A Strange Scottish Shore Read online

  “And the children—” I began, in horror.

  “Yep. The children. Getting to that. Those cute little moppets—and I mean, they are hella cute, no doubt about that, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my little bastard love child half siblings—I put them in the cave. You know, like putting a letter in a mailbox? And Hollander opened up his mailbox and took them back out on the other side.” He brushed his hands together. “Easy peasy, as Mum used to say to me, back when I was a wee lad.”

  Helen was sobbing quietly, kneeling in the pebbles and dirt. I dropped to her side. “He’s lying,” I said. “He must be lying. Nobody would do such a thing.”

  “Yeah, I guess it was pretty harsh, now that you mention it,” said Hunter. “But I mean, what choice did I have? And at least it put an end to all this terrible f ing violence. I mean, who needs that kind of body count? Think of the lives saved. Now we can just stand here in the moonlight and talk it over. Hold hands and sing some Lennon while Mum makes her decision. And I’m sure she’ll make the right one. No good mummy would ever abandon her kids in order to have a f fest with some hot Viking stud. Oh, wait.”

  “For God’s sake, man,” Silverton said, “have a little decency.”

  Hunter sighed. “Come on, mummy dearest. Ticktock.”

  I wrapped my arm around Helen’s shaking shoulders and looked up at Silverton. “Is he telling the truth? Where’s Magnus?”

  “No sign of him. But I’ve looked inside Hunter’s boat, and I’m afraid it’s clear the children were inside.” He nodded to the shore. “And footprints. Some kind of struggle.”

  I followed his gaze and saw the boat dragged up along the beach, just above the line of high tide. I hadn’t seen it before because of the darkness and the driftwood. “What about inside the cave?”

  “I looked. It was empty. Just footprints.”

  I turned to Hunter, whose face bore a small, smug smile. The moonlight had a strange effect on his face, bleaching the ginger from his hair, casting his features in a strange, ethereal shadow that gave him the exact look of his mother. The resemblance made me gasp. He cocked his head inquisitively and I rose from Helen’s side.

  “I’m going to look,” I said.

  He shrugged and sat down on the fallen tree. “Suit yourself.”

  I rose, motioned to Silverton to keep watch over Helen, and made my way across the shingles to the cave’s entrance. In this darkness, I might have groped my way for some time across the damp, sheer rock, searching for the gap, but in truth I needed neither sight nor touch to find it. I felt its proximity like a hum in my bones, or the way bees find their way to the hive. As I reached the opening, I stretched out my hand, and my fingers felt as if they were stung. I drew back, gasping.

  Hunter called out, “Prim feels it. Don’t you, Prim? He’s right there waiting, isn’t he? Waiting by his mailbox. My man Hollander.”

  “It’s not at all like a mailbox,” I called back. “Your friend has to do it deliberately. How did he know?”

  “Go on. Go inside,” said Hunter. “Or are you scared, Prim? Scared he might get you, too?”

  “I didn’t feel anything,” said Silverton.

  “Maybe that’s because you weren’t called, old boy,” said Hunter. “Maybe you’re supposed to stay right here. It’s only us going back who feel the call. What do you think, Prim? Am I right? Maybe those kids were supposed to shoot off into the twenty-first century. Maybe it’s all arranged in our stars, like Shakespeare said, nice and pretty.”

  I couldn’t speak. I could scarcely move. The power contained in that cave was like a lure, like a magnetic current that drew upon some substance inside me.

  “Truelove?” Silverton said, alarmed.

  “It’s there. It’s there,” I whispered.

  “What’s there?”

  “Whatever it is.”

  A pair of hands closed around my shoulders. He pulled me back roughly, nearly spilling us into the shingles. I saw Helen’s white face against the beach nearby, gazing at us in terror.

  “Did you see them?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. But it’s there, the power is there.”

  She made a low, keening noise and bent over her hands.

  Hunter rose from the log, brushing his hands. “Let’s go, then. Time’s a-wasting.”

