Susanna Kearsley: The Winter Sea

‘He is, rather, isn’t he?’ Proudly, she followed my gaze. ‘Alan’s mum says he looks just like Alan did.’

I couldn’t see it. ‘He’s got more of you in him, I think. Just look at that hair.’

‘Oh, the hair, God, yes, poor little chap,’ she said, touching the bright copper-gold softness of the small head. ‘I did hope he’d be spared that. He’ll freckle, you know.’

‘But freckles look so cute on little boys.’

‘Yes, well, be sure you come and tell him that, when he’s sixteen and cursing me.’

‘At least,’ I said, ‘he won’t begrudge the name you gave him. Jack’s a nice, good, manly name.’

‘The choice of desperation. I was hoping for something that sounded more Scottish, but Alan was so bloody-minded. Every time I came up with a name he’d say, “No, we had a dog called that”, and that would be the end of it. Honestly, Carrie, I thought for awhile we’d be having him christened as “Baby boy Ramsay”.’

But of course they hadn’t. Jane and Alan always found a way around their differences, and little Jack Ramsay had made it to church today, with me arriving in time to stand up as his godmother. That I’d managed to do it only by breaking every speed limit between my stop in Cruden Bay and here had left the baby so supremely unimpressed that, when he’d first laid eyes on me, he’d yawned and fallen fast asleep, not even waking when the minister had doused his head with water.

‘Is he always so calm?’ I asked now, as I looked at him.

‘What, didn’t you think I could have a calm baby?’ Jane’s eyes teased me, because she knew her own nature. She wasn’t what I would have called a calm person. She had a strong will; she was driven, and vibrant, so very alive that she made me feel colorless, somehow, beside her. And tired. I couldn’t keep up.

It didn’t help that I’d been struck by some virus last month that had kept me in bed over Christmas and taken the fun out of New Year’s and now, a week later, I still wasn’t back to full speed. But even when I was in good health, Jane’s energy level was miles above mine.

That was why we worked so well together; why I’d chosen her. I wasn’t any good myself with publishers—I gave in far too easily. I couldn’t stomach conflict, so I’d learned to leave it all to Jane, and she had fought my battles for me, which was why I found myself, at thirty-one, with four bestselling novels to my credit and the freedom to live anywhere, and anyhow, I chose.

‘How is the house in France?’ she asked me, coming back, as she inevitably would do, to my work. ‘You’re still at Saint-Germain-en-Laye?’

‘It’s fine, thanks. And I’m still there, yes. It helps me get my details right. The palace there is central to the plot, it’s where the action mostly happens.’ Saint-Germain had been the French king’s gift of refuge to the Stewart kings of Scotland for the first years of their exile, where old King James and young King James by turns had held court with their loyal supporters, who’d plotted and schemed with the nobles of Scotland through three luckless Jacobite uprisings. My story was intended to revolve around Nathaniel Hooke, an Irishman at Saint-Germain, who seemed to me to be the perfect hero for a novel.

He’d been born in 1664, a year before the Plague, and only four years after the restoration of King Charles II to the battered throne of England. When King Charles had died and his Catholic brother, James, came to the throne, Hooke had taken up arms in rebellion, but then had changed sides and abandoned his Protestant faith for the Catholic Church, becoming one of James’s stout defenders. But it wasn’t any use. England was a nation full of Protestants, and any king who called himself a Catholic couldn’t hope to keep the throne. James’s claim had been challenged by that of his own daughter, Mary, and William of Orange, her husband. And that had meant war.

Nathaniel Hooke had been right in the thick of it. He’d fought for James in Scotland and been captured as a spy, and held a prisoner in the fearsome Tower of London. After his release he’d promptly taken up his sword again and gone to fight for James, and when the battles all were over, and William and Mary ruled firm on their throne, and James fled into exile, Hooke had gone with him to France.

But he did not accept defeat. Instead, he’d turned his many talents to convincing those around him that a well-planned joint invasion by the French king and the Scots could set things right again, restore the exiled Stewarts to their rightful throne.

They nearly had succeeded.

History remembered the tragic romance of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie, years after Hooke’s time. But it was not in that cold winter at Culloden that the Jacobites—quite literally, the ‘followers of James’, and of the Stewarts—came closest to a realization of their purpose. No, that happened in the spring of 1708, when an invasion fleet of French and Scottish soldiers, Hooke’s idea, anchored off the coast of Scotland in the Firth of Forth. On board the flagship was the tall, twenty-year-old James Stewart—not the James who had fled England, but his son, whom many, not only in Scotland but in England, accepted as their true king. On shore, assembled armies of the highlanders and loyal Scottish nobles waited eagerly to welcome him and turn their might against the weakened armies to the south.

Long months of careful preparations and clandestine plans had come to their fruition, and the golden moment seemed at hand, when once again a Stewart king would claim the throne of England.

How this great adventure failed, and why, was one of the most fascinating stories of the period, a story of intrigue and treachery that all sides had tried hard to cover up and bury, seizing documents, destroying correspondence, spreading rumors and misinformation that had been believed as fact down to the present day.

Most of the details that survived had been recorded by Nathaniel Hooke.

I liked the man. I’d read his letters, and I’d walked the halls of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he had walked. I knew the details of his marriage and his children and his relatively long life and his death. So it was frustrating to me that, after five long months of writing, I still struggled with the pages of my novel, and Hooke’s character refused to come alive.

I knew Jane sensed that I was having trouble—as she said, she’d known me far too long and far too well to overlook my moods. But she knew, too, I didn’t like to talk about my problems, so she took care not to come at me directly. ‘Do you know, last weekend I read through those chapters that you sent me—’

‘When on earth do you have time to read?’

‘There’s always time to read. I read those chapters, and I wondered if you’d ever thought of telling things from someone else’s point of view…a narrator, you know, the way Fitzgerald does with Nick in The Great Gatsby . It occurred to me that someone on the outside could perhaps move round more freely, and link all the scenes together for you. Just a thought.’ She left it there, and no doubt knowing that my first response to anyone’s advice was staunch resistance, changed the subject.

Nearly twenty minutes later, I was laughing at her dry descriptions of the joys of diapering a newborn, when her husband, Alan, thrust his head around the doorway of the bedroom.

‘You do know there’s a party going on downstairs?’ he asked us, with a scowl I would have taken much more seriously if I hadn’t known it was all bluff. He was a softie, on the inside. ‘I can’t entertain this lot all on my own.’

‘Darling,’ Jane replied, ‘they are your relatives.’

‘All the more reason not to leave me alone with them.’ But he winked at me. ‘She’s not got you talking shop, I hope? I told her she’s to let you be. She’s too concerned with contracts.’