He took the hand I offered him, and in that swift, brief contact something warm, electric, jolted up my arm. He said, ‘I’m Graham.’
‘Hi.’
He really did have the best smile, I thought. It was sudden and genuine, perfect teeth gleaming an instant against the neat beard, closely trimmed to the line of his jaw. I missed it when he turned his head to watch the progress of the dog. ‘So, Carrie, tell me, what is it you’re writing?’
I knew that everyone I met in Cruden Bay would ask that question, and eventually I’d have to come up with a tidy, single-sentence answer, something that satisfied their polite interest without boring them to sleep. I tried it now, and told him, ‘It’s a novel set at Slains, back in the early eighteenth century.’
I’d thought that he might nod, or maybe say that sounded interesting, and that would be the end of it. Instead, he turned his head again, face angled so the strong wind kept the hair out of his eyes. ‘Oh, aye? What year?’
I told him, and he gave a nod.
‘The Franco-Scots invasion, is it? Attempted invasion, I guess I should call it. It wasn’t exactly a raging success.’ He bent briefly to wrestle the ball out of Angus’s teeth and then tossed it back out, several yards past the point where my own throw had landed. ‘An interesting choice,’ Graham said, ‘for a novel. I don’t ken that anyone’s written about it, that way. It barely makes the history books.’
I tried to hide my own surprise that he would be aware of what was written in the history books. Not because I’d made any assumptions about his intelligence, but because, based on the way he looked, the way he moved, I would have expected he’d be more at home on a football field than in a library. Showed what I knew, I thought.
I hadn’t noticed that the dog was overdue in coming back, but Graham had. He looked along the shore, eyes narrowed to the wind, and whistled sharply through his teeth to call the spaniel back. ‘I think he’s hurt himself,’ he said, and sure enough, Angus came limping towards us, the ball in his mouth, but one front paw held painfully.
‘Stepped on something,’ Graham guessed, and crouched down to investigate. ‘Broken glass, it looks like. Not a bad cut, but I’ll need to get that sand out.’
‘You can use my kitchen sink,’ I offered.
He carried Angus easily against his chest, the way a man might hold an injured child, and as I led them across the white footbridge and up the steep side of Ward Hill I was thinking of little else but the dog’s welfare. But with both of them inside, the cottage felt a little smaller, and I found myself becoming more self-conscious.
‘Sorry for the mess,’ I said, and tried to clear a space for him to lay the dog down on the narrow counter.
‘That’s all right. I’ve seen it worse. Is there a towel in the airing cupboard? One of those old yellow ones will do, don’t use a good one.’
I stopped, in the middle of moving a teacup, and stared at him. And then the gears of memory clicked a notch, and I remembered Jimmy Keith describing his two sons to me. He’d said, ‘There’s Stuie, he’s the younger, and his brother Graham’s doon in Aberdeen.’
‘Your last name isn’t Keith, by any chance?’ I asked.
‘It is.’
So that was why he seemed at home in here, and why he knew his local history. He should do, I thought. He lectured in it at the university.
He glanced at me, still holding the dog’s paw beneath the running water. ‘What’s the matter?’
Looking to the side, I smiled. ‘Nothing. I’ll go get that towel.’ I found the ones he wanted, the yellow ones, tucked in the back of the cupboard, and chose one that was worn, but clean.
He thanked me for it without looking up, and went on working at the wound. He had nice hands, I noticed. Neat and capable and strong, and yet their touch upon the spaniel’s paw was gentle. He asked, ‘Has Dad been telling tales about me, then? Is that it?’
‘No. It’s just that I keep tripping over members of your family. First your brother, and now you. There aren’t any other Keiths running around here in Cruden Bay, are there?’
‘Not counting cousins, there’s only the two of us.’ Still looking down and concentrating, he asked, ‘How did ye come to meet my brother?’
‘He was on my plane. He drove me up here from the airport.’
That brought his head around. ‘The airport?’
‘Yes, in Aberdeen.’
