A Strange Scottish Shore

by Juliana Gray

  So I followed him down the hall, tracing the same path that the children had just blazed, and entered the room at the end of the hall. The chamber was smaller than I expected, empty of furniture except for a few stools and a brazier that burned in the middle, attended by an elderly woman in a plain woolen dress much like the one I had doffed an hour earlier in Silverton’s bedchamber. In the corner, Henry and Olivia were playing with some sort of spinning top. The wooden shutters were closed firmly over the window, keeping out the cold, and the room had the dim, opaque quality of an overcast sky.

  Magnus took a step inside the doorway and stopped to cross his arms and observe the children. The woman at the brazier made a curtsey and kept her eyes cast down. I stood at Magnus’s elbow, slightly behind him, and from this vantage his size seemed insurmountable, almost grotesque. For an instant, quite without intending to, I thought of his poor wife, trapped beneath all that bulk while he used her in bed. Silverton might have been tall, but he was also lean, agile, supremely considerate—I would almost say inventive—in the employment of his own weight.

  “My wife,” said Magnus.

  I startled and stepped back. Magnus caught my elbow and turned me to face him. I knew I was flushing; I felt the surge of blood in my cheeks. I couldn’t quite meet his gaze. I addressed the tip of his nose instead.

  “What about your wife?”

  “She is like you.”

  “My hair, you mean? My face?”

  He took my other elbow. His grip was strong but not ungentle. I forced myself to look upward, to find his eyes, which regarded me with such ferocity I lost my breath.

  “No. She is beautiful—”

  “Thank you terribly.”

  “—I mean, like you, she is beautiful. But not this.” He gestured to his own face. “Words. The same words. Like Fingal.”

  I glanced at the children, who had stopped playing with the top and were staring at us, Olivia with curiosity and Henry with suspicion. “English, you mean?”

  “Your English.”

  “I see.”

  He made an impatient noise and looked at his children, at the nurse, who swiftly turned away. “Come,” he said, and dragged me from the room to stand in the hall. I felt the hot frustration raging from his skin, his inability to make himself understood. My own heart smacked and smacked against the bones of my chest. The walls were made of wood, unplastered, unfinished, and I thought of the pile of stones that lay in the attic of Magnusson’s castle. This castle, six hundred years in the future, this attic, in which Max and I had held our brief conference.

  And the woman. The woman, five or six months gone with child, who had walked inside and interrupted us.

  Magnus’s hand still held my elbow. I laid my hand on his sternum, and the thunder of his heart startled me.

  “Like you,” he said again. “From different place. Different time.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “You know?”

  My hand fell away from his chest. I pulled back and stood against the wall, laying my palms on the rough stone, and stared hopelessly at his face. The electricity buzzed in the air, numbing my cheeks, raising the hair on my head and my arms.

  He opened his mouth, and I knew what he would say. I could have said the words for him. But I didn’t.

  “Her name is Helen,” he whispered.

  The Lady was afraid that her son might discover her children by the Fisherman and destroy them in his rage, so she returned with him to the edge of the shore, though her heart nearly stopped under the weight of her grief. When they reached the small boat that was to carry them to the ship at anchor in the bay, her son set her before the eyes of the sailors and said, ‘Now, strip away your clothes and stand before us in your shame, for you have dishonored my father and lain in lust with a poor Fisherman, and your womb even now quickens with the bastard babe gotten of his seed . . .’

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

  Thirteen

  Silverton was deep in conversation with a flushed, small-boned woman wearing a gown of embroidered amber velvet. I took him by the arm and spun him around, mid-sentence.

  “You knew!” I said.

  “Knew what?”

  I leaned forward. “Magnus’s wife.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say Ah. Tell me the truth!”

  Silverton looked back over his shoulder, as if just remembering the woman he was speaking to, but she had already cast me a look of deadly hostility and turned away. He sighed and rubbed his beard at the end of his chin. “I have told you the truth.”

