A Strange Scottish Shore Page 16

  “And us? You’re not afraid?”

  “Afraid of what?” He turned back to me, and his eyes were terribly blue in the pale midday light. The curling hairs of his beard glinted softly. I couldn’t resist reaching up to touch his jaw, to feel the strange texture of his whiskers under my fingers.

  “Afraid of the journey,” I said.

  “A little. But I can’t very well leave you to face it alone.”

  I tried to smile. “Just think of everything waiting for you on the other side. Your cricket ball and your pipe. Women at your feet.”

  “Just one woman is quite enough for me, these days.”

  “Oh, don’t—”

  “It’s true. Now, don’t look away. Look back up at me, the way you were doing just now. As if you were thinking about kissing me.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about kissing you.”

  “Because this is important, Truelove. This is vital. I won’t take another step until we make something clear. If we do this thing, this mad scheme of yours, if by some miracle we actually make this terrifying journey and survive it—”

  “Survive it!”

  “—I want you to promise me you won’t abandon me on the other side.”

  He had taken both my hands and held them close to his belly. His cheeks were pink beneath his beard. Only a week ago, he had stood before me in much the same way, in a bedroom of the North British Hotel in the middle of Edinburgh, trimmed and sleek and beautifully dressed. I thought how different he looked now, how that long golden hair and that scruffy face, that lined skin and rough tunic had transformed him, how only the color of his eyes remained the same as before.

  Only that wasn’t quite right, was it? It wasn’t his appearance that had transformed him. It was the other way around.

  “What nonsense,” I said, “when it’s you who will return to your splendid old life. Gallivant about on the dowager duchess’s behalf. Doing whatever it is you do, whatever it is you’re so marvelously good at doing.”

  “The duchess? Good Lord. You don’t think—my God, Truelove. Those days are long over.”

  “By my count, those days were only a week ago.”

  “By mine, it’s a trifle longer. It’s another age. You can’t imagine what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, the length of days between us. You can’t—I don’t—my God, that old cricket ball.” He made a small, sad chuckle. “My dear Truelove. I don’t even know that man anymore. As far as I can remember him, he had only one good idea.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He leaned down and kissed me. “This one.”

  His kiss was brief and gentle, his lips warm, and when he raised his head, I couldn’t speak. If he had kissed me fiercely, I might have resisted him, but this tenderness left me without the breath for words.

  “I’ll follow you anywhere, Truelove, even if it kills me. God knows this life of mine isn’t worth saving. But I’ll be damned if it was duty that sent you here to rescue me. Not even you could pretend that.”

  “Of course it was duty. And—”

  “And?”

  “And—we share a certain—I have always—since our time together last spring—”

  He stepped close and bent to speak in my ear. His beard tickled my jaw. “Admit it. Before we touch that damned rock. Before we go back to that old world, Truelove. Admit it.”

  With great effort, I put my hands on his chest and pushed him away. It was like tearing a strip from my own skin. We stared at each other, panting a little. His figure began to blur in my vision. I turned and stepped toward the monstrous outcropping of rock.

  “Are you coming?” I asked, over my shoulder.

  He let out an almighty roar. I started forward, walking quickly, and an instant later I heard, or rather felt, his footsteps on the soft turf behind me. Another instant, and he took my hand, then my arm, and the world slanted as he swooped me up in his arms and carried me across the final yards. The action so startled me that I couldn’t tell whether the splintering of my nerves came from shock, or from the supernatural power gathering around us. The air roared in my ears, or perhaps it was Silverton’s angry breath. Together we crashed into the rock, although Silverton took all the impact upon his own shoulder. He leaned back and stared at the sky, still cradling me against his chest, and he whispered something I couldn’t make out. I thought it was a prayer. I closed my eyes and listened to the pounding of his heart, the rasp of his breath, and I waited for the hair to lift on my skin, the otherworldly energy to rush over us both. For the world to blacken and empty, and our entangled bodies to lighten and dissolve into the void.

