He said nothing to begin with, so I filled the pause by lamely saying that I’d had a lovely time.
‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I did, as well.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee, or something?’
Stuart, I knew, would have picked up on the ‘or something’， but Graham only took it at face value, and replied, ‘I can’t, the day. I have to get back down to Aberdeen. I have a stack of papers sitting waiting to be marked.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I’ll take you for that driving tour next weekend, if you’d like.’
My answer came a bit too fast. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Which would be better for you, Saturday or Sunday?’
‘Either.’
‘Then let’s make it Saturday. We’ll call for you at ten, again, if that won’t be too early.’
‘We?’ I asked him.
‘Angus and myself. He loves a drive, does Angus, and I’d never hear the end of it if I left him behind.’
I smiled, and told him ten o’clock would be just fine, and having thanked him once again and said goodbye, I went inside the cottage.
But my nonchalant attitude vanished the minute I stepped through the door, and I grinned like a schoolgirl just back from a date. Standing in my kitchen, well back from the window so he wouldn’t catch me watching him, I saw him take a pebble from the path and skip it deftly out to sea, and then he kicked one booted foot into a tuft of grass and, looking pleased himself, strolled down the hill towards the road.
I wasn’t holding out much hope, when I sat down to write.
It would be gone, I knew. The dream I’d had last night would be long gone. It was no use.
But when I turned on the computer and my fingers touched the keyboard, I surprised myself. I hadn’t lost it after all. It was all there, the whole of it, and as I wrote each detail I remembered having dreamed it. I could not recall this happening in all the years that I’d been writing. It felt…well, like I’d said to Jane, it felt the way a medium must feel, when they were channeling the dead.
The story flowed from my subconscious in an easy, rapid stream. I saw the leering face of Billy Wick, the gardener, and the smile of Kirsty’s sister in her cottage, with the children playing round the gentle mastiff, and I felt Sophia’s sadness as she spoke about her parents, and her thrill of expectation as she saw the ship at anchor near the castle, and the mad confusion of her run with Kirsty to the house, and Rory’s warning they should get inside, before the countess missed them.
And tonight, my writing went beyond the dream. And there was more.
IV
SHE HAD NO TIME to change her gown before the countess called for her. She had just reached her chamber and had seen with her own eyes, within the looking-glass, the rare disorder of her hair, the wild color that her run along the clifftop had raised in her cheeks.
And there was Kirsty, breathless too, and knocking at her door to say the countess had requested that Sophia join her downstairs in the drawing room.
‘I cannot go like this,’ Sophia said.
‘Och, ye look fine. ’Tis but your hair that needs attention.’ And with reassuring hands, the housemaid helped Sophia smooth her windblown curls and pin them back into their proper style. ‘Now, go. Ye canna keep her waiting.’
‘But my gown is muddied.’
‘She will never see it,’ Kirsty promised. ‘Go.’
Sophia went. Downstairs, she found the countess in an outward state of calm, but standing close beside the windows of the drawing room as though she were anticipating something and did not wish to be sitting when it came. She held her hands toward Sophia with a smile. ‘Come stand with me, my child. We will this day have visitors, who may be in this household for a month or more. I wish you to be at my side, when I do bid them welcome.’
Sophia was amazed, and touched. ‘You do me an honor.’
‘You are,’ the countess told her, plain, ‘a member of this family. It is fitting you should stand where my own daughters would be standing, were they not already married and departed from me.’ She paused, as though what she meant next to say took thought, and needed to be weighed. ‘Sophia, in the coming months, there will be much that you will see and hear within these walls. I pray that you will understand, and find the means to let it rest with ease upon your conscience.’
There were heavy steps within the hall, and voices, and then Kirsty came ahead and at the open door announced the guests: ‘My lady, here are Colonel Hooke and Mr Moray.’