The Winter Sea

CHAPTER 6

THE CASTLE WOOD STOOD not far up past the Kilmarnock Arms. I’d gone through it that first day when I had been driving to Jane’s, and by daylight had thought it a peaceful place, but in the dark it was different, and I was grateful that I could pass by it tonight on the far sidewalk, keeping the road in between. There were masses of rooks wheeling noisily over the treetops, their harsh cries unnerving. And the tall trees themselves with their strange gnarled branches looked twisted and weird, like the wolf-and witch-concealing forests in the illustrations of my old book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Dr Weir’s house was a welcome sight—a neat, low bungalow, with wind chimes hung beside the door and a family of small painted gnomes peering up from the tidy front garden.

I was clearly expected. I barely had to knock before the door was opened to me. Dr Weir looked like a gnome himself: not tall, moon-faced, with round, old-fashioned spectacles. I couldn’t judge his age. His hair was white, but his complexion had a healthy, ruddy smoothness, and the eyes behind the spectacles were clear and sharp. He’d been a surgeon, Jimmy had explained, and had just recently retired.

‘Come in,’ he said, ‘come in.’ He took my coat and shook the dampness from it, hanging it with care upon the antique mirrored hall tree. I could see, in every corner of the entryway, the evidence of good taste and a love of timeworn things. There was no clutter, but the fading prints hung on the wall, the Persian carpet runner on the floor, and the soft light from old glass sconces on the walls, all lent the space an atmosphere of permanence and comfort.

And that atmosphere was stronger in the narrow, lamplit study that he showed me to. One wall was lined from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases, their shelves packed tight with volumes old and new, hardback and paperback. And where he had run out of room to stand a book up properly on edge, he’d laid it horizontally across the top of its companions and stacked others over that, so there were books wedged in wherever there was space. It had the same effect on me as the sight of a candy store had on a six-year-old.

But because I didn’t want to seem like a six-year-old, I held in my enthusiasm and let him introduce me to his wife, who had been sitting in a chintz-upholstered chair, one of a pair that flanked a small round table at the narrow end wall. Behind these, a fall of striped, pinch-pleated curtains had been drawn across the room’s one window, shutting darkness out and keeping in the warm glow of the reading lamps. A leather wing chair with a smoking table at its side completed the room’s furnishings, and on the wall that didn’t have the bookcases, a handful of seascapes and nautical prints caught the light in the glass of their frames.

The doctor’s wife, Elsie, was compact like him, and white-haired, but not round in the slightest. More a fairy than a gnome, I thought. Her blue eyes seemed to dance. ‘We were about to have our evening whisky,’ she informed me. ‘Will you join us? Or perhaps you’d like some tea?’

I told her whisky would be fine.

Because the wing chair was so obviously the doctor’s, I took the other chintz-covered chair, angled with the bookcases to my one shoulder and the curtains of the window to my other, and the small round table set between myself and Elsie Weir.

Dr Weir stepped out a moment, and returned with three large tumblers of heavy cut glass, each a third of the way filled with rich amber whisky. He handed mine to me. ‘So, Jimmy said you were a writer. Historical fiction, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m that ashamed to say I didn’t recognize your name.’

Elsie smiled. ‘He’s a typical man. Never picks up a book if the writer’s a woman. He always expects it to end with a kiss.’

‘Well, mine usually do,’ I admitted. I tasted my whisky, and let the sharp warmth sear a path to my stomach. I loved the pure taste of a single malt Scotch, but I had to consume it in small, measured sips, or it did me in quickly. ‘The book that I’m working on now has to do with the French and the Jacobites trying to bring James VIII back to Scotland, in 1708.’

‘Does it, now?’ He had lifted his eyebrows. ‘That’s a lesser-known skirmish. What made you choose that one?’

I wasn’t sure myself. The main ideas for my novels never struck me like a lightning bolt. They formed themselves in stages, like a snowball packed in layers, with clumps padded on here and lumps scraped away there, till the whole thing was rounded and perfect. But by then, I could no longer see the shape of that first handful I’d scooped up, that first small thought that had begun the process.

I tried to think of what had started this one.