  But there was nothing. Only Silverton’s arms, holding me close, and the gentle scratch of his tunic. The salty scent of his skin, the heat of his bones. The muffled thud of his pulse.

  A bird sang out. I opened my eyes and saw the straight gray lines of the castle’s westernmost turret, the one overlooking the sea, and the blue pennant snapping in the breeze.

  Silverton had stopped whispering. The seconds passed, ticking off some invisible clock, and because I was listening so carefully to the world around me, I caught the faint chime of bells, ringing from the village below. Bells, because that was how you kept time in this world. Your life was ruled not by clocks, but by bells, rung from the steeple of a stone church in the middle of a village. By the movement of the sun across the sky.

  Not by a clock.

  “Truelove,” Silverton said at last, “I don’t mean to doubt you, but are you quite sure this is the rock in question?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And Max? He couldn’t mistake it, all the way over in the twentieth century, could he?”

  “I—I—don’t think so.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Of course, anything is possible,” I said reluctantly.

  The arms loosened around me. I slid to my feet on the solid ground and stared at Silverton’s tunic.

  “Perhaps we might walk around a bit,” I said, “just to be thorough.”

  • • •

  Hand in hand, we trod the landscape, drawing long, even lines along the turf, the way a gardener might mow a lawn of grass. Silverton walked patiently by my side, offering only the occasional mild observation, until the rumbling of his stomach betrayed him. I said that we might pause for a moment and eat, if he liked.

  We sat facing the sea, upon a small stand of rocks. Silverton insisted I rest between his knees, so that we remained in physical contact in case Max found us while we ate. Rather, while Silverton ate, because I wasn’t hungry.

  “You must have something,” he said. “You need your strength.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  I was leaning against his lean, bony knee. What excitement had animated me earlier had now dissolved, leaving me weaker than before, and yet—as I truthfully told him—too listless to contemplate eating. Silverton’s hand began to stroke at my loose hair. The waves stirred below us. I closed my eyes.

  “When I was first starting out in the game,” Silverton said, “I used to get most damnably nervous. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Took me weeks to recover afterward, from some silly show of a few days’ work. Eventually I learned to set my terror aside.”

  “Terror? You?”

  “God, yes. And then one night, lying there in some cheap hotel in Budapest, waiting anxiously for midnight, I thought, What does it matter, if you die? Father’s got another heir now. Nobody depends on you. You’ve had a good run, an immensely rich life. Why not end with a bang? I sat up and ordered myself a good dinner, and from then on . . .”

  “Are you saying I should stop caring?”

  “No, Truelove. I don’t recommend that at all.” He reached down and held a piece of bread before me. “But I do recommend that you eat something. If not for your sake, then for mine.”

  I took the bre
ad and put it in my mouth and began to chew. It was different from the bread I was used to: dense and unleavened, heavy on my teeth, nutty in flavor. I swallowed and said, “Did you bake this yourself?”

  “Of course not. Where do you get these ideas? There’s a baker in the village. Pleasant chap. His five children do most of the work, while he chats with his customers.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “She died in childbed a year ago.”

  I accepted a piece of cheese and ate that, and I thought I had never tasted cheese so delicious.

  “It’s sheep’s milk, actually,” Silverton told me. “Sheep being in far greater supply than kine. Feeling better?”

  “It’s not working,” I said. “I don’t know why it’s not working.”

  “Have some more, then. I brought plenty.”

  “I don’t mean the cheese. I mean Max. We agreed—he was supposed to—”

  Silverton brushed the crumbs from his tunic and took my hand. “It’s all right, my love. We’ll find him. Come along, up we go. We’ll keep on bloody walking until—”

  “No. It won’t work.” I pitched forward from the rock and knelt in the grass, staring across the channel to the island that lay faintly in the distance. “I don’t feel anything. Before I left, with Max, when it was working”—I drove my fist into the turf—“I knew. I could feel it in my nerves, my skin. There was this energy. And here, now, there’s nothing. He’s not here at all.”