  “Wait,” I said. “There’s no proof. No proof you’ve sent them through.”

  “Proof? Proof? What more do you want?” He patted his hips, as if searching for pockets. “I mean, where the hell else are they? Hiding somewhere? They’d have come out by now. We’re wasting time.”

  “Time has no meaning. We could wait a week, and the children wouldn’t know the difference. It will be only a minute to them.”

  “But it won’t be a minute to Mummy, now would it? Every minute that goes by is like torture, isn’t it, Mum? When someone goes away to another time, and you can’t be with them. You can feel them standing next to you, but they’re not there. Not that I speak from experience or anything.”

  “Then at least let her wait until Magnus arrives. Let her say good-bye.”

  “No!” Helen rose. “I can’t face him. Oh, God. His face. I can’t.”

  “Besides,” Hunter went on, smiling a little, “he might just be a little bit dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “A little bit.” He dug into his cloak. “I know it’s here somewhere. Somewhere. Aha! Here we go.”

  He tossed a shiny metallic object into the air, and Helen reached out reflexively and caught it.

  “I think he would have wanted you to have it,” said Hunter.

  She stared at the object in her hands, and I strained to see it. “How did you get this?” she whispered to Hunter.

  “Tore it off his cold, dead body. What else?”

  She looked up. “I hate you.”

  “Ouch. Thanks, Mum. I don’t mind telling you the feeling is mutual.” He stretched luxuriously. “Well, anyway. I’m out of here. F ing cold, wet rock. I am going to jump right into a nice hot bath, first thing, and then I’m going to eat an entire jar of peanut butter, straight up. Vodka shots. Get myself a nice hotel suite somewhere, just me and the kiddos, hanging out in our fluffy bathrobes and ordering room service until my dad arrives. And Granddad is going to s his pants. I bet he sets up a trust. I play my cards right, and I’m sitting on a gold mine.”

  “Wait!”

  Hunter was strolling across the beach toward the rock, supremely confident. Silverton grasped his arm and snarled, “Over my dead body, you’ll reach that cave.”

  “No!” Helen said. “Let him go.”

  Hunter turned his head until it was almost touching Silverton’s chin. “You heard the lady. Let him go.”

  “Please, Silverton. I’m going with him.”

  “Helen—”

  “Let him go!”

  Silverton gazed at her, and then down the bridge of his nose and into Hunter’s face, turned up into the full force of the moonlight. “I ought to thrash you and dump you into the middle of the g damned North Sea, you miserable bugger.”

  “But you won’t.”

  Silverton thrust him away, so that he fell onto the shingles, laughing.

  “I forgive you, buddy. I had it coming, I admit. I mean, this is a dick move, no doubt about it. I deserve to get my ass kicked.” He rose, dusted himself off, and held out his hand. “Come on, Mum. Let’s go board our flight. First class all the way.”

  Helen stared at him, and the expression on her face was not hateful or even angry. It was simply blank, as if she had traveled past emotion, and now felt only shock. She wore no headdress, and the breeze ruffled the hair at her forehead, which shone almost white in the moonlight. She was bathed in silver, and her beauty stunned me. A series of waves hit the shore, more rough than the others, and the sound was like
a signal. She turned to me and put her hand on my arm.

  “It’s the legend, isn’t it? You can’t fight the old legend.”

  “What legend?”

  “The selkie legend. How the master of Hoy lost his love to the sea, and the castle was never happy again.”

  “That’s only a legend.”

  “All good legends start with something true.” She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Take care of him. He loves you terribly.”

  She turned and took Hunter’s hand. In the other hand, she clutched the object he had given her, the relic from Magnus.

  I turned into Silverton’s chest. My heart was swollen and painful against my ribs. His arm came around me, and he swore into my hair.

  “I can’t bear it,” I said.

