The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(105)

Especially this morning. I had meant to take a break and get some badly needed sleep, but all I’d managed was to make a piece of toast, a cup of coffee. And I hadn’t even finished that, and here the voices were again, beginning to get restless.

I could have closed them out, but at the window glass the wind rose to a wail and forced its way around the frame to swirl its cold around me and it breathed, ‘Ye have no choice.’

And it was right.





XV

SHE’D THOUGHT TO SPEND an hour in the stables with the horses, but she’d given up that plan when she had happened upon Kirsty standing close against the stable wall with Rory, their heads bent close in earnest conversation. Sophia would not for the world have interrupted such a private moment, so she stopped, and turned away before they saw her. Taking care to keep her footsteps soft so she would not distract the couple, she went round again the long way past the malthouse and the laundry.

It had snowed, as Colonel Graeme had predicted, and the branches of the sleeping trees that showed above the garden wall were frosted thick with white, and further down she saw the thin smoke twisting upwards from the chimneys of the bothy at the bottom of the garden. She had not set eyes on Billy Wick since Captain Gordon’s visit weeks ago, and she had no desire to meet him now, so it was with dismay that she caught sight of his hunched figure standing black against a snowy shrub whose crooked branches arched and reached towards the inland hills as though attempting to escape the fierce winds blowing off the bleak North Sea.

Sophia was about to seek escape herself, and carry on along the laundry wall and round the corner to the kitchen, when another movement from the garden made her pause, and look more closely. Billy Wick was not alone. A second man, much larger and well-wrapped against the cold, a thick wool plaid drawn cloak-like round his head and shoulders, had come now to stand beside the gardener. There was no mistaking who it was—the only question, thought Sophia, was what business Captain Ogilvie could have with Billy Wick.

Whatever it was, they took some few minutes about it; in that time her troubled frown grew still more troubled when the hands of both men moved and some unknown object passed between them.

It was only when the two men parted, disappearing from her view so that she could but guess that Captain Ogilvie was making his way back along the path towards the house, and might at any moment come upon her without notice, that she moved. Her steps were ankle-deep in snow but quick with purpose, and the hands that drew her cloak more tightly round her sought to warm the chill she felt within, as well as from without.

She found the colonel, as she’d hoped she’d find him, in the library. He smiled above the pages of his book as she came in. ‘Have ye returned so soon? I would have thought ye’d had enough defeat for the one day.’

Ignoring the chess board, she asked, ‘May I speak with you?’

He straightened as though something of her urgency had reached him. ‘Aye, of course.’

‘Not here,’ she told him, knowing Ogilvie would soon be back and often chose this room himself to sit in. She needed someplace private, where they would not risk an interruption. As her fingers met the thick folds of her cloak, she asked on sudden inspiration, ‘Will you walk with me?’

‘What, now? Outside?’

She nodded.

With his eyebrow lifting on a note of resignation, Colonel Graeme took a last look at the warming fire and closed his book. ‘Aye, lass. I’ll come and walk with ye. Where to?’

The snow was not so deep along the cliff top, where the wind had blown inland into low drifts that lay soft and melting from a long day in the sun. It was late afternoon, and shadows tangled thickly with each other on the ground beneath the snowy branches of the trees that edged the flowing stream. The scent of burning wood fires from the chimneys of the cottages smelled homely to Sophia, and the smoke that curled to whiten in the air above the wood appeared to mirror her own misting breath.

They walked between the cottages, and up the windy hill beyond, and down onto the wide fawn-colored beach. The sand felt firm beneath her feet, not soft and shifting as it had been in the summer, and the dunes were dusted white with snow through which the tufted golden grass still rose to bow and bend before the wind that tossed the waves ashore.

In all that long, broad curve of sand there was no other person to be seen. No other person who could hear them. Yet Sophia went on walking, looking not for privacy but inspiration.

All the while that they’d been on the path, she had been trying to decide how best to tell him that she thought his friend, the captain, might be more than he appeared. There were no easy words, she knew, for such a thing, and she might not have mentioned it at all if she had not felt such a strongly warning sense that what was happening had happened once before. She set her mind, and chose to take that for her starting-place, and ventured, ‘When your nephew was at Slains, he told me once of his adventures in the company of Simon Fraser.’

Colonel Graeme’s eyes sought out her face with sudden interest. ‘Did he, now? What did he tell ye of the matter?’

‘That the king did send him here with Simon Fraser to enquire how many men might rise if there were a rebellion, and to meet with all the well-affected nobles in the Highlands and in Edinburgh.’

‘It was the queen, King Jamie’s mother Mary, who did send him, for she does esteem him highly. Did he tell ye that?’