  “If we keep walking—”

  I turned and grasped the neck of his tunic with both hands. “He’s not here! Don’t you see? I’d know if he were here. I’d know.”

  “We could try again tomorrow.”

  “It won’t make any difference. It doesn’t matter. Today or tomorrow or a year from now. Either he’s here, or he’s not. If he’s not here now, he never will be.”

  Now I was leaning into Silverton’s chest, and his arms came around me. My knees scraped on the rough, hard rock. My throat stung.

  “I see,” Silverton said slowly.

  “He promised me. We agreed how to do it.”

  “Perhaps he can’t. Perhaps he tried and failed.”

  “It’s my fault. I was so certain. It was an impulse, I had to find you, I didn’t stop to work it all out—”

  “Truelove, don’t—”

  “And Max said we should wait, but I wouldn’t wait, I couldn’t wait—”

  “Because you love me.”

  “—compulsion—”

  “It’s all right. We’ll find a way.”

  I looked up. “There is no other way. There’s nothing. I’ve trapped us both with my stupidity, my headstrong—”

  “Headstrong? You?”

  “Oh, stop. Don’t you see? Don’t you care? There’s no chance of going home. No hope at all.”

  His face was soft and kind. He touched my cheek and said, “My dear, dear girl. I never had any hope. Not until three days ago.”

  “Well, now it’s gone.”

  “Not true. Not true at all. I’m filled with hope, in fact.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s a chance in a million he’ll find us by accident.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Max.”

  I stared at him in amazement. The wind lifted the ends of his hair, and the tip of his nose had turned as pink as a raspberry. His thumb found my cheek again, brushing along the underside of the bone, and I opened my mouth to say something, I forget what.

  And I don’t suppose I shall ever know what I intended to say to him at that moment, because a shout broke apart the fragile air between us, and Silverton leapt and spun in the same motion, drew a weapon from the folds of his tunic, leaving me sprawled behind him at the edge of the cliff.

  The Lady said to the Fisherman, ‘Let us throw this pearl back in the sea, for I need no riches except your heart, and our children I have borne you, and our babe that quickens in my womb.’ But the Fisherman knew that his wife had forsaken luxury for his hand, and he replied, ‘No, I will take this jewel across the channel to sell in the city, and I will return to you with rich clothes to adorn your beauty, and furniture for the great house we will build together.’ The Lady’s heart misgave her. She pleaded with the Fisherman to stay, and in bed that night she worked upon him all her wiles to change his mind, yet still in the morning the Fisherman embraced her tenderly and kissed their children good-bye, and sailed his boat across the channel to the city on the mainland . . .

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

  Nine

  I thought you said you knew these people,” I muttered as we marched across the grass toward the castle’s grim walls.

  “I don’t know all of them.” Silverton kept my hand firmly inside his grip. “But never fear. I do know the right ones. We shall straighten the whole mess out directly, once I speak to Magnus.”

  “Who’s Magnus?”

  “Just a chap I know,” he said serenely. “How are you holding up?”

  “Oh, beautifully.”

  “Ah, the same dear Truelove. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to hear you haven’t lost your essential vinegar. Just let me do the talking, is that clear?”

  “My dear Silverton, I’m afraid we have no choice.”

  There was the briefest pause. “You magnificent woman,” he said. “I want very badly to kiss you right now. If they kill me, will you promise to press my lips in a final embrace?”

  “Kill you?”

  “There is the smallest possibility. But don’t worry, you’ll be safe enough. They’ve got a shortage of women on the island, at the moment.”

  “How fortunate for me.”

  He didn’t reply, and as the three men around us exchanged words, I realized he was listening to them. His hand remained steady and warm, and I’m afraid I clung to it shamelessly, as an anchor. We were approaching the main entrance, which had seemed so harmless on that August day in 1906, almost inviting, and was now harsh and forbidding. The sharp teeth of the portcullis hovered close. I glanced at the man nearest, a few feet to my right, whose thick, dark beard and white face sickened me. He was saying something, laughing as he talked, and he must have felt my gaze because he turned in my direction, grinning—an expression that deepened the scar above his left eye.

