A Strange Scottish Shore

by Juliana Gray

  “I say. And you heard nothing at all until then?”

  “I was asleep, I confess, having drunk a little more wine than I intended during dinner. His lordship, as I remember, volunteered for this reason to keep vigil. Of course, I now suspect he urged the wine on purpose, though I have none but myself to blame for accepting it.”

  “Miss Truelove, there is no one I trust more thoroughly than Silverton, except yourself. I feel certain he has a sound reason for this disappearance.” Olympia paused. “He left no note? No sign at all?”

  “None. I repaired immediately downstairs and made inquiry with the hotel staff, and nobody could remember seeing him, or indeed noticing anything amiss at all. No struggle, no chase, no furtive departure. No unknown characters lurking about.”

  “Strange.” Olympia tapped the wheel.

  “You will remember, of course, that Silverton serves another master than ourselves. I refer to the dowager duchess, who has inherited the work of her husband, the previous duke. You know he was Britain’s great spymaster for many decades.”

  “But why should those particular papers hold any interest for my great-aunt, even in her new capacity? I should have thought they held no interest for anyone but us, and perhaps that damned scoundrel from Naxos, who held me captive.”

  I shrugged. “Once we open our minds along that avenue, any number of scenarios arise. I wired the duchess at once, of course, to inquire whether she had any news of Silverton. I hope she will answer honestly.”

  “You are concerned for him, of course.”

  “Naturally. It is distressing to find one’s trust so terribly misplaced.”

  The duke reached out his hand and patted my own. “Have faith in him, Miss Truelove. Whatever the fellow’s done, I have no doubt he’s done it for the best possible reason.”

  “You aren’t at all concerned for the integrity of those papers?”

  He released the brake and set the motor into gear. The Burke surged eagerly forward, filling the clear, salt-tinged air with the scent of petrol exhaust. “Of course I’m concerned,” he said. “I’m damned put out.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I ought to have been more vigilant.”

  “Indeed you ought, Miss Truelove. In fact, if I may offer a word of advice, there is really only one way to avoid these unfortunate incidents, in future.”

  “Sir?”

  “You must take care to keep the rascal directly by your side throughout the night. If possible, without the benefit of his nightshirt.”

  • • •

  By the time we reached Thurso Castle an hour later, the air had turned chillier, the sky cold blue, and a stiff breeze thrust from the nearby sea against the skin of my cheeks. The towers appeared over a slight rise in the surrounding grassland, and I fell silent in the middle of a sentence. I forget the subject.

  “Astonishing, isn’t it?” the duke said. “I don’t believe there’s anything like it in England.”

  “Certainly not in my experience.”

  The ragged gray stone grew against the sky, haphazard and enormous, rising from a large, flat headland some half mile or so distant. I thought it must have been built four or five hundred years ago, at least; the walls crumbled, the battlements missed teeth, and yet the edifice stood proudly, like a terribly old man wearing the indignities of age as marks of honor. Under an overcast sky, the castle might have seemed intolerably gloomy, but the blue sky and the brilliant northern sun turned the walls nearly white. So pure and plain was its beauty, my breath stopped in my chest. I felt the duke’s quick glance at my profile, his satisfaction at my awe.

  “There are any number of splendid walks,” he said. “I shall be happy to show you about in the morning, before the shoot.”

  “The shoot?”

  “Thurso is an enthusiastic sportsman.”

  As we drew closer to the castle, I saw that the isthmus connecting the headland to the mainland was narrow and worn, reinforced by an arched stone bridge of recent construction. The sea came into view some hundred feet below, lashing against the cliffs.

  “My God,” I said, “it must be well-nigh impregnable.”

  “I believe it was, until Thurso’s father had the bridge built a half century ago. You had to climb down the cliff and scale it back again, by an alarmingly narrow track that runs along the side that may, I believe, remind you of some of our adventures last spring. Makes a fine walk before breakfast, however.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  The road had narrowed into a rough track, and the duke slowed the motor to lessen the jostling as we rode along. “When you reach bottom, you’ll find a scrap of beach on the more sheltered side of the neck, where Thurso’s put up a sort of rudimentary dock, but it’s hardly enough to land anything larger than a sporting yacht.”

