Susanna Kearsley - The Winter Sea

I traced the outline, plain and square, of Moray’s ring, and thought of all the times that I had seen it in my mind while I’d been writing, all the times I’d almost felt its weight against my own chest, all the times I’d wondered what had happened to it.

Now I knew.

She’d kept it, and the years had sent it traveling down through the family until no one could remember where it came from, who had worn it, what it meant. It might have passed out of our family altogether and been sold to strangers, if I had not come to Slains.

But I had come. The sea, the shore, the castle walls had called to me, and I had come.

I touched the picture of the brooch with fingers that shook slightly, because Moray’s ring, too, had a voice—a quiet but insistent voice that called to me across a wider sea, and when I heard it there was no doubt left within my mind what I was meant to do.

Graham was still up and reading when I came to bed. He’d put on one of the small electric heaters to take the chill out of the room, but it was no match for the storm winds blowing strongly off the sea, so strongly that I’d spent the evening worrying the phone lines would go down and I would miss my scheduled call from New York City. But I hadn’t.

Graham looked up from his book as I came in the room. ‘Did ye get it?’

But he knew the answer from my smile as I climbed shivering beneath the covers. ‘Yes.’ I didn’t bother saying what I’d paid for it, because it didn’t matter. I had known when I’d arranged to bid by telephone tonight at auction that I wasn’t going to stop until I got the brooch. The ring. And in the end there hadn’t been that many people bidding for it, only two besides myself, and they had lacked my private motivation. To them, it had been nothing more than jewelry, but to me it was a piece of Moray and Sophia that I could hold in my hand, and keep with me for always, to remember them.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ I asked Graham, and he turned the cover round to show me.

‘Dryden’s plays. The one that you had marked,’ he said. ‘The Merlin one. Where did you dig this up?’

‘Dr Weir loaned it to me.’ I’d been at Dr Weir’s for tea two days ago, and seen the book of Dryden on his shelf—a modern volume, not an old one, but I’d asked about it anyway, and he had known the play I meant.

‘Except it was renamed,’ he’d said. ‘Yes, this is what you’re after, here. Merlin, or the British Enchanter .’

Why Dryden had changed the play’s title from Arthur to Merlin I couldn’t imagine, but it was the same play. I’d read the lines with the warm sense of recognition that I felt when picking up a favorite novel.

Graham said, ‘I’m nearly at the end. King Arthur’s just been reunited with his Emmeline.’ He quoted smoothly from the page: ‘“At length, at length, I have thee in my Arms; Tho’ our Malevolent Stars have struggled hard, And held us long asunder”. Sounds like us,’ he said, and setting down the book he switched the lamp off, rolling over while I snuggled close against him in the dark.

It sounded more like someone else, to me. I smiled. ‘We didn’t have any malevolent stars.’

‘Well, maybe not, no. Only Stuie.’

He was drifting, I could hear it in his voice. He always fell asleep as easily as some great lazing cat, he only had to close his eyes and moments later he’d be gone, while my own mind kept on whirring round with scattered thoughts and images.

I felt his breathing slow against my neck, the heavy warmth of him behind me like a shield to block the fierceness of the storm that even now seemed bent on shaking its way through the windows of the cottage. I was lying there and thinking when I heard the click. At first I didn’t realize what had happened, till I saw the glow of the electric heater dying. ‘Oh, no. The power’s out. The storm—’

‘It’s not the storm,’ said Graham. ‘Just the meter. It was low this afternoon, I meant to fix it for you. Sorry.’

‘Well, I’ll fix it now.’

But Graham held more tightly to me. ‘Let it be,’ he mumbled, low, against my shoulder. ‘We’ll be warm enough.’

My eyes closed and I started drifting, too. Until I realized what he’d said.

I was awake again, and staring. ‘Graham?’

But he was already sleeping deeply, and he didn’t hear.

It might be just coincidence, I thought, that he had twice now used the same words that I’d written in my book, the words that Moray had once spoken to Sophia. And Moray only looked like him because I’d made him look like him…I had made Moray look like Graham, hadn’t I? It couldn’t be that Moray had in fact had eyes the color of the winter sea, the same as Graham’s eyes, and Graham’s mother’s eyes…

My mother’s family goes a long way back here , he had told me.

And an image crossed my own mind of a little girl with darkly curling hair who long ago had run with outstretched arms along the beach. A girl who had grown up here and presumably had married and had children of her own. Had anybody ever traced the line of Graham’s family tree, I wondered? And if I tried to myself, would I find it included a fisherman’s family who’d lived in a cottage just north of the Bullers of Buchan?

That, too, seemed impossible. Too like a novel itself to be true. But still I saw that little girl at play along the shore. The wind rose swirling at my window with a voice that was familiar and again I heard Sophia saying, as I’d heard her say my first day in this cottage, that her heart was held forever by this place. And I could hear the countess answering, ‘But leave whatever part of it you will with us at Slains, and I will care for it. And by God’s grace I may yet live to see the day it draws you home.’

As I lay listening to Graham’s steady breathing in the darkness, I could almost feel that tiny missing fragment of Sophia’s heart rejoin my own and make it whole. Behind me, Graham shifted as though he had felt it, too. And then his arm came round me, solid, safe, and drew me firmly back against the shelter of his chest, and I felt peace, and turned my face against the pillow, and I slept.

THE END

Any work of historical fiction relies on real people. With very few exceptions—little Anna, and the servants at Slains, and Sophia—the characters from the eighteenth-century story are real, and their actions are bound by the limits of what truly happened.

Not that finding out what truly happened in the ’08 is an easy thing. All sides, for their own purposes, tried hard to cover up the truth, and even what was written by the people who lived through it can’t be trusted. I’m indebted to John S Gibson’s masterfully succinct history of events surrounding the invasion, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 , the book that first inspired me to write about the period, and to Colonel Nathaniel Hooke’s wonderfully detailed memoir of the incident, published in 1760 as The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s Negotiations in Scotland, in Favor of the Pretender . I was fortunate enough to find an original copy of Hooke’s account that not only became one of the treasures of my home library, but also proved invaluable in sorting out the movements of my characters.

I’ve tried, wherever possible, to seek out the best evidence—the letters and the transcripts of the time. If an account was written down of what was said between two people, then I’ve had them say the same thing in my book. If Captain Gordon’s ship was in Leith harbor on a certain day, I’ve put him there. I’ve used this rule with even minor characters: “Mr Hall” was the alias commonly used by the priest Father Carnegy when he traveled in public on Jacobite business, and his visits to Slains on behalf of the Duke of Hamilton are a matter of fact, as is Mr Malcolm’s part in the invasion, and his going into hiding when it failed.