The Winter Sea

by Susanna Kearsley

  Taking it, I told him, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to be John Moray anymore.’ It was a half-hearted complaint. ‘He—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me.’

  With reluctance I bent down to put the envelope inside my briefcase, clicking shut the flap. I didn’t want to hear what had become of Moray, even though I knew that I would learn the truth in time, and no doubt sooner than I wanted to.

  XX

  THE SUMMER CAME AND briefly shone its splendor before fading like the twisting leaves upon the trees that dropped and died and left the world to face the bitter frozen winds of winter, till the spring crept out reluctantly and warmed again to summer days that withered in their turn. And in that time there came no word of new resolve from Saint-Germain to bring the king again across the water.

  Still there came each month with regularity a letter from the Duke of Perth to reassure his sister that their plans were not reduced to talk and argument. The messengers yet came and went between the Scottish nobles and the French king at Versailles, and as for young King James, he seemed more determined than ever to keep himself ready for war, having lately declared his intention to lead a charge himself upon the battlefields of Flanders. ‘Although,’ the Duke of Perth had written in his latest letter at the end of August, ‘some do think it possible that peace may come before he gets the chance.’

  Sophia would have welcomed peace. The young king’s disappointment mattered less to her than did the fact that Moray was now back in Flanders fighting with his regiment, and every day the war stretched on she worried for his safety.

  All the comfort that she had now came in dreams, when she could hear again his voice and feel his touch, and not two weeks ago she’d woken in the dead of night convinced he’d been beside her in the bed. She’d felt the warmth of him.

  She’d felt it even when the moon had pushed its way clear of the grasping clouds to shine its light upon the sheets and show her there was nothing there.

  Next morning Kirsty, upon seeing that Sophia had not slept well, had announced, ‘Ye want an hour with your wee Anna.’ And that very afternoon Sophia had gone down to find the drawing room alive with Kirsty’s sister and the children, and with Anna’s brown curls blending with the other dancing heads so well that nobody observing them would have had cause to think that she was not of that same family.

  In fact Anna herself knew no differently, having been placed in their cottage just days after she and Sophia had come back to Slains more than a year ago. That had been the countess’s solution, and it had so far kept Anna safe, for no one had discovered yet that she was Moray’s child, and no one would, with Kirsty’s sister standing guardian. ‘’Tis the benefit of living such an isolated life,’ she’d told Sophia, with a smile. ‘My neighbors are so used to seeing me produce a new bairn every year that none would even question she was mine.’

  ‘Yes, but your husband…’

  ‘Would do anything the countess asked, and gladly.’ With a hand upon Sophia’s arm, she’d said, ‘You must not worry. We will keep her safe with us, I promise, till your husband does return.’

  And Kirsty’s sister had been sure to hold that promise, so that little Anna grew each month in laughter and in happiness and saw Sophia often, though from caution she had not been taught to call Sophia ‘mama’.

  There would be time enough for that, Sophia knew. And though she would have given much to have her daughter with her every day, she weighed her own needs lightly against Anna’s, and was grateful beyond measure that her child was so well cared for.

  She saw little of herself in Anna’s features or her character—the eyes, the hair, the energy, were Moray’s, and it gave Sophia joy to see his nature reproduced with such perfection every time she looked at her daughter.

  That brief visit in the drawing room had raised her spirits instantly, as Kirsty had intended.

  Just as now, these two weeks later, as she sat in her accustomed place among the dunes and watched the children play with Kirsty’s sister on the wave-washed curve of beach, Sophia’s darker thoughts ran from her as if they had been no more than shadows to be chased off by the brightness of the early autumn sunlight and the sound of Anna’s laughter.

  The little girl was happily at play with the great mastiff Hugo, who had cast aside his fierce façade to show his own true gentleness, his jaws clamped softly round the stick that Anna had held out to him.

