Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
I’ve been at the kitchen window for an hour; the coffee in my hand has gone cold twice. The castle is across the bay in the grey morning. Half-ruined, half not. The same view I’ve had for ten days now, except today it has hooks in me.
I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish yesterday, though.
I pulled up my big girl panties and finished up in the boat shed.
I cut meadowsweet from the slope and pressed it.
I made a passable still life of the rowboat half-hauled on the rocks below the cottage, the kind of painting Effie would have done, and I’ve decided I want it in the kitchen if I can stand to look at it after I’ve framed it—I often can’t.
I also refrained from searching for Alasdair. And by refrain, I mean I only looked twice, and I didn’t even use my binoculars.
I didn’t see him, for what it’s worth. He told me he wouldn’t come, and he didn’t, not even on the shore with his dick out.
I thought that would be a good thing.
But…that was yesterday.
Today, the castle is calling me. There is no other word for it. It’s a thin thread behind my ribs that has been there since I opened my eyes and gotten worse in the hour I’ve been drinking cold coffee and staring at it, feeling it tug.
That said, I’m not actually going to see him.
I’m going to go look at the castle, the actual castle, up close, in daylight, and confirm that the man who appeared behind my bedsheets wasn’t lying about where he lives.
The cottage is mine for a year, the castle is across the bay, and I deserve to know the geography of my own situation, and who my neighbors really are.
Mhairi says it’s empty; so had MacRae. Alasdair says it isn’t.
At least one of them is wrong, and I’m a person who likes to settle these things and know who the lying liar pants is.
Also, if a man is murdering women along this coast, and that man is my neighbor, it would be useful to know whether his house has a basement. Do castles have basements? Maybe dungeons.
I shake my head, not wanting my brain to traipse down that figurative dark alley.
The fog came back overnight which doesn’t help with the vibes.
The bay has gone soft at its edges, the mountains across Loch Torridon swallowed entirely, the castle visible only in pieces, a tower top here, a section of curtain wall there, the rest swallowed up in pale wet air.
The kind of morning that would be ridiculous to drive in.
Too dangerous, in fact, the single-track being what it is, and me being the driver that I am who tends to panic and forget what side of the road I’m supposed to be on.
So I’ll walk.
I pull on my wellies, Effie’s wax jacket, and a wool hat that smells like the mudroom.
I bring my sketchbook because the sketchbook is my cover story—both to anyone who might see me and, mostly, to me because I’m really good at convincing myself.
I bring secateurs because if I see something worth cutting on the roadside, I’d be a fool not to.
I lock the back door. I lock the front door.
I check the back door again because it pays to be a paranoid bitch these days.
Then I set out.
My driveway is long in itself and I take it slowly because I’m in no hurry and because the verges are giving me things.
Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks, the flower-heads furred and purple.
Devil’s-bit scabious in three different blues.
I cut what I want and tuck the stems into the canvas bag.
The fog catches in my hair and on the wool of my hat and makes a fine wet glaze on the wax jacket.
Somewhere out of sight a sheep complains, and another sheep complains back, the sound traveling weirdly through the wet air so that I can’t tell which side of the road they’re on.
The road feels good in my body. My hips loosen after the first quarter-mile. My back stops doing the small grinding thing. I’d forgotten this, that walking, the right kind of walking, on the right ground, at the right pace, is one of the few activities my body tolerates.
We’ll see what it has to say on the way back.
The road comes up through the fog. I turn west over a cattle-grate. The castle’s access road is supposed to be about a mile and a half along this stretch, branching off to the right, so I walk slowly and watch for any signs.
Then I see it—small, scoured, half-grown over with hawthorn and giant rhododendrons, their flowers long dropped. Caisteal Eachainn, it reads, and then Category A Listed Building. Heritage Scotland. No access beyond this point without permission.
I think my neighbor and I are past the point of permission.
I turn down the access road and it narrows immediately.
The hawthorn and rhododendron, obviously planted by people a long time ago, closes overhead, and the road becomes more track than road, the broken stone of the surface having gone soft with moss.
Ferns on both sides, taller than my waist and already going copper at the edges, reach for me like greedy fingers.
The fog is thicker here, the trees closer, the world reduced to maybe thirty feet of visible path.
Somewhere ahead the trees thin, the forest slowly giving way to space and light.
That’s when I see something.
A flash of white through the trees on my left, in a small clearing maybe twenty feet off the road.
My first thought, embarrassingly, is woman in white, because that’s what folklore puts in a foggy wood on a Highland morning, and my brain is suggestible. One of the drowned wives is coming for me, finding her way on land from a stream.
Then the white resolves itself into something more concrete: A neck. A back. A flank.
A horse.
It’s just a horse.
Which kinda seems peculiar in its own way. I’m used to seeing horses in fields, not hidden by trees in a forest.
It’s standing in the clearing perfectly still, its head turned toward the track, watching me.
White, more dapple grey-white really, with a long mane streaked with pewter, hanging in heavy wet ropes against its neck as if the fog has soaked it through.
It’s substantial through the chest and has slight feathering at the hocks.
I’m guessing a Highland pony, or something like that…
bigger than a Highland, smaller than a Percheron, the kind of horse you see in old paintings.
What can I say, the horse girl to plant girl pipeline is a real one.
There is something off about it though. Its eyes are dark, almost too dark.
And I don’t know what I mean by that, because most horse eyes are dark by nature. But these are dark the way the loch is dark—the dark of something that has no bottom—and they are looking at me with rapt attention.
Horses are prey animals, and they’re almost always watching you, especially if you’re a stranger encroaching on their land.
But I don’t get that feeling of wariness from this horse.
Not from its gaze, the way it’s so sharply focused on me with those too dark, too deep, too large eyes.
It reminds me more of an elk or a bull; something that’s prepared to defend itself if needed.
It wants to do the chasing, not the other way around.
I take a slow step away to the far side of the road.
The horse does not move. It does not flick its ears. It stands so still that I’m starting to wonder if it’s some sort of illusion, not really there at all.
I lift my hand.
“Hello,” I say, feeling ridiculous. “I’m not here to harm you.”
Are you here to harm me?
The horse watches me wave but it doesn’t move. The only thing it does is blink.
I lower my hand, and I keep walking, and I don’t dare look back until I have gone another twenty feet.
When I do look back, the clearing has filled with fog and there is no horse in it, but I can’t tell if the horse has moved into the trees, or if the fog has come down, or if I invented something that wasn’t there.
I keep going until the trees thin out some more and the world opens, and suddenly the castle is in front of me.
Oh my god.
The fog is acting like a set designer as the castle rises out of the wet grey, its curtain wall the same color as the rock it sits on, the line between geology and architecture almost gone.
The seaward sides drop away to the bay, the water down there hidden by the fog so the castle looks like it ends in cloud.
The ditch on the landward side is grown thick with bracken and gorse, a green moat instead of a stone one, the collapsed timbers of what was once a drawbridge sticking out at angles through the growth.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, a perfect mix of grandeur and decay that makes my heart beat aflutter.
I don’t know what I expected, really. A ruin, I guess.
Something dignified and sad, as seen in a Heritage Scotland photograph.
Not this, though. Not this slow, grand thing half-eaten by its own coast, half-still-standing.
Wild roses have climbed all the way up the curtain wall on the landward side, their last late blooms bright against the grey.
Foxgloves grow in the joints of the stone.
Yellow lichens flame on every south-facing surface.
Honeysuckle has rooted in a high arrow-slit and is hanging in a long curtain of green and cream down the wall that smells heavenly from here.
I have to make myself remember why I came.
I came to confirm that someone lives here.