The Sea House: A Novel (36 page)

Authors: Elisabeth Gifford

BOOK: The Sea House: A Novel

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It’s a small exhibition about Alexander and his co-author MacIntyre’s work on Selkies and Samis. The manuscript is open in a glass case, with beautiful illustrations of the Ishbel story, done by Alexander’s wife, Moira.

Euan runs over to a tall glass case containing a delicate ghost jacket on loan from the Edinburgh museum, and presses his hands and face to the glass. Back lit, arms spread out, the jacket is made of material so fine it seems transparent.

The bell for the performance sounds.

The theatre auditorium is packed, everyone we know and everyone we don’t know from the island seems to have turned out. Angus John, unrecognisable in a dark suit, flashes us a smile; he has put his teeth in for the occasion.

The auditorium goes dark. The screen across the back of the stage lights up, a grey seascape of moving waves. A booming low note fills the hall, and a single voice starts to sing above it in Gaelic, the song of the Sula Skerrie seal man.

Emily grasps my hair in one of her fists and tests if it is well attached. By the watery light of the seascape, I untangle her fingers, kiss the top of her head and smile as I think of the last little secret that Christine MacAulay managed to uncover in her sleuthing through census lists.

CHAPTER 42

Edinburgh, 1862

Every so often the gaslights in the wall sconces gave an almost imperceptible flutter, minute winds troubling the gas flame as if each globe contained its own climate. Fanny looked up from her sewing. She was used to the fluctuations in Edinburgh’s gas supply, but this evening she was alert to any small change in the room, any movement outside in the street; she was listening for footsteps that might approach along the paving stones, turn in at the garden gate.

Matthew was sitting cross-legged in the wing chair by the fire, a large foot in its leather slipper tapping out a silent beat. He had in his hands a concordance, but Fanny noticed that he turned the pages slowly. His head turned to the window when footsteps ran past the building and continued up the street with a slapping sound.

At eleven, the clocks in the house began to chime, first the feminine notes of the mantel clock, then the deeper sounds of the hall clock in its oak casement, and then, a little late as always, the notes from the dining room grandfather followed, wheezy with age. As the music died away, spreading behind it the accustomed, well-ordered silence, they heard, at last, the tread of feet along the garden path. A pause, and then a hand took the knocker, let it slip with a crash, started again with a series of heavy knocks.

Fanny immediately dropped her sewing, stood as if about to answer, but Matthew motioned for her to wait while he went instead. She moved quickly to the drawing room doorway, paused halfway out into the hall where she could see.

A woman in a thick tweed shawl stood on the doorstep, a white frill under a black bonnet, a full skirt of some plain heavy material, of the type worn by most working women – old-fashioned clothes, although she was not old. A young woman from the islands, come over perhaps to work at a post in one of the city’s households.

In her arms, a small bundle of blankets.

She spoke in Gaelic, a low sing-song voice, clear and completely unintelligible. Then she tried again. ‘Please, it is for the Missis.’

But Fanny was already there. She took the well-wrapped bundle into her arms, watched as a tiny arm appeared from between the folds, made a circling motion. She parted the rough cloth, a softer woollen shawl inside, and uncovered the face of a baby, wide awake but quiet, eyes that were more the colour of shadows in water than the blue they were to become one day; a tiny, perfectly proportioned face with a soft down of fair hair. The child turned her head to one side and attempted to suck the blanket. She made a small puzzled sound, and Fanny’s face distorted into a crumple of amazement and love.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Tell them thank you.’

Fanny took the child upstairs while Matthew spoke some more with the woman, his eyes still on Fanny as she went.

* * *

Fanny sat on the nursing chair that had been placed ready by the lamp, slowly feeding the baby with warm milk from a teaspoon.

Soon she would hear Matthew running up the stairs.

‘Anna Katriona,’ Fanny whispered to the baby. ‘Welcome home.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank John MacAulay whose book,
Sliochd nan Ron: Seal-Folk and Ocean Paddlers,
furnished much of the information used in this novel, with his kind permission. He introduced me to the work of David MacRitchie, upon whom I have based the fictional character of Gordon MacIntyre, and also to the letter in
The Times
newspaper of 1809, reporting a mermaid sighting in Western Scotland. Bill and Christine Lawson at the Seallam genealogy centre in Harris, are wonderful curators of the history of the islands. Enormous thanks to renowned artists Willie and Moira Fulton at the Ardbuidhe Cottage Gallery, Drinishader, where I began working on the book in earnest. Their generously shared memories were invaluable for understanding life on the islands. Thank you to Rev. Murdo Smith, Hamish Taylor, and the congregations at Manish and Scarista. And thank you to Hamish for trips on his boat.