  But I had no time to wallow in fear. We passed beneath the thick black iron of the portcullis, and for an instant I recalled how I drove beneath the portcullis at Thurso in Max’s splendid, shining motorcar—was it only a week ago?—and the memory was so thorough, so acute, I thought I could smell the sultry petrol exhaust, I could hear the sublime roar of the Burke’s massive engine. I remembered the strange shimmer of terror I had experienced then, until the peaceful, lichen-crusted courtyard had opened around me. Thurso’s footmen in plaid. Crumbling, damp, relaxed gentility.

  No lichen now. The reek of manure assailed me, of unwashed flesh, of smoke, and though it struck some familiar chord, I couldn’t say what it was. There was an air of purpose. Perhaps half a dozen men milled about, dressed in tunics and hose of homespun wool, shaggy-haired; two of them attended to the unloading of a cart stocked with large woven baskets, pulled by a stocky pony, while others hung from ramshackle scaffolding and repaired the stonework. I heard their strange words drifting down, incomprehensible, and I turned to Silverton.

  “What language is this? Gaelic?”

  “Gaelic? No, no. It’s a form of Norse. Orkney’s subject to Norway, didn’t you know that? The Scots aren’t due to arrive in force for some years yet, as I remember, although the present Earl of Orkney is a Scotsman. All very complicated.” He made some friendly gesture at the guard who stood near the steps to the keep, and the guard nodded slightly. “It all started with the Vikings, as these things so often do.”

  I glanced back at the man with the scar, who was starting up the steps to the keep. “They’re Vikings?”
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  “Descendants, at any rate. I expect they found these islands an excellent place from which to base raids, until they became too troublesome and the King of Norway stepped in, four or five hundred years ago. Then it was all Norsemen coming in. Luckily I had some Norwegian already. One of my few talents, language.”

  “Lucky indeed,” I whispered, and then I fell silent, because the men were casting us suspicious looks. We climbed the steps into the keep, and again I experienced that frisson of familiarity as the walls took shape around me, the same dimensions as before, except the floor was covered with rushes and the walls hung with tapestries, and in the middle of the hall stood a giant rectangular table lined with rough benches. At one end of this table, three men sat eating from a platter of meat, using their knives and the fingers of their right hands. The fellow at the head, somewhat broader than the others, turned to us in mild surprise.

  “That’s Magnus,” whispered Silverton in my ear, just before he strode boldly forward past our phalanx of grim escorts—still holding my hand—and dropped to one knee. I followed suit. I felt I had no choice.

  Magnus nodded, releasing us to our feet, and addressed some question that ended in a gesture, indicating the whole lot of us. Silverton and the scarred man began to answer him at the same time. Magnus held up his hand—silence—and repeated the same words, gazing at Silverton.

  I felt an angry, restless silence gather behind us as Silverton spoke in the unfamiliar Norse tongue. His words rang about the stones, filling the vast, chilly hall. Magnus glanced at me, but it was not a lascivious gaze, merely curious. He was a plain man, and though he still sat on his chair—the men on either side of him occupied the benches—I perceived he was quite large. His shoulders were wide, his neck thick; his tunic covered a bulk of muscle on his chest and arms, as if he were accustomed to rigorous physical labor. I liked his face, which was not handsome but thick-boned and honest, covered by a bristling ginger beard. He turned his gaze back at Silverton, and this time it remained there, steady and penetrating and intelligent. I thought his eyes were gray, but it was difficult to tell in the muted light of the hall, and they were overhung by a pair of large ginger-thatched brows that disguised them further. And yet I felt I could trust this man. Some primeval instinct, perhaps, or else some clue in Silverton’s manner, for of course I couldn’t understand what Magnus actually said. I wasn’t even certain of his position here. A lord of some kind, but hadn’t Silverton said the islands were ruled by a Scottish earl? Surely not this man, then. In any case, an earl would have kept his seat on the main island, not Hoy.