III
SHE DIDN’T LIKE THE gardener. He wasn’t like Kirsty; or Rory; or Mrs Grant the cook; or the slow-moving maltman who kept to the dark, fragrant brewing house and whom Sophia had actually seen only once; or the dairy and byre maids who did little more than go giggling past her whenever she ventured outdoors. No, the gardener was different.
He was not a very old man, but he looked it sometimes, bending over his hard-scraping tools, with his sharp-featured face and the mirthless dark eyes that seemed always, whenever Sophia looked round, to be fixed upon her.
Now that spring had come, he seemed to be around Slains all the day, although he didn’t live there.
‘Oh, aye,’ Kirsty said, with understanding. ‘Billy Wick. I canna bide the man, myself. He makes me feel I’m standing in my shift, like, when he looks at me. The late earl had a fondness for his father, who was gardener here afore. ’Tis why her ladyship, the countess, keeps him on.’ She had been laying fires, and now was walking back along the corridor towards the kitchen, with Sophia following. There wasn’t anyone around to raise an eyebrow at the two girls keeping company. A message had come that morning from the present Earl of Erroll, who had been expected these days past, and on receiving it, the countess had retreated to her chamber to reply.
So when they reached the kitchen door, Sophia walked right through in Kirsty’s wake, and even Mrs Grant did not look disapproving, having long since given up her attempts to persuade Sophia of the impropriety of mixing with the servants. It was clear to all that Kirsty and Sophia, being ages with each other and of friendly dispositions, would be difficult to keep apart. Here in Scotland, it was common for the sons of lairds and sons of farmers to sit side by side in school, and play at games together in their youth, a custom which produced a friendly feeling in the greater houses between those who served and those who sat at table. And as long as Kirsty showed Sophia all the deference and respect that was befitting to their roles when they were in the main rooms of the castle, Mrs Grant appeared to care but little these days what they did when they were on the servants’ side.
She, too, had nothing good to say about the gardener. ‘Allus lookin tae hisself, is Billy Wick. He couldna fairly wait tae see his father deid sae he could get his fingers on the siller that was left. There wisna much. ’Tis why he keeps on here. But Billy thinks hisself above the likes of us. Ye keep well clear of him,’ she warned Sophia, motherly. ‘He’s nae the sort o’ man ye need tae ken.’
Rory, coming through the back door, caught the last bit and his eyebrows lifted just a bit, enquiring.
Mrs Grant said, ‘We’re nae spikkin aboot ye. ’Tis Billy Wick I meant.’
He simply gave a nod and said, ‘Oh, aye,’ which meant he either was acknowledging her comment or agreeing with it. Guessing Rory’s mind was never easy. He took an oatcake from a nearby plate and ate it, and when Mrs Grant prepared to scold him for it, he answered it was likely all the food he’d have that afternoon. ‘I’m away within the hour with her ladyship. We ride to Dunottar.’
Another clifftop castle to the south of Aberdeen—the home, so Kirsty told Sophia now, of the countess’s nephew by marriage, the Earl Marischal. It was not uncommon for there to be visits between Slains and Dunottar, but not within an hour’s notice. Kirsty frowned. ‘Would there be trouble, then?’
‘I dinna ken.’ Rory shrugged. ‘Her ladyship telt me to get the horses ready and prepare to ride with her, and that much I can do.’
‘And you, Kirsty,’ said Mrs Grant, ‘should nae worry aboot what the countess does, or why. Things happen in this house that none of us need question.’
Kirsty bore the reprimand in silence, but she pulled a face when Mrs Grant had turned her back.
The cook, not turning, said, ‘And if ye carry on wi that, I may forget I have a mind tae let ye have a holiday the morn.’
Kirsty stopped, amazed. ‘A holiday?’
‘A wee one, aye. I’d need ye back again by supper, but with her ladyship away to Dunottar, and Mistress Paterson the only one about, there widna be sae much tae do I couldna spare ye for the day.’
The prospect of a day to spend whatever way she wished left Kirsty without speech a moment, something none of them had seen.
But she knew what she would do with such a gift. ‘I’ll go to my sister.’
‘Ye’ll have a long walk,’ Rory said.
‘’Tis but an hour up the coast, and I’ve nae seen her since the birth of her last bairn.’ Inspired, she asked Sophia, ‘Will ye come with me? She’ll give us dinner, that I’m sure of. Even Mrs Grant’s fine broth is nae match for my sister’s kail and cakes. And she would be that glad to meet ye.’
