A Strange Scottish Shore Page 11

  “Then perhaps you must be standing in the right spot.”

  He frowned. “But I didn’t feel this sensation in the morning, when you and I stood here. Nothing overcame me. It was something else. I was thinking about Silverton, and where he had likely gone, and you—”

  “I was thinking the same thing. And I could feel—this thought connected us somehow, and we held hands, and that’s when I felt the power rising, and so did you. And I could feel him there, somewhere, as if he was beckoning us. Guiding us.” Gently I took the duke’s hands. “Try it. Try it again.”

  “No.” He pulled his hands away. “Don’t you understand? If I’m holding you, touching you, then it’s you who will be sent to him, not the other way around. That’s what was happening this morning, Emmeline. That’s why I stopped it. You were rushing away from me.”

  “Was I?”

  “Couldn’t you feel it?”

  “I don’t—I can’t remember—I saw a room—”

  “This room, but different. I saw it, too. I saw you hurtling toward it, and I stopped, because I could not—”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  The duke made a sound of frustration and walked past me to the giant, empty fireplace. He laid one elbow on the mantel and ran the other hand through his black hair. He seemed to be staring into the face of the clock resting in the exact center of the chimneypiece, an ormolu affair of gilt cherubs and scrollwork, in which the time itself seemed an afterthought. He said quietly, “I could not—I cannot—bear the thought of causing you any harm, Miss Truelove. I should never forgive myself. You have seen enough peril, because of me.”

  “The danger? The danger is nothing, sir, nothing at all compared to the marvel. My God. To be so close to such a sublime mystery, a miracle, a thing I never imagined possible—”

  He pounded his fist on the mantel. “A curse.”

  “It is not a curse! It’s a gift from God. An immense, extraordinary power to do good, such as no man has ever before known.”

  “That’s the curse of it. I wasn’t made for this.” He turned to me, and his face was bleak and hollow, each thick bone casting a deep shadow upon the skin beneath. “I am a scholar, Emmeline. A plain scholar. I have not an ambition in the world, except to study the past. Now God has seen fit to make me a duke, and at the same time to endow me with an immeasurable power over my fellow creatures that I neither want nor deserve.”

  My chest seemed to hollow out and fill with pity. I made my way across the floor to where he stood, and so great was the agony in his expression, I lifted my hands and placed the palms along the sides of his face. “He has given you nothing you cannot bear, my dear sir. Nothing you are not good and worthy to do. We have no choice in the burdens that are laid upon us, but we can choose to accept them. To bear them with grace.”

  The duke closed his eyes and bowed his head. He made no move to touch me, nor did he move away from my touch. For some time we stood there in contemplation, while the clock ticked softly nearby, and the breeze spun from the window. At the tips of my fingers, I felt his pulse, measured and heavy, like the beat of a great drum.

  “He has given me something else,” the duke said at last, lifting his head a little. “He has given me you, Emmeline. Your quick mind and your immense fortitude and your good sense.”

  “They are all at your service, sir.”

  He smiled. “Max.”

  “Max.” I slid my hands from his face to take his hands. “I am determined to help you.”

  “And yet, you need my help, don’t you? You need me to find our missing marquess for you.”

  “Only because it is our duty to find him.”

  “Since I have apparently mislaid the poor fellow.” He walked past me, back to the table, and picked up the notebook I had shown him. “And how do you propose we attempt it, hmm? We have this morning inadvertently discovered how this power of mine might be persuaded to send a person to another age, but I hardly summoned Tadeas into ours by my own will. At the time, I never even imagined I could do such a thing, not in my wildest supposition. I only happened to be at the right place at the right moment—” He checked himself.

  “What is it?”

  “Of course. My God.” He set down the notebook and bounded to the open window, gripping the edge with both hands as he peered northward. “The chest. Magnusson brought the chest here from the castle on Hoy, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But why should that matter?”

  Max turned from the window, and I can only guess what he saw out there to sea, for his face was now transformed, lit with excitement. “Because Silverton must have been there. According to Magnusson, the chest has lain in that castle since its earliest days. Don’t you see? It’s a clue. If I did send Silverton back in time, he would have done this deliberately, to give us some sign where to find him. If we go to Hoy, to the castle, where Silverton lived at some point during his adventure, if we map the place thoroughly—”

  “You’ll find him.”

  “I might find him. If this thing works again, the way it did on Skyros. If I can somehow find the exact place—the moment—find a way to replicate—”

  As he spoke, our gazes met, and I noticed that the sun, out of sight to the west, must have emerged once more from behind the clouds, for the space around the window had filled with a molten afternoon light that touched the duke’s head with gilt. The sight made me think of Lord Silverton, and for an instant the two men seemed to merge into one, and I could not say which stood before me. I could not say whether his hair was black or gold, whether his eyes were dark or blue, whether he was built like a Thoroughbred or a destrier. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t blink.

  Then the light shifted, and Max reassembled before me, plain and solid, his gaze still fixed upon mine.

  “A tower of ifs,” he said. “If I sent Silverton to some ancient age. If he left this drawing in a chest in order to communicate with us. If the chest really lay in that castle undisturbed, during all those years lying between us. If it’s possible for me to find him at all.”