  “All the truth.”

  “Of course. Whatever you want to know. Where has Magnus gone?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t stop to see if he was following me.”

  “Well, it seems he has. Followed you, I mean.” Silverton nodded over my shoulder.

  I didn’t turn. “I don’t want to speak to him. I want to speak to you. I want the truth from you, the entire truth, the whole story. And I’d very much like to know why you haven’t told me any of this before.”

  “Not because—oh, damn.” He slipped his arm free and took my hand firmly in his own. “Step back.”

  “Why—”

  But my words were drowned by the noise of trumpets from the gallery above. The din of gathered humanity settled into quiet. A pair of men had stepped in front of us, so I couldn’t quite see what was going on, but I didn’t need to, did I? I heard the final flourish, heard Magnus’s voice boom out in Norse, something about welcome and drink and the bounty of God. I thought he sounded urgent somehow, as if he were straining to get to the end of each rote sentence. Before me, one of the men shifted position, opening up a narrow vantage, and inside that gap stood Magnus, looking mighty in a pool of sunshine from some window above, next to another man in a rich tunic and robe. Older, gray-haired, nearly but not quite so large as Magnus himself.

  “Is that the earl?” I whispered to Silverton.

  “I expect so. Never met the chap.”

  A hurrah swept the crowd. Laughter, high spirits. I looked around the room and saw a few faces I recognized, but mostly strangers. They could not all have belonged to the village. They must have come from throughout the islands, the other towns and hamlets scattered about these fertile rocks, and probably the Earl of Thurso’s own retinue as well.

  “Why is he here?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not quite sure. I gather he’s making a sort of state visit. He’s never been here before, not even unofficially.”

  The trumpets began again, and everyone moved to the long trestle tables laid out in a rectangle in the middle of the hall. To my surprise, Silverton led me toward the head table, raised on a dais above the others, where Magnus and the earl were taking their seats, next to a richly dressed woman who wore a fillet of gold across her forehead and an expression of pained disapproval, close to mutiny. The Countess of Thurso, no doubt, who was perhaps not pleased to attend this celebration in the home of her husband’s bastard offspring.

  The table itself was scarcely visible under the candlesticks and dishes and bowls of fruit. Silverton led me directly to Magnus’s right side, and Magnus turned and took my hand and pressed it with his lips, while the guests below us stood by their stools at the long tables arranged below. I was too stunned to make any reply. I felt the eyes of the crowd upon us, and I felt the weight of my rich clothes, the slight but unmistakable curve of my belly beneath the snug velvet gown and the silver chain, the shadow of Silverton’s body hovering at my shoulder. Magnus straightened and, still holding my hand, introduced me to the notice of the Earl of Thurso, his father.

  I would like to say that I saw some resemblance between this earl and my host, six hundred years later, but this man—if he was indeed a direct ancestor of the Thurso I knew—would have contributed only one line on the family tree
among thousands. Thus the multiplication of generations. He was large, as I said, and beginning to run to stoutness. His silver hair grew long and loose, and his beard covered half his face. From the middle of it, he curved his narrow lips and greeted me in Norse, though his native language surely must have been Gaelic.

  I wished him well in the same language, and Magnus pulled out my chair and urged me to sit. I turned to Silverton at my right. “What in heaven’s name is going on? Why has Magnus seated us with him?”

  “Because of our new status, I suppose. Or perhaps he wants everyone to know that you—that we—are here under his direct protection.”

  We spoke in undertone, while the hum of gaiety went on around us. Next to me, Magnus had not yet taken his seat, nor had his father to the left. They stood quietly, facing the assembled company. I felt tiny as they towered by my side, and yet terribly exposed. How often had I attended grand occasions, in my service to the duke and duchess? I couldn’t count them all, the parties and dinners and ceremonies and performances. But always hovering in the background, always tucked in some obscure corner. Never like this, within the exact center of the room’s gravity. The blood rose in my cheeks. Magnus’s hand rested on the edge of the table, not far from my own, large and gnarled from years of casting his nets into the North Sea. The fingers curled with tension. For the first time, I noticed the priest who had come to stand in front of the table, just to my left, facing the guests.

