The Selkie Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

filled except at low tide. At ebb tide there is a thin bar of sand and rock that allows one to cross the headlands and remain dry-shod almost all the way to Kiel. One must use caution, though, because the mats of sea wrack on the shore can hide pools that will turn and even break ankles. I was not used to such highs and lows of tidal waters, and the water can turn quickly. At high tide a small boat may pass safely over the bar, assuming the water is not so violent with storm that it dashes the craft upon the rugged cliffs; then it is deep enough to drown a tall man.
    The jetty stood at the south end of the cove in whose arms Findloss sheltered. It was an old structure in the shape of an E, its long spine thrust out straight from the island. On the shorter arms, the largest boats were moored. Smaller boats were often pulled up onto patches of sand between the gullies cut into the cliff face; these few scattered beaches were safe from most high tides. It is said that a cave lies below the bottom leg of the pier, which was partly quarried stone and part the cliff face itself, whose lowest shelf had been smoothed into a sort of table and then expanded with the need for more pier. This cave is accessible only atthe lowest of spring tides. I have never seen it, but would like to because it is supposedly inhabited by several species of colorful anemones that can be seen nowhere else in Scotland. People who described it to me had made it sound like a fairyland.
    I was feeling more annoyed than forlorn at that point, but was aware of a growing melancholy trying to possess my mind as rapidly as sand filled my shoes. There is no shortage of sand on the plateaus where the village sits, and with the wind in the west there were enough dunes for the Sahara desert. This low mood threatening me was in part due to the returning clouds that promised more rain, but also the recurring suspicion that I had made a terrible mistake by coming to live among these strange people, and that a winter in Scotland might be more than I could stand.
    Anxious to distract myself from this avenue of pointless thought, I let my brain return to the mystery of my visitor and how he had gotten to my cottage. At one time there had been a sort of road to Findloss. I gathered that it had not been a real road or even a path as most people back home thought of it; the trail had been a sort of zigzag switchback affair, a series of a dozen traverses some sixty feet apiece and rather steep, which climbed the far side of the hills that ringed the village. The natives had shunned it, both because it was built by the British—for the purpose of more efficient tax collection and also chasing down Jacobite rebels—but also because the gravel had hurt the unshod ponies’ hooves as well as the bare feet of the villagers. (Yes, I lived in a place where shoes were once—and not so long ago—considered an effete andforeign invention, a modern convenience that eroded the moral fiber of the inhabitants.)
    In any event, the road is gone now, the hills having reclaimed the space with marron grass, and the village is again what I once heard described by my solicitor as “inaccessible from without and not to be left from within.” So, my stranger was most likely to have come from the sea rather than by road, and probably not from the north since the currents were tricky, and if you sailed incautiously into the marshlands or stony shoals during dark, you were likely to end up adding to the collection of derelict boats whose broken ribs were bleaching in the rare sun at low tide. But if he had come from the south, where was his boat now? It must not have been badly damaged if he had taken off again as soon as the storm abated. Of course, if he were still about somewhere, perhaps trying to mend his vessel, then it was my duty to warn him of what was being said in the village.
    I topped a sandbank and looked out at the empty patch of shore between two spits of rock and then back up at