  “It’s the smallest chance in the world,” I said, “and yet it’s not. If the first thing occurred, then the rest follows.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you knew,” I said. “You wouldn’t have sent him back if you didn’t already know we would save him.”

  The duke stared at me, incredulous, and walked back to the table in the center of the room. The suit he wore was an old one, fitting comfortably over his broad, thick shoulders, and I stared at the point between the shoulder blades, the ordinary cloth covering an extraordinary mystery. I wondered where it originated, this power of his. Did he generate it inside his own body, or was he merely a convenient channel for a force beyond our human senses?

  He reached forward and lifted the notebook. The pages wavered not a millimeter as he held the book open in his hand, frowning at the map I had drawn there.

  “Well, then, Miss Truelove,” he said, without turning, “it seems you must steel yourself.”

  “Steel myself?”

  Max looked over his shoulder at me, and his face wore a devilish grin.

  “We travel to Hoy in the morning. And if I’m not mistaken, the journey requires a spell on the water.”

  So the Fisherman brought the Lady back to his hovel and allowed her to mourn, and every day he went out in his boat and brought back fish for her to eat and to sell in the market, while the Lady tended the cottage and learned to cook and to mend, to grow vegetables in the garden and to repair the nets and to dive for pearls by the shore, though her heart still ached for the son she had lost. One evening, when the Fisherman returned from his work, the Lady looked up from her mending and saw not his poor clothes nor his rough hands, but his great strength and noble face, and she put down her mending and said to him, ‘Fisherman, there is something caught on the hook of my dress,
perhaps you can help me to unfasten it . . .’

  THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)

  Six

  Among her many virtues, Lady Annis Sinclair was apparently not subject to seasickness. I took note of this fact as I hung by the rail of the ferry, attempting to hook my gaze on any object other than the tilting horizon, while her ladyship laughed merrily at some quip from her friends near the shelter of the deckhouse.

  Once the Duke of Olympia had made known his intention to visit and inspect this fascinating project of young Magnusson’s, the entire house party decided it would be a jolly lark to join us. I suppose there was no polite way to dissuade them. Magnusson himself made all the arrangements, from picnic baskets to ferry tickets to transportation to and from the relevant docks, presumably in order to heighten interest in his grand new resort. Now he stood in the center of his party, almost on his tiptoes, holding forth on the laziness of workmen and the healthful benefits of the seaside climate, in reckless disregard of the energetic pitch of the deck beneath his feet.

  “Why, I glory in storms!” he said. “I like nothing better than to watch a good blow come across the harbor. The howling winds, the churning surf. Washes away everything old and stale, scrubs the air clean. I find it invigorating!”

  His voice carried across the deck; he nearly jumped from his shoes from sheer enthusiasm. My breakfast sloshed helplessly in my belly. I turned and hurried to the larboard stern, out of sight, just in time to pitch my all into the deep.

  When I raised my head, a handkerchief hovered respectfully near my hand. “Terrible, isn’t it?” said a woman’s sympathetic voice. “Would you like to sit down? There’s a bench right here.”

  I was too weak to protest. I took the handkerchief, which smelled of lavender, and allowed the woman’s arms to propel me to a seat. The bench was hard and narrow, exactly the kind of implacable furniture one expected to find on a ferry plying the water between the northern shore of Scotland and a weather-beaten island in the Orkneys.

  The woman sat down beside me and asked if I was always subject to seasickness.

  “I’m afraid so,” I replied. “It comes on almost immediately, and I am never fully well, even on a long voyage.”

  “What an awful shame. Isn’t there anything you can take for it?”

  There was something in her voice that made me raise my head. She sat about a foot away, a respectful distance, wearing a plain dress of navy blue and a gray woolen cardigan so similar to my own, we might have acquired them together. Her hands, covered by a pair of dark kidskin gloves, lay in a snug knot upon her lap. But it was her face that astonished me. She was exquisite. Her face was a perfect oval; her eyes huge, a lustrous gray-green, fringed by the thickest, longest black lashes I had ever seen. I thought she was perhaps twenty-five or thirty, but an instant later I changed my mind: the size of her eyes and the luminosity of her skin made her seem younger than she really was. There was a look of knowingness about her, a faint network of lines about her eyes and mouth. She was one of those rare women more beautiful at forty than at twenty.

  She must have seen my confusion, because she smiled and patted my arm in a way that was almost motherly. “Don’t worry, it’s only another hour,” she said. “Pregnancy’s worse, believe me.”

  A second tremor passed along my nerves. In my bemusement at her unexpected beauty, I had forgotten that uncanny something in her voice that had caught my notice to begin with. It was not her accent precisely. She spoke like a well-bred girl from somewhere in the Home Counties; the unmistakable cloth of an expensive finishing school burnished her vowels and her consonants. But she delivered those words with a certain ease, a casual syntax that I cannot quite describe; she uttered the bald word pregnancy without a hint of shame.

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve had three children, and I was miserable for weeks with all of them. Except this one.” She laid her right hand over her belly, which I now saw was not plump but gravid. “He went easy on me. I suppose it’s the least he could do.”