  I glanced at Silverton, whose brow was heavy with speculation as he gazed up at Magnus’s profile.

  “Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?” I whispered.

  “Hmm. Yes. But what?”

  “Don’t you know? Hasn’t he told you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Gradually the assembled guests became aware of the two men standing at the head of the room. The air filled with an expectant silence. Someone suppressed a cough nearby. The servers backed away and stood at the perimeter.

  But it was not Magnus who spoke into that fragrant hush of people. It was his father.

  The Gaelic words rang out in measured phrases, translated into Norse at intervals by the priest who stood before me. I was too rapt, too astonished to concentrate on the words. The expression of the guests transformed from curiosity to amazement. A gasp swept along the tables. I looked desperately at Silverton, whose own face had hardened in that way he had when something important was taking place, too important for emotion.

  The earl finished, and Magnus’s voice boomed out in Norse, a single sentence, and the guests answered him with a cheer.

  “My God,” I said to Silverton, “what’s happened?”

  Next to me, Magnus and his father took their seats, and evidently this was a signal of some kind, because the rest of the company sat, too, and the musicians struck up from the gallery above our heads.

  “A rather extraordinary thing, I believe,” said Silverton. “The earl’s just made Magnus his heir.”

  “Can he do that? His natural son?”

  “In this age? Yes, I believe he can. The nobles are more autonomous. Like little kings.”

  The serving maids and men began to circulate with jugs of wine and platters of meat and stewed fruit, which they first laid before their lord. Magnus helped himself and his father, who served the countess. We could not eat until he had taken the first bite. Not that I had any desire to eat. The sight of the food was making me ill. I felt overturned, disorientated by all the revelations that had just uncovered themselves before me, one after another. Silverton reached with his knife and speared a slice of meat—duck or partridge or some sort of bird—and laid it on my plate, and I put my hand on his wrist.

  “I’m not hungry. You must speak. You’ve got to tell me about Magnus’s wife.”

  “Not here, Truelove. In front of everybody. After the feast.”

  “Now. Don’t you see, it’s vital, it can’t wait. You must tell me about Helen.”

  Silverton went still beneath my palm. “How do you know her name?”

  “Because I’ve met her, you fool. Don’t you understand? She was here, in the castle, the day Max and I came here. She was here.”

  I had always thought it was impossible to shock Silverton. You might startle or surprise him, perhaps, in an entirely superficial way, but after a decade spent undertaking the most dangerous, clandestine errands imaginable on behalf of his country, he had long ago conditioned himself to expect the unexpected. That was how he had survived in the twentieth century, and that was how he had survived in this one—the extraordinary strength of his nerves.

  But now. She was here, I said, and his hand froze, his body froze. He seemed to be staring at my fingers, where they encircled his wrist, and I felt the quick stutter of his pulse through his skin.

  I tightened my grip. “Do you hear me? She isn’t dead. She’s with Max, here, in this castle. She went through time. She’s still alive.”

  “I heard you.” He withdrew his hand, and I released him. “Does Magnus know?”

  “Of course not. How could I explain to him? We can scarcely exchange the simplest ideas. I only realized the connection because I remembered what Helen said, before I—before I came here. And because the children speak English as we do, without any instruction from you.”

  Silverton glanced across me to Magnus, who was speaking to his father. “Then why did he want to speak to you?”

  “I don’t know. I think he realizes there must be some connection, or else why should all three of us find our way into his life? But I didn’t wait to find out. As soon as I realized, I ran downstairs to find you.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Everybody was eating now; the feast had begun. Silverton reached to the platter and filled his own plate, but instead of eating he picked up his cup and drank his wine. His hand seemed steady enough. I envied him. I could not keep my nerves in place; the rest of the world seemed to exist at the end of a tunnel.

