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)
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.