‘You have a poor opinion of yourself.’
‘No, lass. An honest one.’ With eyes still darkly serious, he contemplated their linked hands a second time, and then in one swift rolling motion stood, and helped her up to stand beside him. ‘Come.’
She saw their shadows stretching long across the sand, towards the sea, and knew the sun was moving ever lower in the west, above the line of distant hills. It touched the sky and clouds with gold, and caught her vision in a burst of shifting rays when Moray turned her to its light, and set her hand upon his arm, and led her back along the beach.
He did not take her by the main path that went up and through the crow’s wood, but along the shore itself and up the hill that stood between themselves and Slains. From here she saw the castle stretched before them in the distance, and the gardens running down to meet the dovecote that clung bravely to the gully’s edge, among the gorse and grasses. Then the path was leading down again. It brought them to the bottom of the gully with its quiet grove of chestnut, ash and sycamore trees blotting out all sound except their footsteps and the cooing of the wood doves and the gurgle of the burn whose water ran to meet the sea.
As they approached the footbridge set across the water, Moray asked her, without warning, ‘Do ye love me?’
She stopped walking. ‘John.’
‘’Tis but a simple thing to answer. Do ye love me?’
He was mad, she thought, completely mad, to ask her such a question in the open, here, but looking in his eyes she lost the will to tell him so. ‘You know I do.’
‘Then, since I have your heart already, let me have your hand.’
She stared, and told herself that she could not have heard him properly. He surely only meant to hold her hand, she thought, and not—
‘Sophia.’ With a careful touch he smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear, as though he wished to better see her face. ‘I’m asking if ye’ll marry me.’
A woman who was sane, she knew, would have the wit to tell him that they could not hope to marry, that the countess and the earl would not permit it, that it was a lovely dream, and nothing more…but standing now as she was standing, with her face reflected in the grey eyes fixed with steady purpose on her own, she could not bring herself to think the thing impossible. She swallowed back the sudden swell of feeling that was rising in her chest, and gave her answer with a wordless nod.
The smile that touched his eyes was one she never would forget. ‘Then come with me.’
‘What, now ?’ That was enough to free her from the spell. ‘Oh, John, you know that we cannot. The Bishop never will agree to—’
‘Damn the Bishop,’ was his mild reply. ‘He has no say in our affairs.’
‘And who will marry us, if not the Bishop?’
‘My brother Robert makes his living in the law, and he would tell you that a marriage made by handfast is as binding as a marriage made in Kirk.’
She knew of handfasting. She’d even seen it done when she was but a girl, and she recalled her mother’s explanation that the sacrament of marriage was the only one that did not need a priest, because the man and woman were themselves the ministers, and bound themselves together by their words. Handfast was frowned upon these days, but practised still— an old tradition of a bygone age when priests were not so plentiful, especially in lonelier locations, and the joining of a man’s hand to a woman’s was a simpler thing.
‘Sophia.’ Holding out his hand to her, he said, ‘Will ye come with me?’
‘Where?’
‘’Tis best done over water.’
In the middle of the bridge he stopped, and drew her round to face him, while beneath their feet the water, turned half-golden by the sun, slipped through the shadow of the arch of wood and flowed on without care towards the sea.
They were alone. He took her two hands in his larger ones.
‘I take ye to my wedded wife,’ he said, his voice so quiet that the water sang above it. ‘Now, lass, tell me that ye’ll have me for your husband.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
She raised her gaze to his. ‘I take you to my wedded husband.’ Then, because that seemed unfinished somehow, she invoked the name of God the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
‘I thought,’ said Moray, ‘ye did not believe.’
‘Then it can do no harm to ask His blessing.’
‘No.’ His fingers tightened briefly on her own, as if he understood her need to hold, by any means, this little piece of happiness. ‘No, it can do no harm.’