Thank you to William and Helen Watson who first introduced us to the Hebrides; and to Jane Knight for her hospitality; also to the many wonderful people on Harris who have let their cottages to us over the years.

I owe a great debt to Patricia Law, Margaret Leroy and Nicola and Rhidian Brook-Sulman for reading the early and later drafts and for their encouragement to keep going. Many thanks to the tutors on the Oxford creative writing diploma, especially Antonia Logue-Bose who helped in finding a voice for the story; also to John Bahan, Kate Clanchy, Jane Draycott, Frank Egerton and Clare Morgan. Very many thanks to fellow writers on the course: Marianne Allen, Neville Beal, Alastair Beck, Sarah-Jane de Brito Martin, Sue Cox, Stephanie van Driel, Suellen Dainty, Pauline Fiennes, Nick Harries, Brian Harrison, James McDermott, Karen Pomerantz, Margaret Keeping, Peter Saxby, Nageena Shaheen and Fred Volans.

I would like to thank the tutors on the Royal Holloway University of London creative writing MA: Susanna Jones, Jo Shapcott and Andrew Motion. Very warm thanks for long-standing support from the tutor group: Emma Chapman, Tom Feltham, Carolina Gonzalez Carvajal, Kat Gordon, Lucy Hounsom, Liza Klaussmann and Rebecca Lloyd Jones.

Thanks to Marion Urch and Isabel Collins for help with editing and sorting out my bizarre spelling.

I am indebted to Jenny Hewson at the RCW agency who has taken on and championed the book to publication. Maddie West and Sara O’Keeffe at Corvus have been enormously encouraging and wise editors. Thanks to Lucy Ridout for copy-editing and to Melissa Marshall for proof-reading.

Many thanks to my husband, Josh, scientific illustrator and cartoonist, whose interest in evolution helped inform this book. Thank you to my wonderful parents, Joan and Frank, for raising us always in sight of a churchyard. Thank you to my amazing children, Hugh, Kirsty and George, who have lived with the Selkie story for a long time and who know the island well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CALDER, Jenni,
Scots in Canada,
Edinburgh: Luath, 2003

CAMERON, A. D.,
Go Listen to the Crofters: The Napier Commission and Crofting a Century Ago,
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CRAIG, David,
On The Crofters’ Trail,
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007

DESMOND, Adrian and MOORE James,
Darwin,
London: Penguin, 2009

FAY SHAW, Margaret,
From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides,
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008

HALL, Christina,
Tales from an Island,
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JOHNSON, Alison,
A House by the Shore,
London: Warner Books, 1995

KOHN, Marek,
A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination,
London: Faber and Faber, 2004

LAWSON, Bill,
Harris in History and Legend,
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008

MACAULAY, John M.,
Sliochd nan Ron: Seal-Folk and Ocean Paddlers,
Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1998

MACLEAN, Charles,
Island on the Edge of the World,
Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006

MACDONALD, Finlay J.,
Crowdie and Cream and other stories: Memoirs of a Hebridean Childhood,
England: Time Warner, 2005

MACDONALD ROBERTSON, R.,
Highland Folktales,
Colonsay: House of Lochar, 1998

MACLEOID, Fionnlagh,
Sgaile is Solas: Lasting Traces – Mingulay to Scarp: Robert M. Adam photographs,
Stornoway: Acair, 2007

MACNEICE, Louis,
I Crossed the Minch,
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007

MACRITCHIE, David,
Testimony of Tradition
1890 (Project Gutenberg)

NICOLSON, Adam,
Sea Room,
London: HarperCollins, 2002

REA, F.G.,
A School in South Uist, Reminiscences of a Hebridean Schoolmaster, 1890–1913, Edinburgh:
Birlinn, 2007

STEEL, Tom,
The Life and Death of St. Kilda,
London: HarperCollins, 1988

THOMPSON, David,
The People of the Sea: Celtic Tales of the Seal Folk,
Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001

WILLIS, Douglas,
Crofting,
Edinburgh: John Donald, 2001

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Extract from 1809 letter to the Editor,
The Times
reprinted with thanks to
The Times
/NI Syndication.

Map by Jamie Whyte

www.stmartins.com

First published in Great Britain under the title
Secrets of the Sea House
by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

First U.S. Edition: April 2014

eISBN 9781466841406

First eBook edition: March 2014