  Silverton let out an almighty roar, like a beast in a cage. From behind me came the crunch of footsteps on stone, and I closed my eyes and counted the steps. I smelled the sea, the coldness of the air. Crunch, crunch. Then silence, as if the feet had been swallowed up. Silverton’s heartbeat pounded under my cheek. My own blood stirred restlessly in my veins. In my head, I heard Magnusson’s voice: She stays by his side for seven years, bearing two children, but at the end of the seventh year she discovers the sealskin and disappears back into the sea.

  The children, I thought. It doesn’t fit. The children stay behind, with their father.

  I opened my eyes and saw a ship.

  Silverton must have felt the stiffening of my body. “What is it?” he asked.

  I couldn’t speak. I pulled free from his arms and pointed my finger. He turned and peered at the water, and I remembered that his eyesight was imperfect, and he didn’t have his spectacles, not in this world.

  “A ship!” I gasped out, and I started running toward the edge of the water, straining to catch the details in the moonlight. It had already sailed halfway into the inlet. Had Hunter seen it? Was that why he had hurried his mother into the cave?

  I turned back to Silverton and yelled, “Get her! Quickly!” Then I cupped my hands around my mouth and hallooed with all my strength.

  A faint halloo sounded back. There was a loud splash, as of a boat being lowered into the water, and a voice boomed out, calling my name. Calling Helen’s name.

  “Magnus!” I screamed. “Hurry!”

  But he couldn’t hurry. There was no possible way he could reach us in time. In time to do what? Say good-bye? Helen had made her decision. She could not abandon her children to another age, not again.

  I started forward, splashing into the water itself, and I don’t know what movement caught my notice in that boat. Some shift of the moonlight. I saw them only an instant, fingers curled over the boat’s edge, faces illuminated with hope.

  Two children.

  And I was running back up the beach, flying over the stones, pushing an astonished Silverton aside and plunging into that buzzing, electric cave. The strength of the charge jolted through me. I staggered forward, grasping with my hands in the darkness, grasping whatever I could, grasping at nothing at all, grasping a piece of fine wool.

  “Helen!” I screamed. “The children! Magnus! They’re here!”

  She didn’t answer, and my eyes found them, clasped together, huddled on the floor of the cave. Hunter’s arms were around her, and his face turned up to me, lit with an almost beatific madness. A madness I recognized, for had I not felt it myself?

  I grabbed her shoulders, and instantly the power found me and drew me into its whirling vertigo. I closed my eyes and fought, fought. Pulled at Helen’s shoulders with all my strength. Dimly I felt a pair of hands close about my waist, pulling me back. A voice, calling my own name, calling me back. I shouted Helen’s name, over and over, locked my fingers together around her chest, and then an even greater force found us, a physical might beyond description. I felt myself ripping, bones snapping, sinews popping.

  Release came like a snap of a band. We tumbled free of the cave’s mouth in a heap: me, Silverton, Helen, Magnus, to lie still and silent on the rocky shore.

  Of Hunter, there was no sign.

  So the Lady disappeared with her son into the cold waves, and when the Fisherman returned the next day, laden with rich presents, he discovered only their children, who cried piteously and told him how his Lady had put on her strange suit and swum away with a man who came by the sea. And so great was the Fisherman’s grief at these tidings, he never married again, though he ruled as lord of the island and waters he had once plied as a mere fisherman, for he could not bear to see another woman in the bed where he had once known all the joys on earth . . .

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

  Epilogue

  HOY, ORKNEY ISLANDS

  September 1323

  The King now comes to visit us from time to time, but only my daughter sees and hears him. He watches her play with her little brother and talks to her about the games he used to play as a child. Once he addressed me, though not directly. We sat on the floor of the attic, not long ago, practicing letters while an April gale howled outside the window, and Araminta turned to me and said, “His Majesty wishes to know if you are breeding again.”

  “His Majesty?” I asked, incredulous. (This was the first I had heard of him.)

  “Yes. That fat fellow right there, in the strange clothes and the gray beard.”

  I looked in the direction to which she pointed, and for an instant it seemed to me I could detect a slight shimmer in the air, a faint impression of a pair of familiar blue eyes. Familiar to me, I should say, only from paintings and photographs, for I had never, in my old, twentieth-century life, had the good fortune to meet King Edward in person.

