I bit my lip. ‘Try the summer of 1706.’
There was a long pause. ‘Carrie.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why won’t you tell me where you’re getting all this from?’
‘I’ve told you, Daddy,’ I said, wishing I could lie more convincingly, ‘it’s just a hunch.’
‘Yes, well, so far all your hunches have hit the bulls-eye. You’re not turning psychic on me, are you?’
I tried for a tone that implied the idea was nonsense. ‘Daddy.’
‘All right.’ He gave up. ‘I’ll see if Ross will take a look. You don’t know where, exactly, she’d be buried?’
That last bit was faintly sarcastic, but I answered anyway. ‘No. I don’t think in the town itself, though. Maybe just outside Kirkcudbright. Somewhere in the country.’
‘Right. And Carrie? If you nail this one, we’ll have to have a little talk,’ he said, ‘about your hunches.’
The week flew by more quickly than I’d thought it would. The story was in full run, now—I wrote until the need for sleep took hold of me, and slept till noon, then woke and got back at it, rarely bothering with proper meals, preferring bowls of cereal instead, and pasta eaten with a spoon straight from the tin, things I could eat while I was working and that didn’t leave a lot to clean up, afterwards. The coffee cups and spoons began to gather in the sink, and by week’s end I didn’t bother looking for a clean shirt but just took the one I’d worn the day before, the one that I’d left slung across the bedroom chair, and shrugged it on again.
I didn’t care. I wasn’t in the real world, any longer. I was lost within my book.
Like someone living in a waking dream, I walked among my characters at Slains, and gained increasing admiration for the countess and her fearless son as they involved themselves more deeply than before in secret preparations for the coming of King James. That angle of the plot, as always, held me fascinated. But this week, my storyline kept turning more and more upon the growing love between John Moray and Sophia.
How much of that was memory, and how much was my imagining the romance that I might have had myself, I didn’t know, but their relationship developed with an ease that drove my writing as a fair wind blows a ship upon its course.
They were not lovers, yet. At least, they hadn’t shared a bed. And in the castle, in the presence of the others, they did nothing that would give away their feelings. But outside, beyond the walls of Slains, they walked, and talked, and stole what moments they could make their own.
I didn’t like repeating scenes, and so I hadn’t put them on the beach again, although I sensed they’d been there. I could see them in my mind’s eye with such certainty, and always in the same spot, that when I woke up one morning, restless, earlier than usual at nine o’clock instead of noon, I took my jacket from its peg and went to see if I could find the place.
I hadn’t been outside in days. My eyes were unaccustomed to the light, and I felt cold despite my heavy sweater. But my mind, fixed firmly on the past, ignored these things. There were still dunes that ran above the beach, but not in the same places they had been three hundred years ago. The sands had blown, and shifted, and the tides had come to claim them, and left little I could use to judge position by. But inland, there were hills I found familiar.
I was studying the nearest of them when a blur of brown and white streaked past me, snatched a rolling bit of yellow from the sand, and sharply wheeled to change its running course and come and pounce on me, with muddy feet and wagging tail.
I had stiffened at the sight of him. He’d caught me unprepared. I’d known that Graham would be back to visit Jimmy, but I’d hoped I could avoid him. And the way that we had left things, I’d been sure that he would be avoiding me.
The spaniel nudged my knee with an insistent nose.
‘Hi, Angus.’ Reaching down, I gave his ears a scratch and took the tennis ball he offered me and threw it out again for him as far as I could throw. As he dashed happily away in close pursuit, the voice that I’d been bracing for spoke, coming up behind me.
‘Good, you’re up. We were just coming to collect you.’
His tone, I thought, was so damned normal, as though he’d forgotten what he’d told me at his father’s. I turned my head and looked at him as though he were insane.
He’d been starting to say something else, but when he saw my face he stopped, as someone does who’s put a foot down on uncertain ground. ‘Are you all right?’