Susanna Kearsley - The Winter Sea

But it hadn’t been. Here was the evidence, plain black and white on the screen, and I couldn’t help feeling the way I might feel if I’d opened my eyes to discover a dinosaur in my front garden. With disbelieving hands, I saved the document again and hit the key to print.

The knocking came a second time. I scraped back in my chair, and stood, and went across to answer it.

‘I didna mean tae waken ye.’ Jimmy Keith was all apology, although he had no reason to be, given that it was, as near as I could tell, the middle of the day.

I lied. ‘You didn’t, that’s all right.’ I clenched my cheeks to hold the yawn back that would have betrayed me. ‘Please, come in.’

‘I thought ye micht be wanting help, like, wi’ the stove.’ He brought the cold in with him, clinging to his jacket like the briskness of the salt wind off the sea. I couldn’t see too far behind him for the fog that hung above the waves was like some great cloud that was too heavy to get airborne. Leaving his mud-bottomed boots at the doormat, he went past and into the kitchen and opened the stove door to peer at my coal fire. ‘Ach, it’s gone and deed on ye, it’s fairly oot. Ye should’ve ca’d me.’

Sweeping the dead ashes out, he relaid the coals, his rough hands so quick and neat in their movements that I wondered again what he did for a living, or what he had done. So I asked him.

He glanced up again. ‘I was a slater.’

A maker of slate roofs. So that would explain why he looked like he’d lived his whole life in the open air, I thought.

He asked what I did, and there was the ‘f ’ sound again, in the place of a ‘w’—making the word ‘what’ in Jimmy’s speech come out as ‘fit’: ‘Fit aboot yersel?’ He gave a nod to my laptop computer, its printer still humming away on the long wooden table against the far wall. ‘Fit d’ye dee wi’ that?’

‘I write,’ I told him. ‘Books.’

‘Oh, aye? Fit kind o’ books?’

‘Novels. Set in the past.’

He clanged the door shut on the Aga and stood, looking fairly impressed. ‘Oh, aye?’

‘Yes. The one that I’m working on now is set here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I wanted this cottage. My story takes place at Slains Castle.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Jimmy repeated, as though he’d discovered a thing of great interest. I had the feeling that he would have asked me more if someone hadn’t, at that moment, knocked again at the front door.

‘Yer in demand the day,’ said Jimmy as I went to open it, and found, as I had half-expected, Stuart on the doorstep.

‘Morning. Thought I’d come and see how you were getting on,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, thanks. Come on in, your father’s here.’

‘My father?’

‘Aye,’ said Jimmy, from the kitchen, his eyes crinkling at their corners. ‘I’ve nivver seen ye up sae early, loon. Are ye a’richt?’

Stuart parried the jab with a smile. ‘It’s after eleven.’

‘Aye, I ken fine fit time it is.’

He finished restoking the fire in my stove and stood when I thanked him. But he didn’t look as though he were in any hurry to go anywhere, and neither did Stuart, so I asked, ‘Does anyone want coffee? I was just about to make a cup.’

To both Keith men, apparently, a cup of coffee sounded fine. They didn’t sit while waiting. Jimmy wandered out into the main room, whistling faintly through his teeth, while Stuart came after me into the kitchen and leaned with his back to the wall, his arms folded. ‘So, how did you like your first night in the cottage? I should have warned you that the bedroom window rattles like the devil when the wind blows off the sea. It didn’t keep you up, I hope?’

‘I didn’t actually make it to the bedroom last night. I was working,’ I said, with a nod to the long wooden table.

Jimmy, who’d been having a look at my computer, added, ‘She’s a writer.’

‘Aye, I know she is,’ said Stuart.

‘She’ll be writin,’ Jimmy said, ‘aboot oor castle.’

Stuart looked at me with what might have been pity. ‘It’s a big mistake, to tell my Dad a thing like that.’

I set the kettle on to boil. ‘Why’s that?’

‘He’ll be up to the St Olaf for his lunch, that’s why, and by this afternoon the whole of Cruden Bay will know exactly why you’re here, and what you’re doing. You won’t have a moment’s peace.’

‘Ach, the loon disna ken fit he’s on aboot,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ve nae time fer claikin.’

‘That’s “gossiping”,’ Stuart translated the word for my benefit. ‘And don’t believe him. He loves telling stories.’

His father put in, ‘Aye, and lucky fer me I’ve yersel tae keep geein me somethin tae tell aboot. Is that the kettle?’

It was. I made the coffee, and we sat around companionably and drank it, and then Jimmy checked his watch and said, ‘Weel, I’m awa hame.’ He jabbed a finger at his son. ‘And dinna ye stop here lang, either.’ And he thanked me for the coffee, and went out.

The fog was lifting, but the damp sea air surged in behind him, and I felt it even after I had closed the door. It made me restless.

‘Tell you what,’ I said to Stuart. ‘Why don’t I go get my coat, and you can give me the Cook’s tour of Cruden Bay?’

He cast an eye towards the window. ‘What, in this?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not, she says.’ But he gave in, unfolding himself from the chair. ‘Well, the weather’s as good as you’re likely to get at this time of the year, I suppose, so all right.’

It was good to walk out in the wind, with my hair blowing loose and the spray from the sea carried up from the breakers that crashed on the empty pink beach. The path down the hill was still slippery with water and mud, but whatever misgivings I’d felt here last night in the dark were forgotten by day, and the harbor below looked quite friendly and welcoming.

It wasn’t a large harbor, just a small square of calm water behind a protective wall fronting the sea, and there were no boats actually moored there—the few I could see had been pulled up and out of the water completely to lie on the land, and I gathered that no one went fishing from here in the wintertime.

Stuart led me up the other way and past his father’s cottage and the others huddled tight beside it, with their roughened plaster walls and roofs of dripping slate. We passed the long, white-painted footbridge that crossed over to the high dunes and the beach, and while I would have liked to detour off in that direction, Stuart had another place in mind.

We’d turned the ‘S’ curve where the Harbour Street changed into Main Street, with its row of houses and its few shops climbing up the one side, and the lively stream cascading down the other, overhung by leafless trees. At the top of the hill, Main Street ended by running straight into the side of another main road—the same road I’d been driving on when I’d come through here last weekend, only I hadn’t stopped then till I’d followed it further and round through the woods. I’d been so focused that day on chasing my view of the ruins that I hadn’t taken much notice of anything else. Like the beautiful building that held court just over the road at the top of the Main Street.

It had red granite walls and white dormers and several bow-fronted two-storey projections that gave it a look of Victorian elegance. We were approaching it now from the side, but its long front looked over a lawn that sloped down to the stream which appeared to behave itself better up here, running quietly under a bridge on the main road as though it, too, felt that the building was owed some respect.

‘And this,’ said Stuart grandly, ‘is the “Killie”—the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel. It’s where your friend Bram Stoker stayed when he first came to Cruden Bay, before he moved to Finnyfall, the south end of the beach.’