The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(37)

‘I liked him. And his wife. They gave me whisky.’ Which, I realized, made it sound as though the two facts were related, so I stumbled on, ‘The doctor told me quite a lot about the history of the castle, and the Earls of Erroll.’

‘Aye, there isn’t much he doesn’t ken about the castle.’

‘He said the same thing about you,’ I told him, ‘and the Jacobites.’

‘Did he, now?’ His eyebrows lifted, interested. ‘What else did he say about me?’

‘Only that he thinks that you’re a Jacobite yourself.’

He didn’t exactly smile at that, but the corners of his eyes did crinkle. ‘Aye, there’s truth in that. Had I been born into another time,’ he said, ‘I might have been.’ He traced a corner of the Slains plan with his fingers, lightly, then he asked, ‘Who else has my dad got you meeting?’

I told him, as best I could remember, ending with the plumber’s driving tour. ‘Your brother said he’d drive me round instead.’

‘You’ve seen him drive?’

‘I said I’d take my chances with the plumber.’

Graham did smile, then. ‘I’ll take you for a driving tour some weekend, if you like.’

‘And you’re a safer driver, are you?’

‘Aye,’ he told me. ‘Naturally. I’m all the time driving old ladies to Kirk on a Sunday. You’ve nothing to fear.’

I’d have gone with him anywhere, actually. My mother, had she known that I was walking on the coast path with a man I barely knew, would have been close to apoplectic. But instinctively, I knew that Graham told the truth—I didn’t have to fear when I was with him. He would keep me safe.

It was a newfound feeling, and it settled on me strangely, but I liked the way it felt. I liked the way he walked beside me, close but not too crowding, and the way he let me go ahead of him along the path, so I could set the pace.

We went the back way down Ward Hill and found ourselves in the same gully with its quiet tangled trees and running stream that I’d gone through with Jane, two days ago, when she and I had headed from the village up to Slains. It was a drier day today. My boots were not so slippery as we crossed the little bridge and made our way up and around until we’d climbed again up to the level of the clifftop.

Ahead, I could see the long ruins of Slains with the one tall square tower that stood at the end overlooking the sea, and I looked at the windows and tried to decide which ones should be Sophia’s. I would have liked to spend a few minutes in the castle, but there was another couple walking round the walls this morning, loud and laughing, tourists, and the atmosphere was not the same. And Graham must have felt it, too, because he didn’t slow his steps, but followed as I set my back to Slains and started off again along the coast.

I found this new part of the path disturbing. Not the walk itself—it wasn’t really all that difficult, for someone used to walking rough—but just the sense that everything around me, all the scenery, was familiar. I’d had flashes, in my life, of déjà vu. Most people had. I’d felt, from time to time, a moment’s fleeting sense that I’d performed some action once before, or had some conversation twice. But only for a moment. I had never felt this long, sustained sensation, more a certainty, that I’d already come this way. That just up here, if I looked to my right, I’d see—

‘Dunbuy,’ said Graham, who’d come up to stand behind me on the path, where I had stopped. ‘It means the—’

‘Yellow rock,’ I finished for him, slowly.

‘Aye. What turns it yellow is the dung of all the seabirds nesting there. Come springtime, Dunbuy is fair covered with them, and the noise is deafening.’

The rock was near abandoned now, in winter, but for several gulls that stood upon it sullenly, ignoring us. But I could hear, within my mind, the seabirds that he spoke of. I could see them. I remembered them…

I frowned and turned away and carried on, still with that sense of knowing just where I was going. I might have been walking the streets of the town where I’d grown up, it was that sure a feeling.

I knew, without Graham’s announcement, when we were approaching the Bullers of Buchan. There wasn’t anything remarkable to see at first, only a tight-clustered grouping of cottages built at the edge of a perilous drop down another deep gully, and in front of them a steep path winding upwards to what looked to be an ordinary rise of land. Except I knew, before we’d even started up that path, what waited at the top. I knew what it looked like before I had seen it—a 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 I stood at the edge to look down.

Graham stood at my side with his hands in his pockets, and standing there he, too, seemed part of a memory, and I wondered if this was what people felt like when they started going insane.

He was talking. I could hear him, vaguely, telling me the history of the Bullers, and how its name had likely come from the French word for ‘kettle’, bouilloire, or perhaps more simply from the English, ‘boiler’, and how in the past small ships had hidden there from privateers, or if they were smugglers themselves, from the Scottish coast patrols.