  “A rather startling degree of seclusion, in these modern times.”

  “I was going to say that the entire effect is one of stepping back into the medieval age. The interior of the castle, I should add, does little to dispel this impression.”

  “Perhaps that’s fitting, given our purpose. Will there be time to inspect this object of yours before dinner?”

  He drew his watch from his pocket and glanced at the face. “I’m afraid not. These damned social obligations. Can I persuade you to join me after dinner, or would you prefer to wait until morning?”

  “I have no objection at all, but I suspect Lady Annis might.”

  “Oh, yes. Dash it. I’d forgotten.”

  We were approaching the bridge. The automobile slowed further, and the duke reached for the gear lever. To the left, the sun glittered on the chimney pots hidden inside the stacks, reminding me of the domesticity that lay inside. Fires laid neatly before beautiful, moldering sofas, and ladies occupying the frayed upholstery with bare, shivering shoulders and glasses of sherry: Lady Annis, of course, prominent among them.

  “Yes, I meant to ask earlier. How is your suit progressing?”

  “Well enough,” answered the duke. “There isn’t much for me to do, really, except simply to exist there with my shiny new coronet, which conveniently does all the courting for me.”

  “Think of it as one of the advantages of your position, sir. Why waste your formidable energy in so frivolous an occupation as courtship?”

  “Very true, Miss Truelove. I shall endeavor to look upon my situation in that spirit of optimism. Though I don’t mean to sound churlish. She’s a lovely girl, far lovelier than I really deserve, for my own sake. Are you afraid of heights at all, Miss Truelove?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Excellent. Then you will, I believe, appreciate what comes next.”

  We were just passing the elegant gateposts of the bridge, and the landscape opened suddenly to the wide, clear gulf between headland and mainland, framed by an arc of rocky cliff to the left and the endless reach of the North Sea to the right, where the land curved away from the water. Ahead, the castle sprawled atop its flat perch, so close that I now detected the faint smudge of smoke appearing from the tops of the chimney stacks.

  “You should see it in sunrise,” said the duke as we passed the opposite set of gateposts to arrive safely on solid ground. “A glorious vista. Naturally, they’ve given me the room with the best possible view.”

  “Naturally. Only the finest bait will catch such a prize fish as yourself.”

  He laughed. “Of course, it’s also the draftiest bedchamber in the entire British Isles. What I wouldn’t give for my old flat in Athens. Happy, golden days, now forever lost. Here we are. Mind your head on that portcullis.”

  He was joking, of course, for the portcullis yawned several yards above our skulls. Still, it was a forbidding black thing, lined with fangs, and I was grateful when we emerged into the courtyard, sunlit and paved with comfortable old cobbles. The duke drew the motorcar right up the entrance and shut
off the engine, but he didn’t reach for the handle of the door. Instead he turned to me.

  “Before you start up any nonsense about being grateful for my trouble, Miss Truelove, let me explain to you what this past hour has meant to me. The relief, I mean, of speaking frankly and rationally to someone I trust. Someone with whom I need not play the duke. No, don’t say I’m too kind. Say something true.”

  “Sir—”

  “Max.”

  “Max.” I smiled. “Here is something true. I can think of no man more worthy of this station than you. You aren’t playing the duke, I assure you. You are the duke, as naturally as any man could inhabit such an unnatural station, and I am grateful for you.”

  Beneath the peak of his tweed cap, the duke closed his eyes and allowed a heartfelt sigh. “Believe me, Miss Truelove. I am far more grateful for you.”

  • • •

  We had arranged to meet at half past nine o’clock, in a room Olympia called the Chinese library. “It has the advantage of being private,” he told me as we parted at the top of the main staircase, “since we cannot meet in either of our chambers without exciting comment.”

