I gave you?”

  I glanced down at my notebooks, which lay stacked before me on the table, three of them. They were new, given to me by the housekeeper at my request, for my own notebooks—filled with numbers, sketches, diagrams, observations—had all been contained inside the leather portfolio that had disappeared in Edinburgh. “Yes,” I said, and I rose from my chair and went to the door, which I closed and locked.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Max. His heavy cheekbones were stained raspberry, his mood transformed since the morning’s malaise, giving me leave to wonder just how frank Lady Annis had proved after her bracing dip in the sea.

  I stood with my back to the door, still holding the knob with my right hand. “You’ll think me mad.”

  He laughed. “I have long since lost the right to think anyone else mad, Miss Truelove.”

  “You know, of course, what the drawing depicts.”

  “The caves of Naxos.”

  “Yes.” I walked back to the table and drew the scrap of paper from within the first notebook. “Did you know that I drew it?”

  “I presumed you must have. It’s extraordinarily well done. But that was what troubled me, you see. How this particular drawing made its way inside a hidden compartment in that particular object.” He was sobering already, his skin regaining its customary pallor. He nodded toward the chest itself. “Did you bring it with you from London?”

  “Yes. It was inside my portfolio. The one that disappeared with Lord Silverton.”

  He uncrossed his arms and rested one hand on the edge of the table. “My God.”

  “Yes. But there’s something else. This figure, here by the mouth of the cave.”

  “The woman?”

  “I didn’t draw her.”

  Max took the paper from me and frowned. “Are you quite sure?”

  “Yes. She’s a striking figure—look at her face, so carefully done—but she isn’t—well, she isn’t—”

  He handed back the paper. His face was now quite pale. “She isn’t Desma.”

  “No.”

  “Then who is she? And how did she come to be sketched into your drawing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I spent the day considering various scenarios by which it may have come to pass—all of it—the paper, and the chest, and the strange suit. Silverton’s disappearance, and what that fellow Hunter told us last night—”

  “Presuming he spoke the truth.”

  “I believe him,” I said. “Perhaps I ought not to believe him, but I do. Because it is the only explanation that makes any sense, when we consider your particular powers, and the strange events of the past several months.”

  The duke detached himself from the table and walked swiftly to the window. He crossed his hands behind his back and said, “Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think is the most likely scenario.”

  I hesitated. “This is the mad part.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Very well. I believe that what we are seeing now, these events that have come to pass since the autumn of last year, are occurring by the actions of your future self. A man, we must presume, in full control of the powers that God has granted him, and employing those powers according to some method we do not, at present, fully understand.”

  He did not reply. He seemed to be staring at some distant point across the sea, wholly absorbed by the vista before him, paying not the slightest heed to what I said. The slight breeze moved his hair. From this angle, I could not quite see his expression: only his clenched jaw, and the taut tendons of his neck.

  “I know this explanation makes no rational sense—” I began, and his laugh interrupted me.

  “No rational sense,” he repeated. “My dear Miss Truelove. When did any of this make any rational sense? From the moment she appeared at Knossos . . .”

  She. He meant Desma, of course: Desma, who had traveled three thousand years in an instant, escaping a villain’s trap on Naxos to find herself marooned in the twentieth century, without friends or family, without language or knowledge, without the man whose heart and whose child she carried inside her. Desperate, abandoned, she took ship to the island that had once been her home, and there she had encountered one Maximilian Haywood, who eventually restored her beloved Tadeas to her side. We had left them together in a daze of bliss in Skyros; in June, Desma had presented Tadeas with a bonny daughter, a child conceived three millennia before her own birth.

  But one mystery remained. How had Desma come to this century to begin with? What force had transported her from an ancient Naxos beach to a modern one, at the exact instant when she might otherwise have perished?

  “According to our own philosophy, it makes no rational sense,” I said. “Which means we must endeavor to learn a new one. We must endeavor to understand the rules of this new logic. And I believe—I am certain, sir, certain this logic exists. This morning, when you held my hands, I felt it inside you, communicating itself to me. If we had continued . . .”

  “Yes, Miss Truelove?”

  “If we had continued,” I whispered, “we would have found him.”

  “Silverton?”

  “Yes. He was there. Somewhere inside that connection, somewhere inside that place to which you were propelling me.” I drew in a deep breath. Max was looking down now, staring at his hands, which he spread before him, palms upward. “He was there because you sent him there.”

  “Sent him where?”

  “To wherever—whenever—you required him. Just as you sent Desma from ancient Naxos to the exact moment you required her to appear in your life, in order to begin the course of events of last winter and spring.”

  “No.” He turned to face me, and his expression was bleak. “I haven’t sent her yet.”

  “But you will. One day. Do you remember what Hunter said in the cave, last March? It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you will do.”

  He was quiet for some time before replying. “Yes, it’s possible.”

  I rose from my chair and held up the paper. “And what I thought to myself—as I studied this thing, wondering what it was—I realized it might be a clue. A clue you have sent to yourself, so you would know how to act in this moment.”

  “A clue sent by my future self, you mean.”

  “Yes! You see, don’t you? It’s all—it’s not in a straight line anymore. We have this scientific idea of time, based on our own observation, that it occurs in sequence, from past into present into future, but what I’ve been thinking—” I set down the paper and rummaged into my notebook. “Here. It’s like this. I’ve been trying to sketch it. It’s all laid out, your life, my life, all our lives, all at once, all at the same time. These circles I’ve drawn. Here is Silverton, at the hotel in Edinburgh, gone in an instant. But he isn’t gone. He’s here.” I pointed to another circle. “And he’s hidden this paper in this chest, knowing we would find it, knowing we—the two of us, her
e in Thurso in August of 1906—would recognize that he left it there, because that already exists, you see. Your future self exists in this moment, over here, placing pieces on the chessboard, saving Silverton, saving Desma, putting them somewhere else—sometime else—where they will act as you, sir, as your future self knows they will act. How they must act, in order for all of these events to occur. For this paper to arrive to us in this chest. For Desma to arrive in Knossos in November of last year, when you happened to be there.”

  I stopped, breathless. The duke had come to stand by me, to stare without speaking at the strange sketch in my notebook. I couldn’t tell if he understood me at all, let alone believed me; I could scarcely understand myself. There were no words in the English language, no words in the great scientific tradition of the past two thousand years to describe what I meant.

  “Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that we have no free will at all? This is our fate, laid out in a map, and we cannot escape it?”

  “Not exactly. We can choose not to act. But we won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Silverton’s life depends on it. Because Desma’s life depends on it.”

  “Ah,” he said as if someone had stabbed him.

  “Because you love her so well, you will save her life in order that she can live that life with another man. You will do this thing, one day, even though you know the pain it will bring you.”

  He reached across me and spread his large hand over my circles and arrows and notes, passing each one under his fingertip. “And you,” he said, turning to face me. “Do you love my friend Silverton so well as that?”

  I looked away. “It’s not a question of love. It is simply humanity.”

  “Humanity.” Max settled himself back against the table and crossed his arms. “But what do you propose we do? This future self of mine might be in full control of his powers, but my present self hasn’t more than the most rudimentary knowledge of what I’m capable of, and how to control it. We have discussed over and over the circumstances by which I caught Tadeas from the brink of the cliff, but the truth is I don’t know how it happened. I simply felt this compulsion possess me, when we came to that point on the cliff.”