A Strange Scottish Shore Read online

  “We?”

  “You still stand, I presume, in need of relief?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Come along, then.” He handed me the tunic and winked. “I won’t watch, I promise.”

  • • •

  Outside, it was drizzling, and my need was urgent. I wasted little time inspecting my surroundings, which were gray and shrouded, but hurried the few yards to the tiny shed that served us, while Silverton’s hand gripped mine. He stood outside, stalwart, until I emerged, and invited me to rinse my hands afterward in the bucket beneath the eaves, which caught the rain from a wooden spout. Some small distance away, I heard the soft crash of the sea against the rocks, but I could see nothing through the mist.

  The expedition exhausted me. Inside, I sank back on the pallet while Silverton heated more broth. All this we did in silence, and when we had both drunk our fill, he sat comfortably next to me on the pallet, a few inches away, as if we were housemates of long standing. I had neither strength nor will to banish him. I asked him what time it was.

  “Time?” he said. “No such thing, my dear. Not of the clock, in any case.”

  “Is it morning or evening, then?”

  “Coming on to evening. I’ll cut a bit of bread and cheese for supper. Ale to wash it down. Humble rations, I’m afraid. Nothing like the champagne and whatnot we enjoyed during our last evening together. I hope it agrees with you. If not, I suppose I can—”

  He was nervous. I inched closer and laid my head on his shoulder. “Don’t trouble yourself. I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll need your strength, believe me. You won’t feel properly yourself for a week at least, and even then . . .” The sentence faded ominously.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re going home tomorrow.”

  “Home?”

  “Yes, home. Max is waiting for us, he’s ready. I’ll show you where.” I yawned. “It’s all arranged.”

  “Ah. Of course it’s all arranged. Each detail absolutely fail-proof. I would expect no less of you.”

  His arm was around my shoulders. We leaned back against the wall and stared at the dull orange glow of the fire. Silverton had removed his leather shoes, but his stockings remained, loose and woolen, bound by leather gaiters. I found myself wondering what his feet looked like.

  “And here I am, before the fire, Emmeline Truelove tucked under my arm,” he said softly. “Who would have thought it possible? By God, I would have traded my soul for this, two days ago.”

  “I imagine any woman would have sufficed.”

  “Perhaps for the purpose of an evening’s cuddle,” he said, “but I shouldn’t trade my soul for her. Tattered and unworthy an object though it is.”

  “Well, here I am, and your soul remains your own. No cost to you whatsoever.”

  “Except three years of my life, of course, but that hardly signifies.”

  “Three years. Have you really been here three years?”

  “It passes belief, doesn’t it? There are times I felt as if I’d lived here forever. As if I’d been born again into a new world. Three years.” He shook his head. “Three lifetimes. You can’t imagine.”

  “Tell me. Tell me everything you’ve done.”

  He laughed. “I’d be rattling on for weeks if I did.”

  “Tell me something, then. What happened when you first arrived?”

  “Well, I woke up much as you did, inside the hut of some kindly bystander, except—I imagine—a great deal more confused. For some time, I thought I had died altogether, and this was purgatory. Eventually I pieced together what had happened. The essentials, I mean. That I had passed through some portal of time in the manner of our good friend Tadeas on Skyros, and that Max must somehow be behind it all. The why of it remains a mystery, however. Perhaps you can enlighten me, when you’re up to it.”

  “Not now.” I yawned. “When we’re home again. With Max. We’ll talk about it then.”

  “Oh, I shall demand a proper reckoning from Max, I assure you.”

  I wanted to say more, to tell him that Max had little more notion than I did how all this had come to pass, but fatigue made my tongue and my wits too slow. Instead, I asked him how he had survived.

  “Training, I suppose,” he said simply. “You’ll recall I’ve spent the last decade of my life dropping into various corners of the globe, living by my wits and my good right arm. And I have a certain aptitude for language, God knows how. Once I picked up the lingua franca, I began to get along well enough.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Mind you, it was a lonely existence. Not a friend, not a soul to whom I could unburden myself. The odd moment of black despair.”

  He spoke in perfect tranquility. I slid my hand beneath the blankets and laid it upon his chest.

  “But surely you must have met somebody sympathetic. Some friend you might trust.”

  “The first rule of survival, Truelove, is that you trust nobody. I haven’t sat like this with another human being since—well, since our last dinner in Edinburgh. And I would have bartered anything for a kiss such as the one you gave me this morning.”

  So great was my surprise, I found the strength to lift my head. “Are you telling me—why, you cannot have been chaste all this time.”

  “I have.”

  “But you—you’re Silverton! And there are women—there must be women—”

  “Of course there are women, Truelove. But I am not the same man. I hardly even remember him. Life, you see, has shrunk to its essentials. During the day, I occupy myself with remaining in one piece. During the night, I sleep. When I long for a woman, when I long for a companion of an evening, when I long for anything at all, Truelove . . .”

  His gaze was steady, looking not at me but at the fire. So blue were his eyes, I could still discern their color, even in this faded light, although the fire turned the shade closer to green. I lifted my hand and touched his beard, and I remembered how he used to shave twice a day, and that his cheeks were once smooth and bare. The arm, the shoulder that supported me, was hard with muscle and bone. There was not a spare ounce to him, not a breath of softness. And he was Silverton. The same man I had known a moment ago, except he had changed form, changed voice, changed dress, changed everything.