  I forbore to tell him that we had somehow already contrived to excite comment, according to Silverton. “Very well,” I said simply. “The Chinese library at half past nine o’clock. Good luck this evening.”

  “Good luck?”

  “With Lady Annis, sir.”

  “Oh. Right-ho.” He smiled and bent me a strange, stiff little bow, right there before the amazed gaze of the housemaid who was showing me to my room.

  Before the maid left, I asked her where the Chinese library might be found and memorized her directions, though her accent was so pronounced I had some trouble understanding the words. In the end, I lost myself twice, turning down one dark, empty, narrow corridor after another until I rounded a corner to a noble hallway lined with tapestries, where perhaps a half-dozen gentlemen were filing from a doorway, dressed in immaculate black and white, laughing and smoking. The duke, I saw at once, was not among them. I drew back quickly, but it was too late.

  “Why, Miss Truelove!” someone exclaimed, in a familiar voice.

  For perhaps three or four seconds, I stood quite still, transfixed not by any particular face but by the sovereign array of them, whiskers and collars and hair sleeked back, trailing smoke and parted lips and the thick, rich smell of cigar smoke and prosperity. I had probably met some of these fellows—if not all—during the course of my years in service of the previous duke, and yet I felt no recognition. They stared back with bright, interested eyes, the way they might observe a solitary doe that has come out unexpectedly from cover, and I became conscious of my plain dress and the shape of my body beneath it, of my hair and my mouth, my small female bones, my puny strength. The darkness of the hallway, lit by a single oil lamp burning from the wall, and the thickness of the stone walls, which cast us in utter silence, as if no other being existed for miles.

  My pulse throbbed in my neck. I made a brief nod and turned, walking steadily away down the corridor, and at once the voices clamored behind me. Who the devil was that? asked one, and Olympia’s secretary, I believe, said another, and yet another one began, No, no, haven’t you heard, she’s his—

  By then I was out of earshot, my skin aflame, turning down a succession of corridors without any consciousness of where I was going, only that I had to get as far away as possible from those voices, from those eyes that had stared at me with such unnatural, avaricious curiosity. No English gentleman had ever quite gazed at me like that, not once while my father was alive, not once while I toiled quietly as the private secretary of the august Duke of Olympia. I had always enjoyed—had always expected—a certain status of respect in my unusual position, neither of one genus nor the other, but certainly not belonging to the species of legitimate prey.

  I reached the end of a remote hallway and stopped, resting my palm against the stone, while I endeavored to catch my breath. My heartbeat smacked in my ears. My skin began to cool. A small window was cut into the stone at my right, and a cold draft poured through the cracks in the old wooden frame. I turned to gaze out the ancient glass to a smudged, distorted view of the sea, now turned gray and pink in the gathering sunset. The air smelled of brine and of sharp, wet stone.

  I don’t know quite how long I stood there, gathering my composure while the waves pulsed fretfully below. Perhaps a few minutes only, for I remember that my nerves were still raw enough to jump at the sound of the duke’s deep voice from the end of the hallway.

  “Miss Truelove! There you are! Are you quite all right?”

  I turned from the window and attempted a smile. “I seem to have made a wrong turn.”

  “Not at all,” he said kindly, offering his arm. “The Chinese library is just around the corner.”

  • • •

  The room was aptly named. Some Thurso ancestor—likely female, and perhaps a century ago—had caught the fashionable fascination for Chinoiserie, and this spacious chamber had been duly adorned in reds and golds, in geometrical furniture, in Ming porcelain and a riot of painted decoration. If the effect was not precisely authentic, it was certainly enthusiastic.

  The duke seemed not to perceive this Oriental explosion around him. He ushered me inside and directed me to a table in the center of the room, on which a small, simple wooden chest rested at the edge, while he lit a pair of oil lamps with a match from his pocket. Though a series of casement windows ran the length of the room, the sky behind them was turning rapidly to a dark purple, and the seascape was nearly invisible.

  “This is it?” I said. “It seems quite ordinary to me.”