Mrs Grant was not so sure it would be fitting for two girls to walk so far, and on their own.
‘Och, we’ll have the castle in our view the whole way,’ Kirsty argued. ‘And her ladyship is highly thought of in these parts, so none will think to harm us when they ken we come from Slains.’
‘The countess,’ Mrs Grant said, looking squarely at Sophia, ‘widna like it.’
To which Kirsty’s pert reply was, ‘Will ye tell her?’
Mrs Grant considered silently. ‘No,’ she said, and turned back to her cooking. ‘I’ll say naethin. But ye’d do well tae mind that, even here, the devil turns men’s thochts when it amuses him.’
‘Is that what ails ye, Rory?’ Kirsty smiled at the groom. His stoic features didn’t change, but his eyes warmed a trifle.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I’m long past redemption. Take the dog,’ was his advice on leaving, as he tucked a final oatcake in his jacket. ‘Devil’s thoughts or no, there’s none will lay a hand on ye with Hugo at your heels.’
Sophia thought it sound advice, and the next morning after breakfast when she started out with Kirsty, she held Hugo, the huge mastiff, by his lead. Hugo’s bed was in the stables, and by day he roamed the castle grounds with Rory, as a child might keep close by his father’s knee. He was a gentle beast, for all he barked at strangers and at any sound he took to be a threat. But when they passed the garden wall where Billy Wick was hoeing over stony earth to make a plot for planting physick herbs, the mastiff curled his lip and laid his ears back, growling low.
The gardener took no notice. Straightening his back, he leaned upon the hoe and looked them over. ‘Comin tae see me, my quines?’ His hard eyes speculated in a way Sophia found discomforting.
She knew that Kirsty felt it, too, because the younger girl lied bravely, ‘We’re away to run an errand for her ladyship.’ And without further explanation, she urged Sophia to quicken her pace and the two of them passed by and out of the castle’s great shadow. Ahead lay the broad, grassy sweep of the land curving clean to the edge of the black cliffs, the sea stretching wide to the sunwashed horizon.
Kirsty paused, in full appreciation. ‘There,’ she said. ‘The day is ours.’
And though Sophia hadn’t felt at all confined within Slains castle, nor had she been treated any way but with great kindness by the countess, she too found that she was glad, in that one moment, that the countess was away from home, that she and Kirsty might enjoy such freedom.
There were countless sights to wonder at.
They passed above a large rock at the sea’s edge that was colored with the stainings of a multitude of seabirds, flapping wings of all varieties, returning to their roosts. The rock, said Kirsty, was called locally ‘Dun Buy’, which meant the yellow rock, and was to many visitors a pleasing curiosity.
The mastiff found it curious as well, and it was plain from Hugo’s interest and the way he eyed the birds that he would happily have lingered for a closer look, but Kirsty gripped his lead more tightly and persuaded him to move along.
A little further on, they came to a great circular shaft, like a giant’s well, cut at the edge of the cliff, where the sea had eroded the walls of a mammoth cave till the cave’s roof had collapsed, leaving only a strip of stone bridging the cleft at its entrance, through which the waves sprayed with such force that the water appeared to be boiling below when Sophia dared stand at the edge to look down.
Kirsty came, too, though she stayed one step back. ‘’Tis the Bullers o’ Buchan,’ she named the strange, open-roofed cavern. ‘We call it “The Pot”. Many times a ship chased on this coast by a privateer makes for the Pot, and slips in here to hide.’
It would not, thought Sophia, as she watched those waves beating wild on the rocks, have been her choice of where to seek shelter. But surely no privateer would have attempted to follow.
‘Come,’ said Kirsty, tugging at Sophia’s cloak. ‘I’ll nae be forgiven if I lose ye into the Pot.’
So Sophia came away reluctantly, and in a quarter of an hour they had arrived at Kirsty’s sister’s cottage and were seated by the fire, admiring Kirsty’s newest nephew, ten months old, with ready mischief in his eyes and dimpled cheeks to rival those of his two sisters and his elder brother, none of whom was yet six years of age. But Kirsty’s sister seemed to take the challenge of so many children cheerfully. Like Kirsty, she was fair of face and quick to speak and quicker still to smile, and as Sophia had been promised, her kail—the dinner broth—was richer and more flavorful than any she had tasted.
The children were delighted by the presence of the mastiff, Hugo, and tumbled anyhow about him, fearless of the jaws that could have crushed a man, and he, in turn, lay lordly on the hearthrug and accepted their affections and their play with stoic patience.