  Sophia was so focused on that tiny tug of war she nearly didn’t hear the brush of skirts across the grass as Kirsty climbed the dunes to join her. ‘’Tis not a fair contest,’ said Kirsty. ‘The dog is too strong for her.’

  Sophia smiled, still watching. ‘But she will best him, regardless.’

  ‘Aye, I do not doubt it. I do not doubt she can do anything,’ said Kirsty. ‘Not after seeing with my own eyes how she had my Rory galloping on all fours round the cottage playing horses, and him having sworn he had nae time nor liking for bairns.’

  ‘Perhaps his views are changed,’ Sophia said, ‘and he does seek to make a family of his own, and settle to that life that you so long for.’

  ‘Rory? Never.’

  ‘There is no such thing as never,’ said Sophia, as a sudden shriek of laughter turned her head again toward the shore, where Anna had succeeded in recovering the stick from Hugo’s mouth and had begun to run. She’d walked with confidence at ten months and having had several months’ practice since then ran easily on tiny feet that touched so lightly on the glistening sand they left no mark behind. Sophia thought of Moray walking barefoot on this beach and looking like a lad himself, and something he had told her on that day seemed fitting for the moment, so she said it over now for Kirsty, in a quiet voice: ‘You cannot ever say which way this world will take you.’

  The sand felt cool beneath her hands. She cupped a handful of it, sifting it with absent fingers while her eyes, from habit, searched the far horizon for a sail, but there was nothing to be seen in all that wide expanse of blue except the faint and fleeting lines of white along the breaking waves against the rocks that marked the far end of the beach.

  Kirsty watched in silent sympathy. ‘Perhaps there will be news today from France. The countess did receive a letter.’

  ‘Did she? When?’

  ‘As I was coming out.’

  ‘Another message from His Grace the Duke of Hamilton, no doubt.’ Sophia’s voice was dry. The duke had written often to the countess since the spring. He had at first expressed his great concern about Sophia’s welfare after Mr Hall had lost her in the marketplace, and he’d wondered if he might perhaps have details of her lodgings there in Edinburgh so that he could himself pay her a visit and ensure that she was well. The countess, reading that first letter, had remarked, ‘He will be disappointed, surely, to discover you are back with us at Slains, for though his influence is great within the town he dare not challenge us in our own home. The worst that he can do now is to wait, and watch, and hope we will betray the king’s designs.’

  And so the letters of the Duke, professing friendship, filled with loyal sentiments towards the king, had started to arrive, and each one left the countess out of temper for an hour or more.

  ‘This did not come from Edinburgh,’ said Kirsty. ‘It was carried by a fisherman, the same man who last month did bring the letter from the Duke of Perth at Saint-Germain, and anyway the countess seemed quite happy to receive it.’

  ‘That is good,’ Sophia said. ‘The countess likes to get a letter from her brother. It will cheer her.’

  She was lightened by the thought, and went on sifting sand within her hands while watching Kirsty’s sister and the children. Hugo had retrieved the stick now and the game was on again, the gentle tug of war with peals of laughter rising happily above the rushing rhythm of the waves.

  And then the game became a chase and Kirsty, filled with too much energy herself to sit in one place long, slipped running down the dunes and joined the children. And Sophia, left a
lone, could only think of how contented her heart felt at this one moment, and she raised her face towards the sun and closed her eyes.

  When next she opened them, there seemed to be no change. There should, she later thought, have been at least a cloud to block the sun and send its shadow chasing darkly out across the brilliant sea—but there was nothing.

  Only the countess, coming down the path to join them on the beach.

  The countess was so rarely out this way that in all truthfulness Sophia could not bring to mind the last time it had happened, but she still thought little of it till the countess reached the bottom of the hill and stopped a moment, standing strangely still against the blowing grass. And then Sophia saw her take a breath and set her shoulders and continue on as though the sand between them had grown wider and was difficult to cross.