  “It’s not the chest itself. It’s what’s inside.” Max set the chimney back atop the lamp and turned to me. “I say, are you sure you’re well, Miss Truelove? Have you eaten?”

  “Yes, I took a tray in my room.”

  “You might have come downstairs. There was an excellent venison.”

  “I have no doubt. But I find my presence is generally not missed at dinner. I have little in common with the ladies, and the gentlemen . . .” I turned my gaze quickly to the chest in front of me. “What is your best estimate of the age of this chest?”

  “I would say quite ancient. You see the hinges—look, what do you mean, exactly? The gentlemen. I hope no one has dared to offer you any affront—”

  “Of course not.” I was sharp. “But you must understand I am welcome neither to linger among the cigars and brandy in the dining room, nor to attend the tea and cakes in the drawing room. I am a lemon placed inside a bowl of apples and pears.”

  “This damnable, archaic society. Even among the Moroccans—”

  I moved the chest closer and bent to examine the lock. “Does the key still exist?”

  “No. But keys rarely do survive the centuries.”

  “Then how did you open it?”

  “Why, I picked the lock, of course. I have some experience in these matters, you know.” He came around the corner of the table to stand next to me, facing the chest. “The mechanism gave way easily, which aroused my early suspicions.”

  “Because an ancient lock should have needed quite a lot of oil.”

  “Exactly. Go ahead and open it, Miss Truelove. You won’t damage anything, I assure you.”

  He set one sturdy hand upon the table and leaned forward, as if anticipating me. His eagerness seeped through the formal angles of his clothes; his neck was quite pink. The scent of cigars clung to him, though he had not been among the gentlemen leaving the dining room a short while ago, and I supposed he must have excused himself early to fetch the chest. I imagined him seated at the magnificent table, leaning back in his chair, one leg perhaps crossed over the other, jiggling his hand around his brandy and pretending to care about the subject at hand. Impatient for that pause in the conversation, that turn of the tide in which he might pol
itely rise and leave the dull company behind. I knew that impatience, that dissatisfaction; I had felt it often enough myself.

  I placed my hands on the sides of the chest and opened the lid.

  A scent overcame me instantly, of brine and of some other substance. I tested it inside the cavities of my nose, breathing deeply. “Rubber?” I said.

  “Well done. Now reach inside and tell me what you find.”

  I plunged my hands into the dark interior and found a strange, cool, rather slippery material under my fingers. I grasped it by the corners and lifted it free, to uncurl in long black folds before us.

  “Why, what is it?”

  “It’s a suit, Miss Truelove. Can’t you see? You’re holding it by the shoulders. Here are the arms”—he pointed—“and the legs, here.”

  “But it’s—what’s it made of? Rubber?”

  “I’m not quite certain. It’s rubberlike, to be sure.”

  I laid it carefully down on the table and straightened it out into the shape of a human being, minus head and hands and feet, almost perfectly formed, about the size of a tall adult female. The smell was strong, almost overpowering, a queer mixture of seawater and rot and rubber. Max lifted the lamp and brought it closer, so that the steady glow poured over the surface, turning it brown. I smoothed one sleeve with a kind of rapture.

  “What do you think it is?” I whispered.

  The duke opened his mouth to answer me, but a voice from the doorway carried over his words, young and masculine and utterly certain of its facts. The same voice, in fact, that had recently spoken my name in the corridor outside the dining room.

  “Why, it’s a selkie skin, of course. Isn’t it obvious?”

  The Lady was exhausted and bewildered, for she had swum far that morning, and though the Fisherman led her into his cottage and warmed her by the hearth, she soon fell into a dangerous fever. The Fisherman was greatly alarmed. He undressed her with his own hands and laid her upon his own couch, and for two weeks he tended her without rest and without mercy to himself, certain that each dawn would bring the Lady’s death. On the morning of the fourteenth day, the Fisherman prepared himself to die, for he knew he could not bear his own agony if the Lady should expire under his hands . . .