‘I ken fine where it is,’ he said. ‘But when I saw you last week, you were on your way to Peterhead, and driving by yourself. How did ye get from there,’ he asked me, ‘to the airport?’
I explained. It sounded decidedly odd to my own ears, the story of how I had looked at Slains castle and known that I needed to be here, and flown back to Paris to clear out my things and come over again, in the space of a couple of days. But if Graham thought anything of it, he didn’t say. When I had finished, he tore a long strip from one end of the towel and wrapped it with care around Angus’s paw.
‘So, you’re finished with France, then,’ he said, summing up.
‘Yes, it seems so. The book’s coming along well, now I’m here.’
‘Well, that’s good. There,’ he said, to the dog, ‘how is that, now? Feel better?’
Angus stretched his neck to lick at Graham’s face, who laughed and gave the floppy ears a tousle. ‘There now, we’ll clear off and let the lady get to work.’
I didn’t want them to clear off. I wanted them to stay. I wanted to tell him I did my writing mostly in the evenings, that my afternoons were free, that I could make some tea, and maybe we could talk… But I couldn’t think of a way I could say that without sounding forward, and he hadn’t given me any real reason to think he’d say yes, or to think that he found me one tenth as attractive as I found him.
So I just stood to the side as he thanked me again for my help, and he picked Angus up and I opened the door for them. That’s when he stopped and looked down at me, thinking.
He asked, ‘Have ye been to the Bullers o’ Buchan?’
‘The what?’
He repeated the name, taking care to speak slowly. ‘A sort of a sea cave, not far to the north.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Because I was thinking, if you’re feeling up to a bit of a walk, I could take you tomorrow.’
Surprised, I said, ‘That would be nice.’
I was kicking myself for my bland choice of words, but he didn’t appear to have noticed.
‘Right, then. How does ten o’clock suit you? You’ve no problem walking the coast path?’
‘No problem at all,’ I assured him.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Again I was hit with that flash of a smile, and as I looked at it I realised why I’d had that niggling feeling I’d seen Stuart’s face before. The brothers weren’t that much alike, but there was still a slight resemblance, although Graham’s features, to my mind, revealed a force of character, a strength, that had no echo in the face of his more handsome brother.
Stuart might be nice to look at. Graham was the kind of man I couldn’t look away from.
Maybe that was why, when he had gone, the first thing that I did was make a beeline for my workbook. In the section bookmarked ‘Characters’, I wrote three pages, longhand – the descriptive details of a man with eyes the colour of the winter sea.
I didn’t know exactly how I’d use him yet, but I had a suspicion that when I began to write tonight he’d turn up somewhere, entering the story with that easy, rolling stride that said he had a right to be there.
It was nearly time for supper when the knock came at my door.
I knew it was unlikely to be Graham, but my face must still have shown at least a trace of disappointment when I saw that it was Dr Weir, because he said, apologetically, ‘I didn’t interrupt your work, I hope?’
Recovering, I said, ‘Oh, no, of course not. Please, come in.’
‘I’ll not stay long.’ He wiped his feet, and stepped inside. ‘I promised Elsie I�
��d be home by dark. I’ve found those plans that I was telling you about, the plans that show Slains as it was in the old days, before the Victorian earls made it over. And I found a few old photographs I thought might be of interest to you. Where did I put them, now?’ Feeling inside his coat pocket, he found the small envelope holding the photos. The plans he’d brought rolled in a brown cardboard tube that he’d put, in its turn, in a clear plastic bag so it wouldn’t get wet. A wise precaution, I decided, since the strong wind off the sea had spattered water on his eyeglasses.
He took them off and wiped them while I put the plans and photos on my work table. ‘I don’t have any Scotch,’ I said, ‘but I could make you tea or coffee.’
‘No, my dear, I’m fine.’ He looked around with open interest and approval. ‘Jimmy’s made this very cosy.’
‘He’s been wonderful.’
‘Aye, all the Keiths are fairly that,’ he told me. ‘Even Stuart, for his faults. He got you back home in the one piece, I see.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘He’s a good lad, Stuart is, but…’ The doctor appeared to be choosing his words. ‘He’s still a lad, in many ways.’ Which, so I gathered, was meant as a fatherly warning.
