A Strange Scottish Shore Read online

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Silverton gathered up my hand and inclined his head toward Magnus’s jaw.

  “It seems our presence is required at the banquet, Lady Silverton.” He kissed my knuckles, and even in that dusky light, his blue eyes gleamed with the old charm. “As you’ll recall, we are the guests of honor.”

  • • •

  I had drunk too much ale, I thought, or perhaps it was all the shocks, delivered one after the other, making me so numb and yet so reckless, the way you might act in a dream when you expect to wake up at any second.

  Except there was no waking up. I knew that.

  I stared at the scene around me, and in the way of dreams, nothing seemed strange. The homespun clothing was perfectly ordinary; the furniture, the walls, the rushes spread upon the flagstones had become familiar. Across the table, Silverton shared some joke with his companion, and while I couldn’t understand the words, the sounds of the vowels and consonants fell easily on my ears. He must have known I observed him, for he turned to me and tilted his head.

  “Everything all right?” he asked loudly, for the room was growing hot and raucous.

  “No, it is not all right,” I shouted back, but I was lying. Or rather, it was not all right because it was. It was strange because it wasn’t strange, because my senses had so quickly adjusted to this new world around me, because my human nature was adapting with such frightening ease to these circumstances that ought to level me.

  Silverton’s eyes narrowed in concern. He started to rise, but Magnus placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him and climbed to his own feet. Instantly the hall went quiet, but still Magnus waited. He looked down one side of the table, fastening on each man, and then down the other side, and his inspection was so thorough I had time to sit there and wonder how he had managed this impromptu feast, how he had accomplished this afternoon’s work without the slightest sign of strain. His big fingers rested on the edge of the table; his eyes shone keenly beneath his thick brow. When he spoke, he said the words slowly, as if to make himself plain to the meanest understanding, and I gazed at his extraordinary face in something like rapture, the way certain objects fascinate when your senses are confused by drink. The smell of fish and grease and ale was beginning to make me queasy, but I didn’t care. I heard Silverton’s voice in my head.

  The truest fellow you’ll ever meet.

  I owe Magnus my life.

  As I stared, I noticed for the first time that he wore a simple gold chain about his neck, more like a symbol of office than decoration, and that the center link in this chain was larger than the others. It bore a design of some kind, and I angled my head to see it better. The men around me were echoing back some kind of assent. Magnus turned his head a few degrees, addressing someone, and I lost sight of the link entirely, forgot its existence, because something else intruded on my attention. Some animal instinct, I believe, for when I snapped toward this thing, I found a man staring at me fiercely, from a seat halfway down the opposite side of the table.

  The man with the scar. Thorvar.

  He didn’t look away, as one usually does when caught staring at someone else. He kept his gaze upon me, challenging me to break first, and though I was softened by drink, I wouldn’t yield. He looked sloppy and angry, as if he’d been drinking a fair quantity himself, and his dark beard bore the crumbs of his dinner. Hostility crackled between us. In my belly, I felt the coldness of fear, but also anger. I moved my hand to my pewter cup of ale, half-full, and I never knew whether I meant to finish the drink or to hurl it at him, because someone’s hand closed around my elbow and urged me upward, and it was not Magnus but Silverton. Silverton, who had come around the table and now clasped my hand with both of his, looked upon me with adoring eyes, and around us both the men roared a kind of approval that crosses all bounds of time and language.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. But I knew. I felt it in the heat of the men along the table, in the nature of the sounds they made. I felt it in my crashing heart, my shaking fingers.

  Silverton said, “Our wedding night, apparently.”

  Then he bent his head and kissed me, right there in front of everybody, right there beneath the gaze of his lord.

  • • •

  The room to which he led me was a large, familiar rectangle, hung with tapestries. A brazier stood in one corner, and several rugs covered the stone floor. I went to one of the windows, set deep in the wall, and I knew before gazing through that it overlooked the sea cliffs. “Whose room is this?” I asked.

  “Mine.”

  “Yours?” I turned in amazement. He was stretching his long arms to the ceiling, and beyond him I saw a pair of chairs and a carved wooden bed, overhung by a canopy and clothed in rich blankets. “But this is a nobleman’s room!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve seen it before. It’s one of the principal rooms of the castle.”

  He shrugged. “I happen to be a terribly important man, Truelove, at least as far as Magnus is concerned. Mind you, I don’t sleep here very often. I don’t like the life at court, such as it is. I prefer my hovel near the sea, where nobody finds me odd, and there aren’t quite so many barbs pointed in my direction. Still, it’s nice to have a bolt-hole handy, when one’s up late with the minstrels and doesn’t wish to walk home through the wind and rain in the dark of night.”

  “Minstrels.”

  “Do you disapprove of minstrels, too?”

  My head spun with questions, but I was too tired and had drunk too much ale. I set my hand on the window ledge and remembered how Max had stood right here, had placed his own palm exactly where mine now rested. For an instant, I closed my eyes and tried to find him. But there was nothing. No tingle of electricity in the bones of my fingers. No faint pulse reaching me across the abyss of time.