  I waited for him to finish his sentence, but he did not.

  “There was a more practical reason, too,” he said. “Because there were times when I had no hope, I’ll admit. No hope of you or anything else, these past three years. But in these unenlightened times, I had no means of preventing the consequences of union.”

  “Has it ever stopped you before?”

  “Why, Truelove. What an awful beast you think me. Of course it has. I don’t get women with child, my dear. My father laid down a thunderous lecture on the matter when I came of age, and I never forgot it.”

  “I am—I am astonished,” I whispered.

  “You wound me. Well, there it is.” He paused. “A good man, my father. A good man, a faithful husband. I always hoped . . .”

  “Hoped what?”

  “Nothing.” He kissed the top of my head. “Go back to sleep. In the morning, God willing, we shall see what fate has planned for us.”

  • • •

  In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly, as if someone had prodded me. Except for the remains of the fire in the hearth, glowing like a soft beacon on the opposite wall, the room was utterly dark, and for an instant I lay in terror, thinking myself alone in a void.

  A noise came to me, the rush of a man’s heavy breath, not far away.

  Silverton, I thought, and I remembered the thought that had woken me. The question I had not asked, and the answer he had not offered.

  My earlier mood of drowsy languor was gone, replaced by a fine-tuned alertness. I listened to my companion for a minute or two, the steady soun
ds of his slumber, until I could just pick out his shape on the floor nearby, wrapped in a blanket like some sort of long, gold-tipped sausage. A strangely virtuous sausage. I remembered the gentle way he had removed me from his embrace, just as my eyes began to close, and how he had murmured something to me as he tucked the blankets around me, though I could not recall the words. In my unguarded mood, I had wanted him to stay, and I think I may have told him so.

  Evidently he had found the strength to resist me.

  Outside my little cocoon, the air was not cold, only close and damp. The air smelled of old, stale smoke and human flesh. My mind teemed. I thought about the territory outside these walls, hidden by mist; the same island I had left a day ago, the same rocks and earth and water, and yet belonging to a different people, a foreign world. The enormity was beyond my comprehension. And yet Silverton slept nearby. He was proof. He was indisputable. I could not be dreaming him; his shoulder had been too firm, his words too clear. And now, his sleeping form, too solid.

  I lifted the furs slowly from my body. I still wore Silverton’s borrowed tunic, covering my chemise and my skin, though it reached only just past my knees, like a child’s nightshirt. I slid from the pallet without a sound, not the slightest rustle of linen and straw, and for a moment I crouched there in the darkness, trying to detect any change in the rhythm of Silverton’s breath, trying to orient myself to the room around me. The dim orange glow of the fire’s end, straight ahead. The window, then, lay to my right.

  Below the window, Silverton’s wooden chest.

  The floor was made of stone and beaten earth, covered by rushes. With each step, they made a slight noise, like a whisper. I kept my gaze on the fire, because that was the only thing I could see in this thick, wild darkness; my right hand I stretched out in front of me, searching for the wall and the window.

  As I said, the hut was not large. Three, four, five steps—five soft whispers of my feet on the rush-covered floor—and my fingertips brushed the rough surface of the wall. I felt along until I discovered the corner of the window, and then I bent to place my palms on the lid of the chest below.

  How smooth it was, almost slippery. In the absence of light, I couldn’t tell whether this was the same chest that had made its way to our modern age, only that they were about the same size, and also the same simple shape, rectangular, unadorned. The lid curved slightly, like the side of a barrel. I slid my hands down the sides to the corners and lifted it open.

  Last spring, when Silverton and I embarked suddenly together on a voyage to the Mediterranean Sea—upon a vessel no less august than the Duke of Olympia’s private yacht—he had traveled with no fewer than a dozen handsome steamer trunks, the exquisite, well-tailored contents of which were tended by an exacting—if rather fearsome—valet. Now, it seemed, his entire wardrobe existed within this small wooden box. My searching hands found a few layers of rough wool, folded neatly, and a coil of leather. More folded wool, narrower and thinner in texture, which I imagined must be hose. A large, shapeless garment, possibly a cloak. Something else made of leather. Underneath these few items of clothing, I found the bottom of the chest, and I was just trying to judge whether its location hinted at a cavity hidden underneath when a hand came to rest on my shoulder.

  “Just what the devil do you think you’re doing?” asked his lordship.

  • • •

  My father and I hardly ever spoke of my mother, who died when I was not yet six, but I know she was given to deceit. Once, I asked her about my real father, the man who sired me, and she told me he was a great prince, handsome and rich and charming; she used to spin other tales when she settled me in bed at night. I don’t remember them all, but I can still hear the persuasive lilt of her voice as she built me castles, stone by stone, and whispered promises she had no means of keeping.

