Page 161 of Bonetide

Later, after banking the stove while he locks up—he locks up now, the man checks the doors and windows like he’s paranoid and it never stops being ironic—I stand a moment outside our bedroom, under a certain spot. Just above, under floorboards in Effie’s closet turned binding workshop, in a dead witch’s box, there’s a piece of horse hide that lies warm in the dark. I checked it once, alone, lifted the lid and found it exactly as I’d left it, warm as a sleeping animal, and I understood standing there that checking was the wrong relationship to have with it. It’s not a prisoner. It’s a promise and it will be fine on its own. It’s the only thing in this house with more time than we have, and it can mind itself.

What I think instead, standing there with the fire settling and the snow falling softly at the window and Alasdair’s footsteps doing their nightly human round, is the thing I’ve been arriving at all month, the thought the whole year has been walking me toward.

We loved each other before the binding. I know that now. It’s kind of fucked up, considering the circumstances, but it’s true. But neither of us could have sworn to it, not with the glamour in the air and the pull in the water and the monster at the wheel half the time. And a love you can’t swear to isn’t love yet…it’s hope. Hope under threat, hope holding its breath, hope with salt on the windowsills. That’s what we had, as summer bled into autumn: two people hoping in the haunted dark, with no way of knowing what feelings were true.

And then the horse went under, and the threat went with it, and what was left standing in my kitchen was just hope. Plain hope, with cold feet and a heartbeat.

Hope, with the threat gone, turns out to be another word for a life.

Alasdair comes back in, rubbing his hands, declaring the night “bitter as a bailiff,” and finds me standing outside the bedroom doing nothing.

“What is it, foxglove?”

“Nothing. Just counting my luck.”

“Aye?” He gathers me in, warm right through, smelling of woodsmoke and the cold outside air. “And how’s it tallying?”

“Rich,” I tell him as I hold him back. “Embarrassingly rich.”

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?