I smiled, to show him there wasn’t a need. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed.’ And then, pretending ignorance, I asked him, ‘What’s the other brother like? The one who teaches?’
‘Graham? Well now, Graham is a very different animal from Stuart. Very different.’ He turned thoughtful. ‘He’s a person you should talk to, now I think of it. His memory’s remarkably good, and he has the resources to look things up for you. Besides,’ he said, ‘he’s something of a Jacobite himself, young Graham. Anything to do with the ‘08, he’ll likely know it. He lives down in Aberdeen now, but he comes up nearly every weekend. You might see him sometimes on the beach – he has a dog with him, a little spaniel dog.’ He tapped his watch. ‘Is that the time? I must be going. Keep those photographs as long as you’ve a use for them. The plans, as well. I hope they’ll be some help.’
I knew they would be, and I told him so.
Mind you, I thought, when he had gone and I was left alone again, they’d also serve to make my morning’s work a waste of effort. Crossing to my work table, I pushed my made-up floor plan to one side so I could make room for the real one.
It slid smoothly from its tube, and I unrolled it on the table, pinning down the upcurled edges with a ruler and the long edge of my workbook. There it was – the proper layout of Slains castle, drawn to scale and neatly labelled.
I examined it, then frowned, and with a disbelieving hand reached for the plan I’d drawn this morning. I laid it carefully alongside, for comparison.
There was no way, I thought, this could have happened. But it had.
They were the same.
Not just a little bit alike. They were identical. The kitchen, and the drawing room, the chamber where Sophia slept, the little corner room with light for sewing, they were all here, in the places where I’d put them in my writing, where I’d seen them in my mind.
But how? How did a person draw a thing so perfectly they’d never seen before?
I felt a stirring in the depths of my subconscious, and again the woman’s voice within my mind said softly, ‘So, you see, my heart is held forever by this place…’
Except the voice I heard this time was not Sophia’s.
It was mine.
Jane was calming, on the telephone. ‘All right, it’s weird, I’ll grant you that.’
I told her, ‘Weird is not the word. It’s freaky.’
‘Carrie, darling, you’ve got a photographic memory. You can quote entire conversations that we had three years ago. I’m telling you, you’ve seen the castle plans somewhere before, that’s all. You’ve just forgotten.’
‘If my memory’s so terrific, why would I forget?’
She sighed. ‘Don’t argue with your agent. Just accept the fact I’m right.’
I had to smile at that. I’d never even tried to have an argument with Jane, because I’d known I wouldn’t win. When she was certain she was right, I stood a better chance of moving mountains than of changing her opinion. ‘You don’t think I’m turning psychic?’
‘When you start to win the lottery,’ she promised me, ‘I’ll think you’re turning psychic. If you want to know the truth, I think you’re simply so absorbed in this new book that you’re letting yourself get exhausted. You need a night off. Put your feet up, do nothing.’
I pointed out that there was nothing to do, if I didn’t write. The cottage had no television.
‘So find a pub, have a few drinks.’
‘No, that’s no good, either. I’m going walking in the morning, up the coast path. I can’t be hung over.’
Her voice grew accusing. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t walk that coast path on your own.’
‘I won’t be on my own.’ The minute I’d said that I wished that I hadn’t. Jane had a ferret’s own instinct for sniffing things out, and I hadn’t a hope of running something like Graham Keith under her radar.
‘Oh, yes?’ Her tone was a study in nonchalance. ‘Who’s going with you?’
‘Just someone my landlord knows.’ Trying to muddy the scent, I told her how Jimmy had come back from his favourite haunt with his list of people I was supposed to meet. ‘He’s got me on a schedule.’
‘Very helpful of him.’ But she came right back to, ‘What’s his friend like? Young? Old? Good-looking?’
I said, ‘He lectures in history, at the university in Aberdeen.’
‘That isn’t what I asked.’
