The Exile of Sara Stevenson
Page 40
His attention was held rapt by the couple, and with his heart thumping away too loudly in his ears he watched as the gallant lad took the woman’s hand in his own. At the instant of their touch, a burst of joy and happiness hit him. It was pure emotion. He was spellbound by it, held mesmerized by it—and watched in awe as the young woman got into the boat that she had longed to sail in for over a hundred years.
His heart broke; and then he felt it stop entirely.
He thought that he too was dead, for he could no longer feel that steady beat in his chest. Reflexively he pushed his fingers into his neck and was reassured. His pulse was still palpable; his heart was still beating. And then he remembered the watch. He pulled it out of the little pocket next to his chest and held it tenderly in the palm of his hand.
It had stopped.
For a hundred years it had remained true and had kept ticking away without pause, and now it had stopped. He couldn’t even see what time it was, it was so dark, but again he knew the watch was indeed very special. Special to them all.
It was then it hit him. Sara Stevenson, the woman and the ghost, had been waiting for him to come before she could leave. She had been waiting for Alexander Seawell to arrive on Cape Wrath. And he had finally come.
He grasped the stilled watch in the palm of his hand, unwilling to let it go. He was gripping it still, clutching it to his aching heart, as he watched the little skiff sail off into the cloaking mist and darkness, the vessel that held the woman of his dreams. It was only after he could no longer see the ghostly craft that he realized he’d been crying.
For she was gone. Sara Stevenson, the ghost of Cape Wrath, had finally gone home.
Alexander Seawell found himself alone once again and on the edge of existence. And he too harbored thoughts of leaving. For a great maudlin sadness had filled him, it depressed him; it crushed him to his very core. And it was with great effort that he made it back to the lighthouse at all. But the lighthouse had called to him, it beckoned him with that inextinguishable yellow light, and he, like a moth to a flame, had followed it.
He walked into the darkened cottage lit only by firelight and a few oil lamps that had been kept burning. And he found himself standing in the doorway of a bedroom. It was there, through his tears, he beheld the lovely young widow asleep on the bed with the newborn child at her breast.
He felt a strange tightening in his chest at the sight of her. She reminded him strangely of his wife, Jane, the first woman he had ever loved. It was when she died of scarlet fever before giving birth to their child that he felt compelled to join the fighting in Europe. It was there he had planned to die. But this woman’s husband had foiled that plan. And now he was the one standing in her doorway, not James. He was the one staring at this young woman; so much like the other young woman he had journeyed across Scotland to save.
He felt the pulse of his heart beating in the back of his throat at the sight of her. And his breath came in short, quick bursts—as if he had just run the Kaiser’s gauntlet with his life intact. He could not remove his eyes from her, and so he just stood there, watching as mother and child slept, the pair of them also alone on the edge of the world. It was then he felt a twinge of something very like hope well up from deep within him. It was faint, but it was there.
He was struck with the notion that he would not be leaving Cape Wrath anytime soon. For there was too much history here, there were too many ghosts. Yet above it all, there was the glimmer of something rare and alluring. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but he could feel it all the same. It was here, and it was impossible for an antiquarian like him to ignore.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As this story is obviously a work of fiction, I took many historical liberties with my plotline, due in part to the timing of the two great wars that shadow this story: the Napoleonic Wars, from 1793 to 1815, and World War I, from 1914 to 1918. The first large leap of fiction was the lighthouse on Cape Wrath. This lighthouse was indeed built by Robert Stevenson (a remarkable lighthouse engineer and grandfather to Robert Louis Stevenson), but not until the year 1828, thirteen years after the setting of Sara’s story. In order to make a love story traverse a hundred years (which, by the way, I’d like to think could happen), I had to put Sara in a lighthouse that did not yet exist. I also have no evidence that the Stevensons ever had a daughter named Sara. They did have thirteen children, of whom only five survived infancy, four boys and a daughter named Jane, and they would all have been very young indeed in the year 1815. Also, I do not have any solid evidence that the Stevensons ever banished any of their children to one of their remote lighthouse settings for anything other than education on the engineering of a lighthouse. Though, being a parent myself, I cannot guarantee that the thought never crossed their minds.
Another matter I’d like to clear up is my negligent indication that the entire population of Cape Wrath engaged in smuggling. This, of course, is not true. While it remains a fact that fewer people live in that region of Scotland today than did before the Highland Clearances of 1790 and onward, the livelihood of the people of Sutherland, perhaps of all the Highlanders, was the most affected. And those who lived on Cape Wrath at that time, in the heart of MacKay country, must have been hardy souls indeed. It was when large sheep farms moved in to replace the small clan farms that the local population was encouraged to move to the coast and become fishermen or kelp harvesters. And if some did manage to prosper in the land of their ancestors at the expense of the government, well then, my lips shall forever remain sealed!
Darci Hannah
Howell, Michigan
DARCI HANNAH lives and plays in Michigan with her husband and three sons. When she’s not playing, she’s hard at work on her next novel.
The Exile of Sara Stevenson is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2010 by Darci Hannah
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hannah, Darci.
The exile of Sara Stevenson : a historical novel / Darci Hannah.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52055-5
1. Single mothers—Fiction. 2. Sailors—Fiction.
3. Scotland—Fiction. 4. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A7156E95 2010
813′.6—dc22 2010005229
www.ballantinebooks.com
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