Time passed happily, and when Sophia finally left with Kirsty in mid-afternoon, she counted those few hours well spent. ‘Your sister seems to have a pleasant life,’ she said, and Kirsty answered, ‘Aye, she chose her husband well. He is a good man, with a world nae wider than his farm and family. He disna seek adventure.’
With an eyebrow raised, Sophia asked, ‘And Rory does?’
‘Why would ye think I’d be speaking of Rory?’
‘Kirsty, I have eyes.’
The housemaid blushed. ‘Aye, well, ’twill come to naethin. I wish for bairns, a hearth and home, but Rory dreams of things beyond that. When he sees the open road, he wonders only how far it will carry him. There is nae future in a man like that.’
‘My father was a man like that,’ Sophia said. ‘But he craved not the open road. For him, it was the sea. He always marveled at the sea, and how its waves appeared to have no ending, and he longed to follow on with them, and touch a foreign shore.’
‘And did he?’
‘No.’ The mastiff dragged a little at his lead, head bent to sniff a clump of grass, and so she slowed her steps to let him. Her cloak dragged heavily behind her, and she lifted it a little from the ground. ‘He died on board the ship that would have carried him to Darien. They put his body overboard.’
The mention of the Darien disaster sobered Kirsty, as it did all Scots. She would have been still younger than Sophia when it happened, but the sad details of Darien were scribed into the memory of the nation that had pinned its hopes of future wealth and independence on those few ships of settlers who had sailed to found a colony intended to control the route of trade through the Americas to India.
‘It must have been a hard blow for your mother,’ Kirsty said.
‘She never learned of it.’ Long months had passed before the news had found its way to Scotland, with the rumors that the colony itself had failed, and been abandoned. By that time, a second eager wave of colonists had sailed. Sophia’s mother, bright and fair, had been among them. ‘She was fortunate,’ Sophia said, when she’d told this to Kirsty, ‘she did not survive the voyage.’ Those who had survived found only bitter disappointment, for the settlement in truth was left defenseless and deserted, and the land that had been promised to bear riches offered nothing more than pestilence and death.
And James and Mary Paterson were now but names amid the countless others broken by the dream that had been Darien.
‘How could ye bear so great a loss?’ asked Kirsty.
‘I was young.’ Sophia did not say that she had borne much more in the unhappy years that followed. Kirsty looked too sad already, and this day was not a day for sadness. ‘And I did hear a minister who preached once that there never was a tragedy except the Lord had some great plan for turning it to good. And here I am,’ she said, ‘so it is true. Had both my parents lived, I never would have come to Slains, and we should not have met.’
Kirsty, presented with this, answered, ‘Aye, that would have been a tragedy indeed.’ And taking up Sophia’s hand, she swung it while they walked and chattered on about less dismal things.
They passed the Bullers by this time and did not stop to look, but when they reached Dun Buy, and Hugo tried again to make them pause and let him chase a seabird supper, Kirsty stopped, pointed down the coast and said, ‘There is a ship off Slains.’
Sophia looked, and saw it, too—the furled sails and the rocking hull that rode upon its anchor, some fair distance from the shore. ‘Is that the Royal William?’
Kirsty raised one hand to shade her eyes, and slowly shook her head. ‘No. That ship is nae Scottish.’
Sophia’s hand was tugged more firmly, not by Hugo this time but by Kirsty. ‘Come, we canna tarry here. We must get back.’
Sophia did not fully understand the urgency, but she could feel it surging through her own self as she ran along the clifftop, keeping breathless pace with Kirsty while the mastiff strained against the lead and pulled her onward ever faster.
She could see the ship’s hands lowering the jolly boat with several men aboard it, and her run, without her knowing why, became a race to reach the castle first, before the jolly boat’s strong oars could land its men upon the shore.
Near the garden wall the mastiff tore his lead free of her hand and made a dash towards the stables with a single woof of welcome. Rory stood within the stable doorway, wiping down his horse with hay to dry its sweat-stained flanks. He said, ‘We saw the sails from Dunottar. Her ladyship is in the house already.’
‘And the ship?’ asked Kirsty, breathless. ‘Is it—?’
‘Aye. Now get inside, afore the twa of ye are missed.’ He said no more, but turned back quickly to his work, and Kirsty tugged Sophia’s hand again and told her, ‘Come,’ and so Sophia hurried with her to the kitchen door, not knowing what awaited her inside, nor why the ship was so important, nor indeed if those men rowing to the shore below the castle, who might even now have landed, carried with them something pleasurable, or something to be feared.