‘Well, what do most history professors look like, in your experience?’
She let me leave it there, but I had known her long enough to know she wasn’t finished asking questions. This was only the beginning. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘don’t write tonight. Your poor brain obviously needs a rest.’
‘You may be right.’
‘Of course I’m right. Ring me tomorrow, will you, after your walk, so I’ll know that you didn’t go over the cliffs?’
‘Yes, Mom.’
But I did take her advice about not working. I didn’t even read for research, though the pages Dr Weir had given me the night before – the articles having to do with Slains castle, along with the copies of Samuel Johnson’s and Boswell’s account of their visit there – sat in their folder, enticingly close to my armchair. Deliberately, I took no notice of them. Instead, I made a cup of tea and switched on the electric fire and sat there doing absolutely nothing till I fell asleep.
III
She didn’t like the gardener. He wasn’t like Kirsty, or Rory, or Mrs Grant the cook; or the slow-moving maltman who kept to the dark, fragrant brewing house and whom Sophia had actually seen only once; or the dairy and byre maids who did little more than go giggling past her whenever she ventured outdoors. No, the gardener was different.
He was not a very old man, but he looked it sometimes, bending over his hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever Sophia looked round, to be fixed upon her.
Now that spring had come, he seemed to be around Slains all the day, although he didn’t live there.
‘Oh, aye,’ Kirsty said, with understanding. ‘Billy Wick. I canna bide the man, myself. He makes me feel I’m standing in my shift, like, when he looks at me. The late earl had a fondness for his father, who was gardener here afore. ’Tis why her ladyship, the countess, keeps him on.’ She had been laying fires, and now was walking back along the corridor towards the kitchen, with Sophia following. There wasn’t anyone around to raise an eyebrow at the two girls keeping company. A message had come that morning from the present Earl of Erroll, who had been expected these days past, and on receiving it, the countess had retreated to her chamber to reply.
So when they reached the kitchen door, Sophia walked right through in Kirsty’s wake, and even Mrs Grant did not look disapproving, having long since giv
en up her attempts to persuade Sophia of the impropriety of mixing with the servants. It was clear to all that Kirsty and Sophia, being ages with each other and of friendly dispositions, would be difficult to keep apart. Here in Scotland, it was common for the sons of lairds and sons of farmers to sit side by side in school, and play at games together in their youth, a custom which produced a friendly feeling in the greater houses between those who served and those who sat at table. And as long as Kirsty showed Sophia all the deference and respect that was befitting to their roles when they were in the main rooms of the castle, Mrs Grant appeared to care but little these days what they did when they were on the servants’ side.
She, too, had nothing good to say about the gardener. ‘Allus lookin tae hisself, is Billy Wick. He couldna fairly wait tae see his father deid sae he could get his fingers on the siller that was left. There wisna much. Tis why he keeps on here. But Billy thinks hisself above the likes of us. Ye keep well clear of him,’ she warned Sophia, motherly. ‘He’s nae the sort o man ye need tae ken.’
Rory, coming through the back door, caught the last bit and his eyebrows lifted just a bit, enquiring.
Mrs Grant said, ‘We’re nae spikkin aboot ye. Tis Billy Wick I meant.’
He simply gave a nod and said, ‘Oh, aye,’ which meant he either was acknowledging her comment or agreeing with it. Guessing Rory’s mind was never easy. He took an oatcake from a nearby plate and ate it, and when Mrs Grant prepared to scold him for it, he answered it was likely all the food he’d have that afternoon. ‘I’m away within the hour with her ladyship. We ride to Dunottar.’
Another clifftop castle to the south of Aberdeen – the home, so Kirsty told Sophia now, of the countess’s nephew by marriage, the Earl Marischal. It was not uncommon for there to be visits between Slains and Dunottar, but not within an hour’s notice. Kirsty frowned. ‘Would there be trouble, then?’
‘I dinna ken.’ Rory shrugged. ‘Her ladyship telt me to get the horses ready and prepare to ride with her, and that much I can do.’
Sophia's Secret Page 10