She pulled a letter from her reticule. “Would you post this for me?” she asked. “And would you terribly mind bringing me a penny dreadful from the bookshop?”
When he returned after successfully completing all errands not half an hour later, Mr. Wright and the shop owner looked harried and sweaty, but a camera had been selected: a whole-plate model using dry plates, at the price of sixty-eight pounds when including all required equipment and accessories. The apparatus, tripod, plates, plateholders, protective gloves, and bottles of chemicals would have to be meticulously wrapped for secure transport.
“My head is buzzing like a beehive,” Harriet said as he was signing the check. “I should like to go to the beach and have the wind blow the cobwebs away while everything is being readied.”
They left to take a stroll to the castle ruins, where a ramp led onto the beach. The sea in the bay below was in uproar and the slate-gray line of the horizon blended water and sky. The damp breeze blew unhampered here and filled Lucian’s mouth with salt. Next to him, Harriet gasped and threw her arms wide open. “Isn’t it vast—isn’t it beautiful!”
“It is,” he murmured, but she was already dashing toward the shore. By the time he had caught up, her hems were soaked with sea spray. The pebbles and shells that lay scattered along the waterline soon snared her like a will-o’-the-wisp: she stopped and stooped every other yard to pick something up, held it up for inspection, put it into her skirt pocket, and hurried on toward the next, and was soon ahead of him again. She was light-footed despite heavy hems and pockets, and her ribbons and tendrils of her fiery hair were dancing in the breeze.
He had grown up in Argyll, close enough to the sea to know all about selkie lore. His grandmother had told the stories at night, about these creatures who lived as seals in the sea but shed their skin to take the shape of a human when they wanted to be on dry land. Selkie females in their human form were said to be enchanting.
“Lucian!”
She was coming toward him, and his heart was in his throat. “Yes?”
She held up a brownish stone. “I believe this is amber?”
He forced his attention away from her rosy-cheeked face to the lump she was waving at him. Her white gloves were covered in sand. “It is,” he said after a brief examination.
She gave a small whoop of delight and resumed her hunt.
A female selkie in human form better not stumble across a man. She would be naked with only her long hair to hide her charms while her sealskin was tucked away safely under a rock or in some cove. In the legends, the man set out to find her pelt so he could keep it and force the selkie to remain a woman and to become his wife. When Lucian had heard the stories as a boy, he hadn’t yet felt the desire to steal; he had had a child’s simple sense of justice. He had felt a noble rage on behalf of the creature who was now forever trapped on land, in a fisherman’s hut, with only memories of her freedom. Granted, the selkie was a female, whose natural lot seemed to be to eventually become stuck indoors with a brood no matter her species, but he had known unfairness when he saw it. He supposed he hadn’t been born bad. He had become that way.
On the train ride back, he was reading the book he had purchased in the bookshop, and Harriet was ignoring her new penny dreadful and spread her beach loot on the table. Glancing over the top of his page now and again, he soon noticed that she was arranging it first by material—stone, beach glass, fossilized squid—and then by color. She seemed especially fond of the beach glass.
“Why did you collect those?” he finally asked, and nodded at a pile of unremarkable gray beach pebbles rattling on the polished wood.
She looked up, vaguely confused, as though he had pulled her from the depths of some meandering thoughts. “Those?” she said. “So that they wouldn’t feel left out.”
His brows pulled together. “They are … stones.”
She gave an apologetic shrug. “Yes, but I don’t think anyone ever picks them.”
Somehow, no sarcastic answer came to mind. Instead, his throat felt strangely constricted as he watched her sort the unloved pebbles into an orderly row.
He was in dangerous territory. Like a hunter who had been too focused on chasing his prey and suddenly found himself on very thin ice indeed. Dangerous, because the legends about the selkies never ended with the trapped female living out her days with the man who had stolen her. Inevitably, someone always found her skin, and she would slip it on and leave her husband and family to return to the sea without a backward glance.