  All mothers say these things, I am told, and I suppose she meant to comfort me. But as time went on, and I learned the truth of her past, of my own conception, I resented her falsehoods bitterly. Better to tell me the truth, that I was begotten of a brief, lustful encounter with some carnal-minded gentleman; a transaction, no more, a commercial exchange. I sometimes wondered how much he had paid for the privilege of starting me in her womb, and whether he ever knew the result of his few minutes’ recreation.

  A short time before she died, when her belly was just beginning to round out with a true, honest babe, conceived in matrimony with Mr. Truelove, she told me the greatest lie of all. She took my small, frightened hand and told me that she would be well again soon, should shortly rise from her sickbed and join me for tea in the nursery, and she said this thing with such conviction—I can almost see the sincere slant to her beautiful eyebrows, even now, though I never can recall the shape or the color of her eyes themselves—that my fears dissolved at once. Only later did I realize how skillfully she had misled me, and I have hated a lie ever since, even those small, harmless ones in which most people trade daily.

  You can imagine, therefore, the sickness in my heart when Silverton laid his hand on my shoulder, in the black, damp netherworld of his hut on the island of Hoy, my own palms deep inside the contents of his private chest, and asked me what the devil I was doing.

  The lie came easily to my lips, as it had to my mother’s.

  “I was cold. I thought you might have another tunic. A blanket, a cloak.”

  He reached around me and closed the lid of the chest. “My dearest love. You should have woken me.”

  “I have already troubled you enough.”

  An instant’s silence settled upon us both. In this strange, primeval world, not a single noise disturbed the stillness, not the slightest sign that another human being existed on the earth. Not the sea, not the wind outside. Even my breath seemed to have stopped in my chest, and so did his. Only the warmth of Silverton’s flesh reached me through the darkness, spreading softly along my back and my arms. My hands dropped away from the chest.

  “Come to bed, then, Truelove,” he said at last. “We’ll make you warm enough.”

  He took my elbow, and I followed him obediently to the pallet and climbed under the furs. My heart smacked, my breath turned shallow at the thought of my deception. I nearly blurted out the truth, I nearly demanded the truth from him, and to this day I don’t know why I didn’t. Perhaps I was too frightened to hear the answer. Instead I lay on my back, staring up at that shadow that must have been his head, expecting his lips to find mine, his long limbs to slide down the furs and warm me with the compressed, violent heat of his own body.

  But he only drew another length of fur over my body and tucked them all snug, the way a mother might do to an infant, hardly touching me at all. He asked me if that was warm enough, and I said it was.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll find our way home in the morning, never fear.”

  For seven years the Lady and the Fisherman lived in peace in the cottage by the sea, where she bore him a girl and a boy, and their passion for each other grew with the setting of each sun. By day the Fisherman plied his trade on the water while the Lady taught her children to dive for pearls by the shore, and by night they lay in the Fisherman’s bed and discovered every carnal pleasure, until the Lady’s heart was whole once more, and a new babe quickened in her womb, and she knew she had nothing left on earth to desire.

  Then one morning, at the beginning of the eighth year, their daughter rose from the sea with a pearl of such size and beauty, it might make their fortunes forever . . .

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

  Eight

  In the morning, the mist had lifted, though the sky remained gray. When Silverton led me outside to the privy, I gasped at the sight around me.

  We stood in a field that sloped to meet the wet, pebbled shore, about a hundred yards away; above us, perhaps a mile or two distant, a castle rose from the cliffs and merged with the clouds. Further down the line of the shore, where the land became
flat, lay a cluster of modest houses—two dozen, no more—from which the steeple of a church emerged like an arrow pointing to heaven.

  “Why, it’s the village!” I exclaimed. “There’s the harbor. There’s where we landed on the ferry.”

  Silverton followed my outstretched arm. “Is it? I’m afraid I wouldn’t know. Never having visited the place in its modern setting.”

  “And the castle. Except it’s—it’s—I don’t know, it’s different. The same size and shape . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, because I could not put a name to the change. A pennant snapped breezily from the middle tower; perhaps that was it. The building seemed alive somehow, fulfilling some higher purpose. At work, instead of inert.

  “All right?” Silverton said quietly, touching my arm, and I realized I had been staring, without sound or movement, for some time.

  “Yes. Quite all right.” I resumed my progress to the privy, and once inside, cramped, covered by darkness and the reek of human waste, I stared at a long crack of daylight between two wooden boards and wept.

  • • •

  When I emerged, Silverton stood respectfully away, staring down the slope of grass toward the lapping shore. I had forgotten how tall he was, and the unfamiliar, homespun tunic made him somehow larger. I touched his shoulder and he turned to me. He made no comment on the lapse of time, or the redness that no doubt marked my eyes and skin.

  “What brought you here?” I asked.

  “Here? This island?”

  “This village, this castle. How did you know?”

  “I don’t understand. Know what?”

  “Know to come here and wait for us. That this was the place we’d find you.”

  His face was puzzled. “I didn’t know anything. Wait for you? I hadn’t the faintest idea. I thought I was stuck here forever, that I had no hope of seeing my own world again.”

  “Then why—” But I stopped. There were new lines in his face, spreading from his eyes and his mouth. I reached up and smoothed his forehead with my finger. The skin flattened away under my touch, and I thought, It was the other way around, wasn’t it? We were led to you.