  I opened my eyes. “You found me here, didn’t you? In this room.”

  “Not quite. Magnus found you first.”

  “What?”

  “You lay asleep on my bed. He sent for me straightaway.”

  I stared at the bed, and then at Silverton. “I see,” I whispered.

  “So I carried you back to my hut, in the dead of night, so as not to attract any unwelcome attention. The trouble is, one can’t really keep a secret so delectable as yourself, Truelove, in a small village like this.”

  I shook my head. All at once, the room seemed large and cold and alien. I suppose I must have wavered or some such sign of weakness, because Silverton stepped forward and caught me by the shoulders.

  “Look at you,” he said. “I ought to have stopped that nonsense downstairs hours ago.”

  I shook my head again.

  “Time to rest, Truelove. Come to bed.”

  “It’s not bedtime.”

  “Yes, it is. Come along, now.”

  “But I need—I require—”

  “There’s a pot under the bed. I shall give you a moment’s privacy, if you like.”

  I stood for a moment or two after he left, not because I was loath to make use of such a primitive device—those of you who regularly visit English country palaces, as I must, will surely know what still awaits you—but because I could not bring my thoughts into order. I felt myself balancing on the verge of madness, as if one step might send me falling from the brink. The evening breeze tumbled through the window, full of the endless light of a northern summer, and for a flash of an instant I imagined how it would feel to force myself through the opening and spring free, free.

  Don’t be a fool, snapped a voice nearby.

  I whirled around, but no other creature inhabited the room with me. No small, queenly image. I pressed one hand to my forehead. A gust of wind flew through my hair, so sharp and cold it might have been November.

  Don’t be a fool, the voice said again, more kindly.

  I
closed the wooden shutters over the window and stumbled to the bed.

  • • •

  When I was finished, I covered the pot with a cloth and closed the remaining shutters. The brazier was unlit, and my eyes took some time to adjust to the darkness. Silverton had been gone for some time. I reached without thinking for my father’s silver watch, but my grasping fingers found only the cloth of my dress and nothing more. No watch. Not even time itself.

  “Oh, God,” I whispered. The distant sounds of merriment drifted through the walls. I sat on one of the chairs next to the cold brazier and gazed around the dusky room, and for the first time I noticed the shape of a small wooden chest resting against the wall, opposite the foot of the bed, nearly lost in the shadow of the tapestry that hung above it.

  A rush of blood filled my veins.

  It’s only a chest, I told myself, just an ordinary chest. There must be dozens of them inside these walls.

  Still, I found myself rising from the chair. The dark, cool air moved against my skin. I grasped the bedpost for support—my limbs were so weak, my head so muddled—and stepped carefully around the corner of the bed to kneel before this object, this thing, this wooden capsule. I ran my hands over the top and down the sides—was it the right size? I couldn’t positively say—to grasp the edges of the lid.

  It was locked.

  What did you expect? demanded an imperious voice, from the opposite corner of the room.

  I jumped and turned, and again I saw nothing there.

  “Where are you?” I called out.

  Here.

  A faint blue light seemed to shimmer by the window. An instant later, it was gone.

  “Why can’t I see you?”

  Why do you think? I had trouble enough finding you as it is. Foolish, foolish girl. Did I not warn you—?

  A knock sounded on the door. “Truelove! It’s me.”

  “It’s Silverton,” I whispered.

  Well, answer him! He’s your husband, after all.

  “He’s not—”

  The door swung open. Silverton’s face appeared in the crack of light, all bent with concern. “Truelove? Can I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  He sidled through the doorway and shut the portal firmly behind him. “Why didn’t you answer me? And what the devil are you—”

  “This is locked.”

  “Of course it’s locked.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “Perhaps,” he said suspiciously. “Why do you need one?”

  I held out my hand. “To open it, obviously.”

  “Well, I don’t have it with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t expecting to spend the night here! I say, you’re acting rather queer. What the devil’s so important about that chest?”

  I hit the lid with my open palm. “Because it might be the chest I’m looking for. The one that lay in the dungeon all those years, the one with the suit inside.”

  “Suit? What suit?”

  “The selkie suit!”

  He blinked—twice, slowly, as if waking up from a long nap. “I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about. A selkie suit? There’s nothing inside that chest but a few clothes of mine. Ceremonial stuff. Are you saying you found it? On the other side, I mean?”

  I sat back on my heels. “I don’t know. It might be this one, or another one. The point is, it exists somewhere, and I think—I wonder—maybe in order to go home, in order for Max to find us—”

  Silverton strode across the room, fell to his knees in front of me, seized my shoulders. “Go home? For God’s sake, Truelove. We’re not going home. Don’t you realize? This is home.”

  “This is not home!”

  “Maybe not, but it’s all you’ve got, Truelove. There is no hope of anything else. Nobody’s going to save you, nobody’s going to send you back where you came from. There’s no hope.”

  “That’s not true. I won’t give up.”

  “It’s no use. Don’t you see? This is all there is.”