  The countess did not try to climb the dune when she had reached it, but stood several steps below Sophia looking upward, and her face was like the faces of the women who so long ago had come to tell Sophia that her father and her mother would no more be coming home.

  She felt the shadow touch her then, although she could not see it, and inside her a great hollowness consumed all other feeling. But because she did not wish to hear the answer to her question she said nothing.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ the countess said, ‘I bring sad news of Mr Moray.’

  And Sophia knew what it would be, and knew she ought to spare the older woman all the pain of its delivery, but in the sudden numbness that had settled on her, words were somehow far beyond her reach. She dug her fingers in the sand and tried to focus on the feeling as the countess slowly carried on, as though she felt the pain of it herself.

  ‘He has been killed.’

  Sophia still did not reply.

  ‘I am so very sorry,’ said the countess.

  There was sunlight in Sophia’s eyes. It seemed so strange, that there should still be sunlight. ‘How?’

  ‘There was a battle,’ said the countess, ‘at a place called Malplaquet. A dreadful battle, so my brother tells me in his letter.’

  ‘Malplaquet.’ It was not real, she thought. A distant place, an unfamiliar name that tasted strangely on her tongue. Not real.

  She heard the countess talking but she could not understand the words, nor did she try. It was enough to sit there, sifting sand and gazing out towards the line where sea met sky and where it seemed at any moment she might see the first white flutter of a fast approaching sail.

  The waves kept coming in their soft way up the beach and slipping backwards, and the gulls above still hung upon the wind and wheeled and called to one another in shrill voices that were lost amid the laughter of the children playing at the water’s edge.

  Then Anna’s laughter rose above the others and in that one instant something tore Sophia from inside and crumpled her like paper in a careless hand. She fought against it; fought the brimming pressure of her tears until her mouth began to tremble with the effort, but it was no use. Her vision blurred until she could no longer see the far horizon, nor the countess standing closer by in sympathy, and she could no more stop the first small tear that spilled across than she could stop the final bit of sand that slipped between her fingers and would not be held.

  And so she let it go.

  I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had no choice. The envelope of papers was still sitting where I’d left it on the corner of my desk, as far as possible from where I sat to write. It had been sitting there all day since I’d come back from Aberdeen. I’d only taken it out of my briefcase in the first place because I’d been missing Graham after our weekend and I had found it comforting to look up now and then and see the bold and certain letters of his handwriting spell out my name across the narrow envelope.

  I hadn’t changed out of his rugby jersey, either. The long sleeve slipped over my hand as I reached across my desk. I pushed the folds back to my elbow, took the envelope in hand, and drew the papers out in one determined motion, as though I were ripping off a bandage.

  It was not, in actual fact, a pedigree chart, as Graham had called it. A pedigree chart would have started with one name and worked its way backward through just the direct line. What Graham had found was more useful, in my view. It was what my father would call a ‘Descendants Chart’, beginning with the earliest known ancestor and traveling forward, like the charts of English kings and queens found in the front of history books, showing the wide web of family relationships, the children of each union and who married whom and when each person died.

  The Morays of Abercairney had been a busy bunch, and it had taken several pages to trace their line up to the point of John’s birth. He was easy to find, in the section that listed his brother—the 12th Laird—his sisters Amelia and Anna, and two other brothers. I narrowed my focus to his name alone.

  Written down, it was painfully brief. Just the year, and the note: Died of wounds…

  There was no specific mention of the battle, but I was long past questioning my memories by now and I knew without doubting that Moray had fallen at Malplaquet. That name might have meant little enough to Sophia, but I knew it well. I still remembered reading Churchill’s vivid description of that battle in his volumes of biography of his own ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. I couldn’t recall the exact numbers killed in that one day of fighting, but I knew that all of Europe had been shocked and sickened by the slaughter. Marlborough himself, a seasoned warrior, had been so deeply affected by the loss of life at Malplaquet that, according to Churchill, he had been forever altered. It would take another hundred years before that death toll would be reached upon a battlefield again.

