Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
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.