  Her intimacy amazed me. I have never had much connection with other women; having been raised and educated by an elderly father, having been employed by an elderly duke, I had no opportunity to form the usual female friendships. Such girls as I encountered in my childhood were either the daughters of servants or of aristocrats, and neither were encouraged to play with me. By the time I reached adulthood, I had no notion of what interested other girls, what they discussed, what they dreamt of. All I knew was that I had not marriage in my future, but employment. That alone set me apart. In time, I suppose I developed a kind of aversion to other women, and they of me. We might have been two separate races, eyeing each other suspiciously. I have never been the sort of person to reveal my inner soul to anyone, but if I did, I should open myself to a man: solid, honest, practical, and unsentimental.

  But this woman. I wanted to pull away, and yet I found I could not. Her firm hand on my arm held me fast; her frank expression mesmerized me. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “Have we met?”

  She lowered her face, but her eyes continued to hold mine. “My name is Helen,” she said.

  “My name is Truelove.”

  “Yes, I know.” She squeezed my arm and rose. “I shall tell the duke to fetch you a cup of water.”

  “No, don’t—” I began, but she was already walking away, around the corner of the deckhouse, and I was so miserable I couldn’t find the strength to follow her. I sat on the hard bench and gazed at the shrinking Scottish shore, clutching at something in my hand. When I looked down, I realized it was the lady’s handkerchief, smelling of lavender.

  • • •

  An hour later, exact almost to the minute, the ferry began to slow and change course, the engines to thud and grind. I lifted my head from the bench and forced myself to sit up. I had been left mercifully to myself for the remainder of the voyage, and there was nobody nearby, though I could hear a multitude of merry voices from the other side of the deckhouse. Perhaps the woman Helen had failed to find Max in the crowd; perhaps he had been too engaged with the other members of the party. The boat lurched, finding its bearings in the confluence of current and tide at the harbor’s mouth. I gripped the edge of the bench, rose unsteadily to my feet, and staggered to the rail. We were coming into Hoy at an angle, and I could see the land to my left: soft, round, grassy hills, ending abruptly in a sheer gray cliff, and a stone village nestled by the shore, in the crook of two green slopes.

  “Why, there you are, Miss Truelove,” said the duke. “I thought you must be in the deckhouse, in this drizzle.”

  I looked at my woolen sleeve, on which the dew had laid a thick sheen. The air sang with mist. “It’s nothing,” I said.

  He offered me his arm. “Are you well enough to walk?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have been thinking,” he said as we walked around the corner of the deckhouse, toward the buzz of voices, “how we shall effect this investigation of ours, without undue notice.”

  “As have I,” I said. “I can easily plead sickness to avoid the picnic. You shall have to find some other excuse.”

  “A false telegram, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. I suspect an opportunity will present itself. Did you speak to Helen?”

  “Helen? Who the devil’s Helen?”

  We were now joining the tail of the throng of passengers, waiting to disembark. The duke lowered his voice, and so did I.

  “The woman who assisted me, when I was sick. A beautiful woman. She was going to find you.” I paused. “I thought you knew each other.”

  He looked astounded. “Nobody approached me. I don’t even know a woman named Helen. Are you quite sure?”

  I cast my gaze over the small crowd spread before us, already streaming down the gangplank to the dock. Lady Annis’s pale, wide-brimmed hat hovered joyfully near the front, wh
ile Magnusson, in his peaked cap of gray tweed, swiveled back and forth somewhere in the middle.

  Nowhere did I spy Helen’s plain, modest straw hat, rimmed only by a grosgrain ribbon the color of strawberries.

  “Quite sure,” I whispered.

  • • •

  Nobody doubted me when I staggered down from one of the wagons Magnusson had hired to transport us to the castle and said I should prefer to rest indoors.

  “My poor Miss Truelove,” said Lady Annis, looking deeply concerned, “I understand you suffer from le mal de mer. How dreadful that must be for you.”

  “It is an inconvenience to me,” I said, “but I hope it won’t deter you from your picnic.”

  “Not at all, I assure you. Can I offer you a ham sandwich? A deviled egg, perhaps? I believe Cook packed along her pâté de saumon fumé, such a treat.”

  The blood drained from my head. “No, thank you,” I said, rather more wanly than I intended.

  “Dear me. How pale you look. Magnusson!”

  Her brother ranged up magically by her side. “Yes, my dear?”

  “Miss Truelove looks decidedly pale. She won’t be joining us for the picnic, I’m afraid. Have you got a cot of some kind, inside that pile of yours? I’m sure she doesn’t require much. Do you, Miss Truelove?”

  “Not much at all,” I gasped.

  We stood in the castle’s courtyard, surrounded by stones and dust and pounding workmen. The clouds had parted briefly, and in the glimpse of watery sunshine, the castle looked magnificent despite its spider’s web of wooden scaffolding. Like Thurso Castle, it was perched on a cliff by the sea, and as Magnusson took my arm and led me up the steps and into what had once been the keep, I remarked on the similarity between the two buildings.