I’d been working on my last book, which was set in Spain, and, needing to find out some minor detail about eighteenth-century hospitals, I’d come across the memoirs of a doctor who had lived in France about the time I needed. That doctor had done surgery on Louis XIV—the Sun King—and had been so proud of it that he’d written several detailed pages on the incident. And that had got me interested in Louis XIV.

I’d started reading up on him, and on his court and all its goings-on. For pleasure, nothing more. And then one night I’d turned my television on to catch the news and got the channel wrong and tuned in an old movie—Errol Flynn in ‘Captain Blood’—and because I’d always had a thing for Errol Flynn I’d watched him instead, enjoying the swordfights and the romance and the swashbuckling, and at the end he’d leapt onto the foredeck of his ship and told his fellow pirates they could all return to England, now that bad King James had fled to France and good King William ruled the country.

And that had set me thinking, idly, of what rotten luck the Stewart kings had suffered, King James in particular, and how it must have felt for him to lose the crown, give up his throne, and have to live in exile.

And, still thinking this, I’d turned the television off and opened up the book that I’d been reading, a biography of Louis XIV, and on the page where I’d left off there’d been a mention of the palace, Saint-Germain, that Louis had loaned to the Stewart kings in exile, so they still could keep a royal court. Intrigued, I’d started reading up on that—on all the Scottish nobles coming in and out of Saint-Germain, and all the plotting that went on. I’d found it all so fascinating.

Shortly after that, I’d found the papers by Nathaniel Hooke, and learned about his dream of a rebellion, and…

It was, I knew, a convoluted explanation, and most people who asked where I got my ideas were looking for a shorter answer, so I said to Dr Weir that I had picked the 1708 rebellion just because, ‘I liked Nathaniel Hooke.’

‘Ah, Hooke.’ The doctor nodded. ‘He’s an interesting character. An Irishman, though, not a Scot. You knew that? Yes, he came to Slains on two occasions, I believe. The first in 1705, to gauge support among the nobles for his plan to bring the young king back, and then again in 1707, to set everything in motion.’

‘I’m just dealing with the second visit, really. And the actual attempt at the invasion, the next winter.’ I settled back and took another careful sip of whisky, and explained how, since I’d started writing my book from the French side of things, I needed to fill in some gaps on my knowledge of Slains. ‘Jimmy said you knew a lot about the castle.’

‘That I do.’

‘It’s his pet subject,’ Elsie told me, with a fond, indulgent smile. ‘I hope you’ve nothing else to do, this evening.’

Dr Weir, ignoring her, said, ‘What, specifically, were you wanting to know?’

‘Whatever you can tell me.’ I had learned from years of doing research not to put restrictions on the things that people told me and although he’d likely touch on things I’d read about already, I’d learn more from him if I just let him talk, and kept my own mouth shut.

He started with the history of the Hays, the Earls of Erroll, who had built Slains. ‘It’s an old and noble family. There’s a legend told about the Hays, you know, that in the ancient days an ancestor of theirs was ploughing a field with his two sons, in sight of a battlefield on which the Danes were destroying the Scots forces. And, says the legend, when one of the Scots lines began to break up and retreat, well, this farmer—a large man, with powerful arms—snatched the yoke from his oxen to use as a weapon, and called to his sons, and together the three of them herded the Scots soldiers back into battle and reformed the line, and the Danes, in the end, were defeated. The king then took the farmer and his sons to Perth, and let a falcon off from Kinnoull Hill, and said that all the land the falcon flew over was to be theirs. And the bird flew to a stone, still called the Hawk’s Stone, in St Madoes Parish, so then the farmer was master of some of the finest lands north of the Tay, and a man of great wealth.

‘It’s no more than a tale, mind, and there’s nothing written down to give it proof, but to this day the Chiefs of Hay still carry as their coat of arms the king’s falcon, and the ox-yoke, and three bloodstained shields, one each for that brave farmer and his sons. And the family’s motto, translated, means “Keep the Yoke”. So they believe it, anyway.’

He paused, because he’d noticed that I’d taken out my notebook and was writing down the legend, and he gave me time to finish.

‘Do you have all that?’ he asked me. ‘Good. I’ll try to go more slowly for you. Now, about the Hays. They came from Normandy, according to the history books. They were raised to the title of earls in the mid-fifteenth century, and fully a hundred years before that, they’d been made Lord High Constables of Scotland by Robert the Bruce himself. That’s an influential office, Lord High Constable, and a hereditary one, passed down the family through the generations, along with a fierce devotion to the Catholic cause.

