I could feel the now familiar creeping chill between my shoulder blades.
It was all there, as plain as day.
The captain promising the earl that he’d stay off the coast for fifteen days, and the exchange of signals to be used in case he met the French ship, and the fact that Captain Hamilton was bound to grow suspicious if the French ship stayed too long in Scottish waters. Even Captain Gordon’s statement that he might soon have to leave the naval service, since he would not take the oath against King James.
I read it with the same sense of surrealism I’d felt when I’d been sitting in that reading room in Edinburgh with Mr Hall’s old letter. Because I knew for certain I had never read this document before. I hadn’t gotten this far in the book on my first reading. I had gotten spooked and closed it, as I closed it now. I pushed it far away from me across the table. ‘Damn.’
I’d honestly believed that scene had been my own invention, that I’d made the captain come back just to complicate the plot. I’d been so proud of how I’d worked the whole thing in. And now I found I hadn’t done such an amazing thing.
It looked as though I’d have to face the fact that Dr Weir had hit the nail more squarely on the head than I’d have liked. It might be that I was not to have a hand at all in the creation of this story.
Maybe all that I could do was write the truth.
Deleting the few stilted lines I’d written so the cursor sat once more at the beginning of the chapter, I closed my eyes and felt the silence of the room press round me like a thing alive.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What scene should I be writing?’
VIII
THE COUNTESS LOOKED ROUND, smiling, as Sophia passed the doorway of her private rooms. ‘My dear, would you have seen Monsieur de Ligondez?’
She meant the captain of the French ship, the Heroine, which that morning had, unheralded, returned from Norway, sliding down the coast so very stealthily that none at Slains had noticed it until the boat that bore the captain had been rowed halfway to shore. The earl, who had not risen from his bed yet, had been forced to beg Monsieur de Ligondez’s indulgence for the short while it would take to dress and drink his morning draught and make himself prepared.
The countess, also, had just finished dressing.
But Sophia had herself been up some time, and knew exactly where the French ship’s captain was. ‘I do believe,’ she said, ‘that he is walking now with Mr Moray, in the garden.’
‘Then would you be good enough to go and seek him there, and tell him that my son and I are ready now to welcome him.’
Sophia hesitated. She had not been in the garden these three days since Billy Wick had put his hands on her, and she had no desire to go there now in case he tried it once again. But she could not refuse the countess. With a brave lift of her chin, she answered, ‘Yes, of course,’ and did as she’d been asked.
It was another fair spring morning. Songbirds greeted her with twittering more cheerful than the crying of the gulls that wheeled, high specks of white, above the cliffs beyond the garden wall. Her shoulder brushed a vine that loosed a fragrance sweetly unfamiliar from its soft, unfolding leaves, and when she walked her gown brushed lightly over bluebells growing close against the ground.
She did not give herself to daydreams this time, though, but kept her eyes fixed open, and her ears alert. Not far off, she could hear the quiet voices of Monsieur de Ligondez and Moray, though she could not understand their words, and so presumed they must be speaking in the language of the French. She turned her steps towards the sound, and felt so near her goal that she had almost let her guard down when the heavy steps fell in behind her on the path.
She would not show him fear again, she thought. Not looking round, she kept her shoulders square and walked more briskly, heading for the voices with such single-minded focus that she burst upon the speakers like a pheasant flushed by dogs out of the underbrush.
The French ship’s captain stopped mid-sentence, startled. Moray turned to look first at Sophia, then beyond her to the gardener, who had changed his course unhurriedly away from them, towards the malthouse.
Quickly, to distract his narrowed gaze, Sophia said, ‘The countess sent me here to find you.’
Moray’s grey eyes settled once more on Sophia’s face. ‘Did she, now?’
‘She would inform Monsieur de Ligondez that she is ready, with the Earl of Erroll, to receive him.’
Moray translated her message for the Frenchman, who bowed low and left them.
Moray made no move to follow. Squinting upwards at the sky, he said, ‘The day is wondrous fair.’