Page 10 of Bonetide

Chapter

Three

Iwake up thinking about him.

Honestly, it’s embarrassing.

I had the kind of night where I was both unbelievably tired and unable to sleep, where my body was lead-heavy on the mattress, but my brain kept replaying the way he said my name. Goodnight, Iris. In the dark, lying in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin, I held the words on my tongue and turned them over and tried to figure out what about them made my body do what it was doing, which was the kind of low, warm pulse I haven’t felt since well before the divorce. I haven’t even slept with anyone since then, but that also includes myself. The dust on those particular shelves is impressive, to say the least.

When I wake up at dawn the next morning—too early thanks to lingering jet lag—and see grey, pearlescent half-light coming through the bedroom window. I’m sore in the usual places and a few unusual ones, so I try to replay the events of last night, try to get a read on him and figure shit out.

My new neighbor is a man named Alasdair who came to my door in the dark and wouldn’t give me his last name. He’s a man Mhairi pretended not to know of but actually does, which means there’s context here I’m not privy to. He’s also, by his own account, the only other resident on this bay who shouldn’t exist, because Mhairi told me the castle’s been empty for years.

Not to mention Effie had written not to let him in. Of course, she didn’t say who the “him” was, but regardless, I should be more freaked out than fucking horny.

The fact that I’m not is a thing I’ll need to think about later, when I’ve had coffee. I think I need a whole vat in order to get my fuzzy cotton-ball brain into working order.

I climb out of bed, slip on my robe and slippers, and pad toward the back door, opening it to let in the fresh morning air. The bay is gone, or, rather, the bay is still there, but it’s been swallowed. The water close to the rocks is visible, dark and slow, but everything past about ten meters out is pale grey and indistinct. The mountains across the loch are completely gone, as is the castle on the spit. The whole opposite shore has folded itself into the fog as if it was never there to begin with. As if I dreamed the whole place.

The cottage is wrapped in damp; the kind my bones aren’t a fan of. The air smells like wet stone and salt and the particular green smell of bracken when the night has been long and wet. Somewhere a curlew is crying, the call so liquid and lonesome it makes my heart twinge with sadness.

I make myself coffee and drink it while leaning against the frame, looking at the fog of nothing and reveling in it. The cottage has the kind of silence that has its own weight. I can hear the faint slap of water against rock below me and, very far off, the muffled lowing of a sheep. The world has narrowed to about thirty feet in every direction.

It occurs to me that this is a fantastically moody day to put on my boots and go for a walk.

The other thing that occurs to me is that I’m going to do that walk on my own—or, perhaps, soon-to-be own—property, where I can see the cottage at all times, because I’m not stupid, either.

I pull on my hiking boots and warm clothes, grab my sketchbook and a pencil, and head out first to the boat shed, which I’ve only looked inside briefly when the solicitor gave me the tour on the first day.

The boat shed sits about fifty feet from the cottage, down a slope of tussock and gravel toward the water. Walking down to it through the pale wet grass, I notice it the way I haven’t before, the slate roof gone soft with lichen, the stone walls hugged by a tangle of late honeysuckle, the whole structure looking like something that grew out of the ground rather than something built. The door is wooden, weathered, fastened with a wrought-iron latch the same blackened color as the horseshoes on my cottage doors, but there is no horseshoe above the door.

I don’t open it but I stand in front of it for a moment and think this could be a studio. I imagine a workbench under one of the windows. I imagine drying flowers from the rafters. I imagine the smell of turpentine and lavender and the even light a north-facing window would give me in the afternoons. It’s too bad there’s no electrical hookup, but maybe I could get a portable heater for the colder days. I doubt Amazon delivers out here—another inconvenience I’ll have to get used to—but perhaps I could pick one up in Fort William or Inverness, when I feel like driving a couple of hours.

It’s a project for sure, the first of many.

The plants around the shed are hanging on past their reasonable bloom time because I was told July was unseasonably warm. There’s yarrow growing in a clump beside the door, white flat-topped clusters going slightly brown at the edges—Achillea millefolium, called milfoil by people who don’t know any better. My dad called it the soldier’s herb and told me Achilles stanched the wounds of his men with it (depending on which translation of Homer you trust). I crouch and crush a leaf between my fingers and breathe in. Bitter, peppery, faintly medicinal.

There’s also self-heal—Prunella vulgaris, small violet-purple flowers in a tight cylindrical head—growing in the shorter grass toward the path. Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks. A few late thistles, some starkly pink and purple while others are going to seed, the silken white of their seedheads soft as cobweb in the still air. Sea pinks past their flowering, the dried magenta heads still rattling on the rocks closer to the shore.

These aren’t just plants, these are cunning-folk plants, the kind that the wise and revered herbalists (or folk healers) of the village would use to solve problems. Every plant has been placed here for a reason or, more likely, every plant has been allowed to grow here for a reason. Effie didn’t pull what she didn’t need to, that much I can tell. And while she never said outright in any of her writing that she considered herself as one of the cunning-folk, I knew she was.

I straighten up, feel my hips complain, and turn to look up the slope toward the road.

There’s a copse of trees on the higher ground, a small stand of stunted Scots pine and birch and, at the edge, a hawthorn or two, sitting where my property bends toward the single-track road that brought me here. It’s the only patch of real cover on the spit. A botanical illustrator’s instinct says that’s where the interesting plants are, because anywhere else on this spit is exposed to wind and salt, and the things growing in the woods will be a different ecology entirely.

This morning the copse is barely visible with the fog having settled into the trees. The trunks are dark verticals against the pale grey, and the spaces between them are darker still, the kind of dark that swallows the eye. I can’t see more than a few meters in. The trees aren’t moving. Nothing is moving. The whole forest has the stillness of a held breath.

I want to go in.

This is the part of me that’s spent fifteen years being a botanical illustrator, that excited thrill of discovering something new. Unexplored ground in a foggy morning is exactly the conditions under which the best fieldwork happens. It’s like the plants you find on a clear day are pretty but common plants, but the plants you find on a damp, still, foggy morning are mystical. They’re old plants, woodland plants, plants that don’t tolerate a lot of light. There could be wood sorrel in there. There could be whitlow grass. There could be the kind of mossy, lichenous, cold-loving growth a coastal Highland copse holds in pockets the rest of the world doesn’t get.

I stand at the edge of the slope and look at the trees in anticipation.

The trees don’t look back, exactly. They’re just trees, after all. I’m not a person who anthropomorphizes vegetation, except occasionally when drinking. But I have a thing—a small, possibly silly thing—that I trust about the way certain places feel when I’m alone in them. And the woods this morning, is a no in my body. The same no I get when I’m standing at the entrance to an empty parking garage at night.

So I don’t go in. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.

Besides, the fog is bad, my fibro is grumpy, and I don’t have my full kit and shouldn’t be doing botanical fieldwork without my pressing materials anyway. I turn around and walk back to the cottage, and only when I’m at the back door with my hand on the latch do I realize I haven’t looked back at the woods since I turned.