Epilogue
ALASDAIR
Twenty years later
The body keeps a tally, and I’ve learned to read it the way I once read water.
I’m sixty, or thereabouts—we settled on a birthday years back the third of October, the binding’s day. I was nearly forty when I first stopped being a man and died, so we just ignored the centuries after that, and picked up on the third.
So, therefore, I’m sixty. The black’s gone silver at the temples and is losing the war everywhere else, there’s a knee that moans in wet weather, and my eyes want the cheaters now for the small print, which Iris finds so funny she’s hidden three pairs around the cottage like Easter eggs, so there’s always a set within reach of my outrage.
And I am, she informs me regularly, holding up indecently well. “It’s not fair,” she says, watching me split wood that morning with my sleeves up. “You’re going to be one of those silver-fox pensioners. Women at the heritage site ask about you.”
I tell her centuries of practice ought to count for something, but the truth is simpler: the body’s sixty, but I’ve only been using it twenty years. Everything on me is original parts, low mileage. The first half of my life put no wear on the machine at all.
Twenty years mortal. Twenty Christmases, twenty springs, that first road trip to Skye and the eleven road trips after, Edinburgh and the ponies and one regrettable ferry to Orkney that Iris has never let me live down—no boats, she said, she was clear about the boats—and her hair’s gone its own handsome grey now, and her hands hurt more than she admits in the cold months, and I rub them by the stove on the bad nights and feel the years in them and would not trade a single bloody one.
That’s the thing I could never have explained to the creature I was.
It hoarded time like a dragon on gold and never once spent any.
I’m spending mine. It turns out that’s what it’s for.
The loch lies grey and well-behaved below the window, and has for twenty years.
Just water, disturbed only by the storms that blow in from the northwest and lash the shore with great drama.
The castle stands across the bay with its new gravel car park and its wee laminated guides—the trust took it in the end, all but the tower, which is structurally unsound, per the engineer’s report I paid a good deal to have say so—and five pounds fifty buys you the great hall and the chapel and a recording of local legends narrated, the guide pamphlet says, by a member of the MacCoinnich family.
And this morning, up the path from the road with a rucksack the size of a sheep and boots that have seen three continents, comes a Galloway woman to the cottage door.
I’d know the walk anywhere. I watched it for sixty years on Effie and twenty on Iris and there it is again, third generation I’ve witnessed of it, that particular Galloway way of arriving at this shore like the shore had better explain itself.
Rosey.
She was six when I first met her, a small, loud dignitary who interviewed me about horses down a telephone and approved me on the strength of my answers.
She’s twenty-six now, finished with her degree, “feral,” per her mother, which Maddie says into the phone the way other women say terminal.
Six months backpacking with no fixed itinerary and no fixed plans after, and she’s washed up here for a fortnight on her way to wherever’s next.
She comes up the path dressed entirely in black, black coat to her ankles, black boots, silver rings on every finger, a pentacle at her throat, eyes done dark as a selkie’s, hanging off her shoulder a camera older than her mother.
Iris takes one look at her niece and falls in love on the spot.
“Maddie said you’d gone goth,” she exclaims, hauling the girl into the kind of hug that rearranges a spine. “She said it like it was a disease. ‘She’s gone goth, Iris, she has a tarot deck, talk to her.’”
“She wants you to fix me,” Rosey says dryly.
“Oh, I’m going to make it so much worse. Come in, come in. Alasdair, look at her, she’s perfect.”
She is, rather. She’s got the Galloway look under the eyeliner, the bones of it, the watchfulness, and over the first pot of tea she lays her tarot deck on our kitchen table next to Iris’s like a young gun laying her pistol beside the marshal’s, and the two of them are off, trading spreads and significators, and I sit by the stove with my whisky listening to a witch and her apprentice, or possibly two witches, two cunning folk, the line not so much continuing as compounding.
And I hear Maddie’s despairing voice in my mind, and I think, Ah, Maddie.
You sent her to the one house in the world where this was always going to catch. Didn’t you know what you were doing?
She fits the place eerily. That’s the word, eerie, and I’m a fair judge of it.
She’s up before us walking the tideline.
She finds Iris’s old pressing frames in the studio and asks if she can use them.
She photographs everything, from the film camera—always the film.
“Digital lies,” she says, “film has to be somewhere, it has to have actually happened.”
On the fourth evening she asks about the loch.
“It’s strange here,” she notes, not troubled, just noting it, the way her aunt notes things. “Good strange. The water feels like it’s…” she hunts for it, “…paying attention.”
