For Jimmy’s sake, I stayed until we’d finished with our coffee, and he’d started clearing plates away to do the washing up. I offered to help, but he shook his head firmly. ‘Na, na, nivver fash, quine. Keep yer strength fer yer writing.’
Which gave me an opening, when I had thanked him for lunch, to announce that I ought to be going. ‘I left my book this morning in the middle of a chapter, and I ought to get it done.’
‘A’richt. Jist let me put these in the kitchen.’ Jimmy, with the plates piled in his hands, looked down at Stuart. ‘Stuie, quit yer scuddlin, loon, and go and fetch her coat.’
Stuart went, and Jimmy followed after him, which left me on my own, with Graham.
I felt him watching me. My own gaze stayed quite firmly on the tablecloth in front of me, as I sat sifting words, and then discarding them again while I tried hard to think of what to say.
But he spoke first. He said, ‘“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men…”’
He’d meant for me to smile, I knew. I didn’t.
Graham said, ‘You realize Stuart thinks of you as being his?’
‘I know.’ I raised my head at that, and met his eyes. ‘I’m not.’
‘I know.’ His voice was quiet, willing me to understand. ‘But he’s my brother.’
And just what, I thought, was that supposed to mean? That since his brother had such clear designs on me, he didn’t think it right to interfere? That, never mind my preference, or the fact that something seemed to be developing between us, Graham thought it best to just forget it, give it up, because his brother might object?
‘Here you are,’ said Stuart, breezing through the doorway of the sitting-room, my coat in hand. The one good thing about self-centered men, I thought, was that they were oblivious to everything around them. Any other person walking into that room at that moment would have surely been aware of something hanging in the air between myself and Graham.
But Stuart only held my coat for me, while Jimmy, coming back, said, ‘Div ye want one o’ the loons tae walk ye hame?’
‘No, that’s all right.’ I thanked him once again for lunch and shrugged my coat on and, still with my back to Stuart, somehow summoned up the thin edge of a smile to show to Graham. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I told them, ‘on my own.’
So, not a problem, I assured myself. I’d come to Cruden Bay to work, to write my book. I didn’t have the time to get involved with someone, anyway.
My bathwater was cooling, but I settled deeper into it until the water lapped my chin. My characters were talking, as they always did when I was in the bath, but I tried shutting out their voices—in particular the calm voice of John Moray, whose grey, watchful eyes seemed everywhere around me.
I regretted having made him look like Graham. I could hardly change it now, he’d taken shape and would resist it, but I really didn’t need an everyday reminder of a man who’d thrown me over.
Moray’s voice said something, low. I sighed, and rolled to reach the pen and paper that I kept beside the tub. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Hang on.’
I wrote his words down, and Sophia’s voice spoke up with a response, and in a minute I had pulled the plug and stepped out of the bathtub and was buttoning my clothes so I could head for the computer, smiling faintly at the thought of how the worst things in my life sometimes inspired the best plot twists.
When I’d stood and talked to Graham in the stables, only yesterday, surrounded by the horses and the dog curled in the hay, so like the scene that I’d just written in my book, I had been thinking how life echoed art.
And now the time had come, I thought, for art to echo life.
VII
MORAY’S GAZE HAD SWUNG away and out to sea, and suddenly he pulled upon the gelding’s reins and brought him to a standstill.
Stopping too, Sophia asked, ‘What is it?’
Even as she spoke the words, she saw it, too—a ship, just coming into view around the jagged headland to the south. She could not see its colors yet, but something in the way it seemed to prowl the coastline made her apprehensive.
Moray, with no change of his expression, turned his horse. ‘’Tis time we started back.’
She made no argument, but turning with him, followed at that same slow, measured walk that gained them little ground before the silent, purposeful advance of those full sails. Sophia knew he only held them to that pace for her own comfort, and that chivalry would keep him from increasing it, so of her own accord she urged the mare into a rolling canter that would speed their progress.