‘They supported Mary, Queen of Scots’s son, James VI, till James decided to turn Protestant. That was too much for the 9th Earl of Erroll, and he led a mounted attack on the king’s forces. Got himself an arrow wound for his efforts, as I recall. And he made King James so angry that the king marched north personally to sack the Earl of Erroll’s castles at Delgatie and Old Slains, just south of here. Destroyed them both with gunpowder and cannon. The Earl of Erroll spent a few years biding time in exile, then came back to Scotland, and, instead of trying to rebuild Old Slains, decided to build anew, around a tower house the Hays kept here. So then he called this New Slains.

‘New Slains is the one you want to know about. The other was long gone when Colonel Hooke came over. In 1708… now, let me think…the Earl of Erroll who’d have been here would have been the 13th earl, Charles Hay, the last male of the line. And his mother, the Countess of Erroll, Anne Hay, was a driving force in the conspiracy. But then,’ he said, ‘she would have been. She was a Drummond, and her brother was the Duke of Perth, a powerful man at the court of the Stewarts, in France. She was committed to trying to bring back the king. A remarkable woman. The Countesses of Erroll have, through history, been more interesting,’ he told me, ‘than their men.’

He drank his whisky, and the warm light in the little room reflected on the thousand points of intricately cut glass on his tumbler, and his round, old-fashioned glasses, behind which his eyes turned thoughtful. ‘Mind you, her son, the 13th earl, did have some fire in his belly. He hated the Union, and fought it till his dying breath, in any way he could. And then, of course, he was a Hay, and a supporter of the Stewart kings, and that was not a choice a man made lightly. Dangerous times, so they were.’ He mused on this a moment, then went on, ‘He didn’t think to marry and produce an heir before he died, and so he passed the title to his sister. Another interesting Countess of Erroll, she was, but that’s a different story altogether. Anyway, she had no heir either, so from her the title went sideways, into her nieces and nephews, and out of the old family. Slains, though, stayed with the Earls of Erroll until 1916, when the 20th earl had to sell it for death duties. The new owner eventually gave up on it, and had the roof taken off in the 1920s—for safety, they say, though more likely it was so he wouldn’t have to pay the taxes. After that, well, with no roof, the place just fell to ruin.’

Elsie said, ‘A shame, it was, a grand old house like that, with such a history. Samuel Johnson stayed there once, you know, with Mr Boswell, his biographer. Douglas, you used to have copies of what they both wrote about Slains. It was fair interesting.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I forgot about those.’ Rising from his leather chair, he left the room a moment and returned with a file folder full of papers. ‘You can keep these, if you like. I’ve other copies. Boswell’s account is by far the more colorful. Johnson’s is drier, but still good to read. There are one or two other bits in the folder that might be of help to you, having to do with the history of Slains. And somewhere,’ he said, looking round, at a loss, ‘I did have the old plans for the castle, that showed where the rooms were. I can’t think what I’ve done with it.’

Elsie said, ‘You may have loaned it out.’

‘Oh, very likely.’ He sat down again and smiled at me. ‘The curse of age. I can’t remember anything. I’ll see if I can’t find them for you though, those plans. You’d like to have a look at them, I’m sure.’

‘I would, yes. Very much.’

Elsie smiled. ‘It must be fun to write about the past. What made you interested in history?’

There was no short answer to that question either, but I did my best, and so we talked about my father’s love of genealogy, and the trips we had taken to places our ancestors came from, and all of the hours that I’d spent as a child walking with him in graveyards to search out the headstones of great-great-great grandfathers. All of those people were real to me. Their faces in the framed and yellowed photographs that hung around our house were as familiar as my own, and when I stopped to look at them their eyes looked back at me, and pulled me with them to the past.

The doctor nodded understanding. ‘Aye, my father had no great love of history, but he’d inherited a portrait, quite a good painted portrait, of a Weir who had been a sea captain. It hung in the study, when I was a lad. A fair bit of imagining, I did around that portrait. I don’t doubt it’s why I’m so fond of the sea.’

That reminded me. ‘Do you, by any chance, know where I could find out about Scottish naval history in the early eighteenth century?’