  John Moray had been only one more dead among the thousands, and Sophia only one among the wives who’d been made widows, and six months ago I might have read the papers I was reading now and noted down the facts with the detachment of a researcher, and thought no more about it.

  But I couldn’t do that now. I closed the papers on their folds and laid them carefully aside. The blank computer screen was waiting for my next word, but I couldn’t do that either, not just yet. And so I rose and went to put the kettle on to make some coffee.

  It was no longer night but early morning, and the winter sun was rising with reluctance. Through my windows I could see the dull light spreading grey like mist above the soggy-looking landscape, and the rolling lines of white that marked the edges of the waves along the empty curve of beach.

  In my mind I almost saw the lonely figure of Sophia standing on the shore, her bright hair hidden by her shawl, her saddened eyes still gazing seaward.

  Even when the kettle whistled keenly to the boil and made me turn my gaze away, I saw those eyes, and knew they’d never give me peace until I’d finished with the story.

  XXI

  SOPHIA FACED HER PALE reflection in the looking-glass while Kirsty made her choice among the new gowns that had lately been delivered by direction of the countess. There were three of them, of finest fabric, and their cost must surely have been felt by even such a woman as the countess, who had already put herself to such expense for the adventure of the king that, should he not come soon, the family’s debts might bring this noble house to ruin. But the countess had not listened to Sophia’s protestations. ‘I am overdue in tending to your wardrobe,’ she had said. ‘I should have done this when you first arrived. A pearl, though it may gleam within the plainness of the oyster, shows its beauty best when viewed against a velvet case.’ She’d smiled, and touched Sophia’s cheek with tenderness, a mother’s touch. ‘And I would have the world observe, my dear, how brightly you can shine.’

  The gown that Kirsty chose was soft dove grey, a fragile thing of silk that slipped lightly over a petticoat trimmed with silver lace. Frilled lace showed delicately at the deeply rounded neckline and the hem, and fringed the full sleeves that were fastened up with buttons at Sophia’s elbows.

  A velvet case indeed, she thought—but looking in the glass she did not think herself a pear
l.

  These last two months had left her thinner, hollow-eyed and wan. She could not dress in proper mourning clothes nor grieve her loss in public, but that loss was written plainly on her face, and even those within the household who knew nothing of the truth knew nonetheless that there was something sadly wrong with Mistress Paterson.

  That had, in some ways, worked to her advantage. When the word had got about that she was leaving, many thought it was because she’d fallen ill and had been forced to seek a kinder climate than the wild northeast.

  ‘You’ll stay till Christmas, surely?’ Kirsty had implored her, but Sophia had replied that she could not.

  ‘’Tis best to be away before the snow,’ had been her explanation. Easier than saying that she could not bear the prospect of a holiday so based on hope and joy when she had neither.

  ‘Anyway,’ she’d said to Kirsty, ‘you will have enough to occupy your time, I think, now that Rory has at last come to his senses.’

  Kirsty had blushed.

  ‘When will you wed? Is it decided?’

  ‘In the spring. The earl has given Rory leave to take a cottage by the burn. It is a small place and will need repair, but Rory feels by spring it will be ready.’

  ‘So you will have your cottage after all,’ Sophia had said, and smiled above the pain that she was feeling at the knowledge she must leave behind her best and truest friend. ‘I am so happy for you, truly.’

  Kirsty, too, had seemed to find it difficult to keep her own emotions on a level. Now and then they’d broken through. ‘I wish you could be here to see the wedding.’

  Sophia had assured her, ‘I will hear of it. I do not doubt the countess will be writing to me often. And,’ she’d promised, ‘I will send the finest gift that I can find in all of Kirkcudbright.’

  Kirsty, setting her own sadness to one side a moment, had looked closely at her. ‘Are ye still decided to return there, after all that you did suffer in that place?’