Chapter 1 #2
There is also coarse salt in every windowsill, a thin, neat line that’s gathered a little dust. She must have done it just before she’d left for good.
There is also a single rowan tree near the front door, mature, planted deliberately a long time ago.
There are dried herbs hanging from the rafters in the kitchen, some I recognize, and some I don’t.
There is an herb garden out back beside the roses, the mint run wild as it’s prone to do, but otherwise it’s in good condition.
Now, I don’t remember my father ever mentioning his aunt was a witchy person, but being as I am a somewhat witchy person myself, these things stand out.
Perhaps that’s why I inherited the cottage, though I wasn’t really into that stuff at twelve.
In fact, it was a botanical folklore book that my father picked up for me somewhere during that trip here that got me interested in plants to begin with.
The thought of him makes my heart both swell and constrict. It’s funny how fresh grief can feel while at the same time it’s been your shadow for over a decade.
I sigh, put the sketchbook down on the kitchen table, and make a list—because making lists is one of the few neurotypical things that actually works on me. I want to leave the cottage today for reasons that are not entirely about groceries.
Bread.
Oat Milk.
Find out who the hell my naked neighbor in the castle is.
The drive into Shieldaig is twenty minutes of a single-track road that bends around the hills like it was laid down by someone who hated cars.
I take it slow. The rental car has a wonky alignment, and the road climbs and dips around boulders like a rollercoaster.
I’ll eventually have to fork out some dough to buy a car since I can’t afford to rent one for an entire year, I just don’t know if what I get is going to be any better than this hunk of junk.
Shieldaig, when I get to it, is a single curve of road, a picturesque pier, a handful of stone cottages that wear the weather like a second coat, and a restaurant called Gille Brighde I haven’t been brave enough to try—it seems the type of place where you have to eat haggis or else.
The post office is in the front room of someone’s house, while the shop is in another.
The shopkeeper is a woman called Mhairi, who, I have decided, based on two visits and approximately ninety seconds of total interaction, is going to be the person I orient around in the village.
She’s behind the counter when I come in, late fifties or early sixties, dark hair pulled back, sleeves rolled to her elbows, hands red from the cold of the chest freezer she’s just been reaching into.
“There she is,” she says, smiling. “Are you all settled in?”
“Well,” I say. “Mostly.”
“Mostly is about as much as anyone gets out this way.”
I gather a few things—bread, milk, a wedge of sharp cheese, a packet of biscuits I don’t need but have a funny name, a can of bean soup for the kind of evening I can already feel coming on—and bring them up to the counter.
The shop smells like cured meat and woodsmoke and something herbal, courtesy of a small posy of dried lavender by the till.
“Mhairi,” I say carefully while she’s ringing me up, hoping I’m pronouncing her name right. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” she replies mildly.
“There’s what looks like an old castle across the bay from mine. Big one, I think. It’s hard to tell. Tall, anyway.”
Her hands don’t stop moving, but she takes a breath that’s a beat too long before she answers.
“Aye, I know the one.”
“Who lives there?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“That’s what they say,” she says as she weighs the cheese. She glances up, one eye squinting at me. “Why’re you asking?”
“I saw someone over there this morning. On the shore.”
“On the shore, you say?” Another squint, this one loaded with meaning.
“Yes. Not the loch itself, but on the other side of that small bay by the cottage.”
“Could’ve been a hill-walker. People do come round, end of the season.”
“I guess,” I concede, and I can hear myself deciding not to mention the part where the walker was naked. Old me would have been quick to blurt that out, but new me doesn’t want to offend the only person I’ve had conversations with since I got here.
Mhairi gives me one slow nod and bags my groceries. She slides them across the counter. And then, just as I’m reaching for the handles, she puts her hand lightly on top of mine. Her skin is warm; for a moment I wonder if I’ve caught a chill.
“Iris,” she begins, my name sounding delightful with her accent. “Your aunt was a good woman.”
“Thank you,” I reply, though I feel silly accepting that compliment on Effie’s behalf.
“She kept herself to herself. Out there.”
“I can tell.”
“There’s wisdom in that.”
And at that, she lifts her hand. It’s not a threat or a warning, but it is something. I find myself standing in the shop with my groceries hanging from one fist, trying to figure out what she meant.
“Drive safe back, hen,” she commands. “The light can go early when the clouds come down.”
I look out the window. The sky has gone the color of old pewter while I’ve been in the shop, though it is barely past four in the afternoon.
“Thanks, Mhairi.”
“Mind how you go.”
I drive home with the heater on high and the radio off. I don’t normally drive without some sort of music that quiets my thoughts, but the silence feels like the appropriate response to whatever just happened. I want to be able to hear myself think.
Mhairi knows something, I can tell. Why else would she have gone cagey?
She knows something about that castle across the loch, and she chose not to tell me.
Why? Am I too new, not yet a resident who is privy to local lore?
Do I have to prove myself by doing something silly, like living in my aunt’s cottage for a year?
The road bends around the lower slopes and the loch comes up on my right, slate-dark in the failing light.
The mountains across the water are losing their edges, and the clouds have come down low.
It’s so wonderfully moody, so unmistakably The Highlands, that I wish I brought my paints with me so I could capture the scene.
Then, as I turn down my road and pass through the copse of Caledonian pine trees, I see it.
See him.
This time, he’s in the water.
Not on the far shore. Not across the bay. In the water, ten meters off the road, swimming a slow, even stroke parallel to my car.
I hit the brake harder than I mean to. The car lurches. The groceries tip in the passenger seat and the milk thumps against the door.
He stops swimming.
He treads water. I can see the small movement of his shoulders, the dark shape of his head above the surface. Then he turns to face the road.
To face me.
I can’t see his eyes from here thanks to the light, but I can feel them.
We stay like that for what is probably three seconds but feels like considerably longer, my foot still pressed heavily on the break.
He’s not moving except to keep his head above the water, which he is doing efficiently, as if he knows exactly how much effort it costs him and won’t spend a calorie more.
Then he lifts one hand out of the water.
Not a wave. Nothing that friendly. He just lifts it, palm out, like he’s marking the spot. Like he’s saying here I am.
Hill-walker, my ass.
I take my foot off the brake.
The car rolls forward.
I drive the rest of the road with both hands on the wheel, my grip tighter.
I’m not sure what it is about this naked swimming man that has me so on edge, but I’m strangely unnerved.
Guess it comes with the territory when you’re a single woman living alone in an isolated cottage in a foreign country.
When I get inside the feeling lingers, so I quickly lock the front door behind me. Then I lock the back door, which I didn’t bother with earlier. I mean, what’s someone going to steal? A blue tin of sewing supplies?
I hang my coat, put the kettle on, then sit at the kitchen table.
The sketchbook is where I left it, still open. I look at it in the low light from the kitchen lamp.
I flip to a fresh page.
I draw him from memory.
I draw him as he was in the morning, on the far shore, distant and pale and unbothered.
I draw the line of his shoulders. The hang of his arms. The angle of his head.
I don’t usually draw figures—my work is botanical, the careful, particular spread of a petal, the veins of a leaf—but I have been trained, and the proportions are something I should be able to do without thinking.
I draw for maybe ten minutes, then I sit back.
The drawing is quite good, if I do say so myself, considering he’s not a flower. I have caught the stillness of him, the way he was watching me, his whole posture on edge. A chill runs through me, for he reminds me a bit of a predator about to pounce.
But there’s something off about the figure on the page and it takes me way too long to realize what it is.
I’ve drawn him exactly as I saw him.
And while I remember the feel of his eyes, I can’t, for the life of me, remember his face.