He smiled, and setting down his glass, looked over to his bookcases. ‘Well, now, I might have a few odd volumes on the subject.’

Elsie said, ‘He has a shelf full. Were you wanting information on the ships?’

‘The people, mostly. I need to do research on one of the captains Nathaniel Hooke writes about.’

‘Ah, Captain Gordon, is it?’ Dr Weir glanced at me to make sure it was, then stood to search the shelves. ‘There’s quite a lot on Gordon in The Old Scots Navy. I did have a copy here…aye, here it is. You can take that with you, if you like, and read it over, see if what you want is in there. If not, I have other books that you can—’

Someone knocking at the front door interrupted.

‘Do excuse me,’ said the doctor, and he went out to the entry hall. I heard the door swing open, and the muffled voices of the doctor and another man, a burst of laughter, and the stamp of feet as someone crossed the threshold.

Dr Weir returned, all smiles. ‘Your driver’s here.’

‘My driver?’

Stuart Keith came close behind him, handsome in his leather jacket, with his near-black hair. ‘I was just on my way home, and I thought you might need a lift down to the harbor. The wind’s picking up something fierce.’

I hadn’t noticed it earlier, while we’d been talking, but now I could hear the wind raging against the front window behind me. And I thought of walking back in that, alone, past Castle Wood, and of that dark and lonely stretch of path that led from Harbour Street up to my cottage on the hill, and having Stuart take me home seemed suddenly a very good idea.

So I thanked the Weirs for what had been a really useful evening, and I finished off my whisky in a rather too-large swallow, and with borrowed book and files in hand, I said good night.

Outside, the wind rocked Stuart’s low-slung car as I slid into it. ‘How did you know where I’d be?’ I asked.

‘Someone mentioned it tonight in the pub.’ When he saw my expression he said, ‘Well, I told you, now, didn’t I? One hour at the St Olaf Hotel and my dad can spread any news round half the village. Has he got you on a schedule, yet?’

‘Not quite. He just gave me a list of people he thought could help.’

‘Oh, aye? Who were they?’

‘I can’t remember their names, honestly. But I think I’m supposed to be getting a driving tour this weekend, from either a plumber or a schoolteacher.’

He smiled. ‘That would be the plumber. You don’t have to go—I can give you a driving tour.’ He turned the wheel smartly as he said that, and the back tires swung out as we made the turn down into Main Street.

I gripped my armrest. ‘I think that my odds of survival are better,’ I said, ‘with the plumber.’

He laughed, and I went on, ‘Besides, you’re off again this weekend, aren’t you? Down to London.’

‘Aye, but not for long.’ I felt his glance, although I couldn’t see him clearly in the dimness of the sports car’s warm interior. ‘I will be back.’

I knew he liked me. And I liked him, too, but not that way. Despite his looks, there wasn’t any spark, and although it had been some time since I’d felt a spark with anyone, I knew enough to know when it was missing. So I felt a little guilty when I let him park the car and walk me up the muddy footpath to my cottage. I didn’t want to lead him on, or give him false encouragement, but neither did I want to be alone. Not here. Not in the dark, when every hair along my neck was rising with the sense of something wicked on its way.

‘Mind how you go,’ said Stuart, reaching out to grab my arm. ‘That’s the second time you’ve done that, nearly stepped clean off the path.’ He stopped. Looked down at me. ‘What’s wrong?’

I couldn’t answer him. The moment that he’d grabbed me, I’d been gripped by panic, sudden and unreasoning. My heart was beating so hard in my chest that I could hear it, and I didn’t have the least idea why. I took a breath, and forced a smile. ‘You just…surprised me,’ was the only explanation I could offer.

‘I can see that. Sorry.’

‘Not your fault. I hate this path at night, to tell the truth,’ I said, as we fell back in step. ‘It’s all right in the daytime, but at night it always spooks me.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘I don’t know. Curse of my profession, I suppose. I have a wild imagination.’

‘Well, you can call me any time you like, I’ll come and walk you home.’

‘You won’t be here,’ I pointed out.

‘Aye. I’m away tomorrow morning, early. But I’ve told you, I’ll be back.’

We’d reached the cottage. Stuart watched me fit my key into the lock, and asked, ‘D’ye want me to come in and see you don’t have any monsters in your cupboards?’