  “You have to tell me what you know,” I said. “There’s something—something’s going on, I can’t explain it, but I need to know everything, straightaway. Everything you know about Helen and how she disappeared.”

  “I don’t know anything. Neither of us knows anything. I’ve never even met her. She had already disappeared by the time I arrived.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, start from the beginning!”

  Magnus turned to us. “What is it? Something happens?”

  “No, old boy,” said Silverton. “I’m afraid she’s not feeling well.”

  “What?”

  Silverton spoke in Norse—I caught the word sick—and Magnus put his hand on my chin and turned my face toward his. He looked worried, almost thunderous, and said something to Silverton.

  “I’m not sick,” I said clearly. “For God’s sake. I just need to know. Will somebody please tell me what the devil happened here three years ago!”

  Magnus gestured to Silverton. “You tell her. Go. Now.”

  “Are you sure?” said Silverton.

  The two of them shared a heavy look. Above us, the minstrels played some light, cheerful tune with pipes and strings; the men and women around us were drinking wine, were eating rich food; somebody burst out into laughter and was joined by his fellows. The hall had been transformed into color and light and sound, was saturated with the smell of human sweat and animal food, and yet for an instant I glimpsed its bare, gray, half-ruined shell, scaled by scaffolding, ringing with the lonely beat of hammers and chisels, so clear and sharp I couldn’t breathe. I put my hands on my temples and closed my eyes. The vision passed, but I felt its absence inside me like a poison.

  “Take her,” Magnus said urgently. “Take her now.”

  But Silverton was already pushing himself from his chair, wrapping his arm around my waist, lifting me to my feet. “Come along, Truelove. That’s it. Let’s find somewhere private, hmm?
”

  He led me along the row of stools, stepped me down from the dais, called out for a cup of wine for his wife. His voice sounded like an echo of itself. I felt his hand at my waist, his arm across my back. The great hall slid past, a blur of colors, and something appeared before me, a cup. We paused. Silverton said, My thanks to you, in Norse. Took the cup and continued on, brushing past the servant who had brought it, a man wearing a plain gray tunic, smelling of something I couldn’t quite place. My head came up. I turned and looked over my shoulder at the man, but he had already turned away, and I couldn’t see his face, even if my eyes could properly focus.

  We reached the end of the hall and turned down a narrow, quiet passage, and in the diminishing of sight and sound my mind seemed to find anchor again. The whirring slowed, the objects around me took shape. Silverton led me to a small window recess and sat me on the bench. The wind sang through the shutters, but I was not chilled—the opposite. A strange friction heated my skin.

  “Here,” said Silverton, offering the cup to my lips, watching me closely. While I drank, he said, “I met Magnus as I told you, in Edinburgh. What I didn’t say was this: he had rescued me from those chaps at the tavern because he’d heard me swearing in English, the same native language as his wife.”

  “Helen,” I whispered.

  “Yes. He told me the story as we made our way northward. His English isn’t fluent, as you know, so I had to piece it all together. He said that she had come from the sea, half-dead, wearing clothes like the skin of a seal and speaking a strange language, and he had taken her into his hut by the sea and nursed her to health. Had fallen deeply in love with her. Eventually she loved him back, and bore him two children.”

  I set the empty cup on the bench beside me. “Did he actually believe that? That she was a selkie?”

  “He never said the word selkie. But he seemed to think her a magical creature of some sort. Until they learned a little of each other’s language, he didn’t know what else to think. And I don’t believe she trusted him for some time—trusted him to believe her, I mean, because the truth, as you know, is too fantastic for belief, unless you’ve seen it happen for yourself. Even now, I think he sees you and I and Helen as coming from another world, a sort of realm of the gods, like Valhalla. I don’t think he can properly get his head around the notion of traveling through time. God knows I don’t blame him.”