  “That’s not true. That’s not true.”

  He slid his arms around my back and gathered me to his chest. “I know. I know what you’re thinking. How you feel. Believe me. My God, how I railed. How I raged. But it’s no use. That world, it’s gone, it’s lost.”

  “It is not lost. It is not gone.”

  “Not forever, maybe. But we’ll be gone by then. This is our world now, Truelove, and believe me, it’s infinitely better now that there’s two of us in it. At least as far as I’m concerned. I only wish—”

  “Wish what?”

  He sighed into my hair. “Of course I would have done anything to spare you this. But since you’re here—since it’s done—”

  My arms had crept around his waist. I was not quite sobbing, but I was close. Gone. Lost. The finality of those words, the desolation. I thought of Max, of the great mansion in Belgrave Square, of my comfortable bedchamber and my dear, dirty, bustling, striving London. Of railway carriages and hot tea and the familiar, sensible sound of the English language.

  “It’s not done,” I said. “There’s always hope.”

  He sighed again, more deeply, and we knelt there on the flagstones while the salt wind whistled through the cracks in the shutters. Beneath my head, Silverton’s heart thumped steadily, the same heart as ever. The heat of his body seeped into mine.

  He is your husband now, said the Queen, in a tone of either satisfaction or resignation: I couldn’t quite tell.

  I lifted my head.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Silverton.

  “We aren’t really married, are we?”

  He paused delicately. Lifted one eyebrow. Looked terribly handsome, even underneath all that golden beard. “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Because it matters!”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course it does. We can’t possibly be married.”

  “Magnus says otherwise.”

  “Damn Magnus.”

  “Now that’s ungrateful. He saved our hides, didn’t he? Anyway, we’ve got to be married. It won’t work otherwise.”

  “What won’t work?”

  He frowned. My hands fell away from his waist. After a moment, his arms dropped, too. He rose to his feet and helped me up, one aching knee after another, and turned me around to unbutton the bodice of my dress.

  “This damned dress,” he said. “The cause of today’s mischief. If you will insist on wearing unusual clothing—”

  “It’s not unusual. Where we were going, where we were supposed to go, it’s not unusual.”

  “Truelove. We’re not going back. Strike that idea from your mind. It will only bring you misery.”

  The dress fell away from my chest. I stepped out of it. My shoes were already off, lying side by side next to the chair I had occupied earlier. I didn’t remember taking them off. Silverton found the laces of my corset and loosened them.

  “Will you please consider it?” he said softly.

  “Consider what?”

  “Me.”

  I moved away and removed my corset with my own hands. I stood in my petticoats without embarrassment. Perhaps I ought to have felt embarrassment, but I didn’t. The drink, maybe, or my own fatigue, or shock, or the sense of intimacy that had grown between us. And yet my fingers were trembling. My skin was warm, despite the chill Orkney draft. I crept to the bed and pulled down the bedclothes.

  Silverton followed me. “I don’t understand. Is it such a terrible thing, to be my wife? You can’t possibly have the same objections as before. I’ve got no awkward bloody title in this world, no dukedom in my future. No clandestine career, chasing treason across the globe. Nothing to do but devote myself to a quiet, faithful life with you.” He touched my hair. “And y
ou care for me.”

  I paused with my hand on the linen. A bed, I thought. A real bed.

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re equals here. But what happens when we return?”

  “Damn it all, Truelove! We’re not going to return. Will you listen to yourself? What happens if some mystical wand waves over our heads and sends us six hundred years into the future?”

  “Max sent us here to begin with. He will not rest until he’s found us again.”

  “But he won’t succeed. Think. If he had, he’d have done it by now.”

  The bed was quite high. I lifted my foot and braced my toe on the bedframe, and then I heaved myself onto the feather mattress and brought the bedclothes up to my chin. Silverton stood nearby, glowering and shadowed. I saw the outline of his long hair, the tiny glint of his beard.

  “You’re welcome to share the bed, of course,” I said generously, “since there’s nowhere else for you to sleep.”

  The Fisherman was gone for seven nights, while the Lady grew more wretched each hour, for he was dearer to her than her own flesh, and his absence was like the absence of her own breath. On the morning of the eighth day, she went to the shore to look for the return of her husband, yet instead of the Fisherman’s humble boat she saw a strange craft sailing toward her with all the might of the wind. The Lady turned to her children and said, ‘Go, my darlings, hide in our cottage, and if some evil befalls me, run for the village as fast as you can and ring the bell of the church three times, for then I will know you are safe . . .’

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

  Ten

  I woke on my stomach, to the gentle prodding of somebody’s hand on my shoulder. For a moment, I thought I was a child, and the hand was my father’s.

  “Come along, Truelove. Rise and shine.”

  Silverton’s voice, abundantly cheerful. I bolted upright and felt a wash of cold air upon my skin. I looked down in terror. To my relief, my chemise remained in view, crumpled and far, far too thin. I crossed my arms over my chest and looked over my shoulder at Silverton, who was fully dressed and presently opening the wooden shutters wide to the early sunlight.