  I turned back to Araminta. “You may tell His Majesty that such an intimate subject is none of his business.”

  There was a little pause, and Araminta sighed. “He says that it is his business, Mama. He is passionately concerned in your affairs.”

  “Then he should ask me directly.”

  But he never did.

  • • •

  Still, we are a happy lot, the four of us. Araminta, as you see, is a terribly precocious child, and her brother Armand is a cheerful little towheaded chap who rarely complains. Of Hunter, there has been no sign, no breath of news, and we have gradually come to presume he has met some unknown fate elsewhere, and to believe his evil influence gone from our lives. Our only true sadness arrived last spring, when Nature dashed our hopes for a third child—for the King, you see, was correct in his speculation—and I am afraid I have only just begun to emerge from the grief of this loss. My husband has been my chief support. The insatiable carnal appetites of our early days may have moderated somewhat, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the course of everyday life, but our mutual affection seems only to feed upon itself. My great joy still lies in waking up each morning to find some part of my body touching his, and to see the inevitable smile warm his dear face when he opens his own eyes to regard me at his side.

  Or perhaps my great joy comes a few moments later, when the door to the nursery flies open, and our children scamper in to land between us in the bed.

  Silverton is away just now, visiting Lord Magnus at Thurso to hold council on some recent acts of piracy that have plagued our fishing and merchant fleets, and the entire household misses him horribly. When one is accustomed to sunshine, its absence turns everything gloomy. Araminta, who is the shining red apple of her father’s eye and knows it well, has been inconsolable. She shares his height and his nimble mind and his blue eyes, and from the hour of her birth, when she nestled in the crook of his elbow and received her first smile from his overjoyed face, they have been desperately in love with each other. I’m afraid she does not take his absences well. The nurse, having put Armand to bed for his nap, begged me for an hour’s relief, so here I sit at the little table in the attic instead of attending to my own duties as lady of Hoy, wh
ile Araminta tosses her doll on the floor and sticks her face in the hollow of her folded arms.

  “You must pick up your doll, darling. Lady Helen made it for you with her own hands.” (We speak Norse in public and modern English at home, for I have some slight, superstitious fear that our native language might one day return to our lives.)

  Araminta lifts her head and looks at me with her blue eyes and her stubborn face, and I’m half afraid she’ll say cheerfully, as her father might, B Lady Helen. But if the idea occurs to her, she quickly thinks better of it, pressing her cherry lips together to hold the words back.

  “Perhaps we can practice your sums?” I ask.

  The look on her face tells me what she thinks of this scheme.

  “I have an idea,” I say. “Let’s go downstairs to Mama’s room and try on the jewels for Lord Magnus and Lady Helen’s visit at Christmas.”

  Generally speaking, Araminta is not given to such pursuits. To be perfectly honest, she’s what we would have called a tomboy, in my own time. But perhaps it’s the rain drumming at the shutters, or the shift of seasons now under way, or the temporary void in her heart that bears the shape of her adored father. She tilts her head as she considers my proposal, given in desperation, and then she slides from her stool and takes my hand.

  • • •

  The jewels were presented to me by Lord Magnus, when Silverton was officially invested as the Earl of Orkney’s vassal and lord of Hoy, and I as his lady. This occurred perhaps three months after the ordeal on the beach, as Magnus had assumed the titles and lands of his dead father, the earl, and I was nearing my confinement with Araminta and gross with child. I remember feeling generally unimpressed, both with the jewels, which were weighty, and the ceremony itself, which required me to stand upon my aching ankles for rather longer than I would have chosen. After Araminta was born, however, and Silverton added to my collection with a gift of his own, I looked upon the baubles with more affection.

  I keep them in a locked chest in my private closet, which was added some years ago to our apartments, on the other side of the bedchamber from the nursery. This is not the chest we brought from our hut in the village, nor is it the chest that occupied the room when I first arrived, which I long ago sent down into the storerooms with its ominous cargo and try not to think about.