From his smile I thought it far more likely that he had a mind to look for monsters underneath my bed, and I was not about to fall for that. I took his offer lightly. ‘No, you don’t have to do that, I’m OK.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

I saw how he was watching me, and knew he was considering attempting a good night kiss, but before he followed through with it, I reached instead to hug him—just a friendly hug that made no promises and wouldn’t be misunderstood. ‘Thanks again for bringing me home,’ I said. ‘Have a safe trip down to London.’

The hug seemed to surprise him, but he took it all in stride. ‘I will,’ he said, and let me go, and took a backwards step onto the path. ‘And I’ll be seeing you,’ he promised, ‘very soon.’

For all the complications that I knew I’d just avoided, I was sorry to see him go. The cottage felt lonely when I went inside. And cold. The coal fire in my Aga had burned so low that it took an hour of concentrated effort to revive it, and by then I was so chilled and tired I wanted just to fall into my bed, and go to sleep.

I took the book with me—the one that Dr Weir had loaned me, on the Scottish navy, because, tired or not, I felt I should do some work, since I clearly wasn’t going to write tonight. It was an older book with blue board covers, and the title page read helpfully: ‘The Old Scots Navy, From 1689 to 1710, Edited by James Grant, L.L.B.’ The frontispiece was black and white, a portrait of a white-wigged naval officer in an authoritative stance, his finger pointing to a sailing vessel in the background. There was something in his eyes, his face, that struck me as familiar, so I peered more closely at the light italic script beneath the portrait, looking for his name. I found it.

Thomas Gordon.

Admiral Thomas Gordon, to be sure, but every Admiral was a captain, once.

I sat upright. Cold rushed in beneath the blankets, crept around me, but I hardly felt it. Flipping to the index, I began a careful reading of the references to Thomas Gordon.

‘Thomas Gordon had,’ the book informed me, ‘a remarkable career…His voyages embraced such distant places as Shetland, Stockholm, Norway, and Holland. On 17th July, 1703, he received a regular commission in the Scots Navy as captain of the Royal Mary.’

Well, I thought, I’d almost got it right. The Royal Mary. William and Mary had reigned as a couple—I’d just picked the wrong half, when I’d named my fictional ship.

I kept reading. And here was the transcript of part of a letter Nathaniel Hooke wrote, of his first visit over to Scotland, two years before my story started: ‘While I stayed with my Lady Erroll, our frigate [the Audacious] was within musket shot of the castle. The day after my arrival Mr Gordon, captain of a Scotch frigate commissioned to guard the coast, appeared in the southward. My Lady Erroll bid me be under no apprehensions, and sent a gentleman in a cutter to desire the captain to take another course, with which he complied. The lady has gained him over, and as often as he passes and repasses that way he takes care to give her notice…’

I knew I’d read that bit before, because I’d remembered his role in avoiding the French ship that carried Hooke over.

And after that came other varied documents: Sailing orders to Captain Gordon, and more sailing orders; a warrant to Captain Gordon to sail to Scarborough; a commission to Captain Thomas Gordon in 1705 to be commander of the ship the Royal William…

I read that last one over, to be certain I’d made no mistake. But there it was, as plain as plain. And right below it on the page, a similar commission to James Hamilton of Orbieston, to be commander of the ship the Royal Mary.

In my mind, I played the scene that I’d just written, with the countess saying, ‘I confess I did forget your Captain Hamilton.’

And Captain Gordon—Captain Thomas Gordon, yet— replying, confident, ‘I know. But I did not.’

No more, it seemed, had I. But how on earth had I remembered such a tiny, minor detail as the name of Captain Hamilton? I must have read it somewhere, though I couldn’t for the life of me think where. I kept a written record of each document I used in my research, in case I missed a fact and needed to go back again to check it, and I knew I hadn’t read one single thing about the Scottish navy apart from what Nathaniel Hooke had written, and that hadn’t been much. Still, you couldn’t just remember something if you hadn’t had it in your memory to begin with.

Could you?

At my back, the window rattled fiercely from a gust of wind that sent me sliding underneath my covers, seeking warmth. I closed the book and set it safely on the table at my bedside, but it didn’t leave my thoughts, and by the time sleep finally claimed me I’d have paid a lot for one more glass of Dr Weir’s good whisky.