Iris’s eyes come to mine over the teapot, just briefly. Twenty years and we’ve a whole language for these looks. This one says steady, hold steady.
“It’s an old loch,” Iris says. “And this is a very old land. Old things hold an atmosphere.”
“Mm,” hums Rosey, unconvinced and unbothered, and deals another card.
The fifth day, Rosey takes the camera down to the shore for the late April light, and stays.
It’s not till the light’s nearly gone that Iris looks up from her drawing board and says, “She’s been a while.
” And while there’s nothing in her voice that should cause me concern, there’s something in the air, and I find I’m already up and reaching for my coat.
All these quiet years and the old sense still lives in me somewhere, in whatever room the creature used to keep, and it has just, very softly, for the first time in two decades, knocked.
We go down the path together, not hurrying, but almost.
Rosey is in the water.
Only to the ankles though, her boots on the rocks behind her, trousers rolled, standing in the shallows where the spit runs out, the camera hanging dead weight at her side.
She’s staring out across the bay at nothing, absolutely still, stiller than the young ever stand, and the late light is going to pewter and rose all around her and the loch is flat as glass to the far shore.
“Rosey.” Iris’s voice. “You’ll freeze. You all right?”
She doesn’t startle. She turns, and her face is…well, it’s not frightened. It’s rather lit. Wide open under all the dark paint, the look of someone who’s been shown something.
“Yes. I think so. It was the weirdest thing.” She looks back out at the water.
“There was a horse. Swimming. Right across the bay…I watched it for ages, it was huge, and then it just—” she lifts her hand, lets it fall, “—went under. It never came up. I waited and it never came up. Look, you can still see the ripples where it went.”
And you can. God help us, you can, out in the middle distance, on water with no wind to stir it, a wide ring spreading slow and patient from a center where nothing now is, the way water folds over something that has gone down deliberately.
And hopefully means to stay down.
Iris’s hand finds mine with cold fingers. The grip says everything, her face says nothing at all.
“A sea lion, most likely,” Iris says, in the mild voice she keeps for police and tourists.
“Big bulls this time of year. They come into the bay after the salmon farms, the mussel beds. They’ll look enormous in low light.
Come on out of that water, you mad child, your mother will have me extradited.
There’s tea on, and Alasdair’s whisky, and you can show us the photos. ”
“I got two frames,” Rosey says, wading toward us, her eyes still going back over her shoulder.
“At least I think I did. The light was—” and then she’s up on the rocks pulling her boots on and talking shutter speeds.
She’s twenty-six and luminous and entirely unaware of what she is, which is a Galloway woman, ankle-deep in this particular water, who looked at something older than God and felt it look back.
They start up the path ahead of me, dark head and silver, Iris’s arm through her niece’s, their voices mingling. I stand a moment where the rocks meet the water and look out at the bay.
The ripples have nearly closed. The water lies down, smooths, goes back to keeping its own counsel, the way I remember it doing from the inside.
Somewhere below the painted pewter and the rose, in the cold dark fathoms where the bottom’s never been found, something is settling itself into the deep with its long patience, the way you settle into bed for sleep.
So. The loch’s let a room again.
I should feel dread, I suppose. There’s a version of me that would have, the new man, twenty years ago, frightened of every shadow in the water.
But I find what comes up in me instead, standing here in the last of the light, is something closer to recognition.
The villagers have always said this loch has a tenant or two.
It had one for hundreds of years, and the women of one stubborn family stood on this shore and kept the ledger and salted the sills.
And in the end one of them did what the others could not, which was walk into the fog with an iron knife and ask the question I was finally ready to hear. The loch is patient, but so, it turns out, are the Galloways. There’s a fresh one up the path right now that asked the water for its picture.
Whatever’s down there now, it’s young at this.
It’ll learn the shape of the bay, the old rules, the smell of rowan and iron coming off a certain cottage.
And someday—not soon, these things move at the speed of centuries, the speed that rocks evolve at—it’ll come to the edge of itself and look up the slope at a lit window, the way I once did.
Aye, well, let it look. The house it’ll find has a witch in it, and the witch has an heir, and the heir will be back, one day.
“Alasdair!” Iris, from up the path, the whisky-and-tea voice. “It’s getting dark, mo ghràdh!”
“Coming,” I call, and I mean it the way I’ve meant everything for twenty years.
I give the loch one last look over my shoulder, old neighbor to new, and then I turn my back on the water and climb the path home to the women and the fire and the rest of my one good life.
THE END