Читать онлайн «The Winter Sea»
Автор Сюзанна Кирсли
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
I
CHAPTER 4
II
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
III
CHAPTER 8
IV
CHAPTER 9
V
CHAPTER 10
VI
CHAPTER 11
VII
CHAPTER 12
VIII
CHAPTER 13
IX
CHAPTER 14
X
CHAPTER 15
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
CHAPTER 16
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
XXII
XXIII
CHAPTER 19
ABOUT THE CHARACTERS
A NOTE OF THANKS
Come home! The year has left you old; Leave those grey stones; wrap close this shawl Around you for the night is cold; Come home! He will not hear you call; No sign awaits you here but the beat Of tides upon the strand, The crag’s gaunt shadow with gull’s feet Imprinted on the sand,
And spars and sea-weed strewn Under a pale moon.
Come home! He will not hear you call; Only the night winds answer as they fall Along the shore,
And evermore
Only the sea-shells
On the grey stones singing, And the white foam-bells Of the North Sea ringing.
— E. J. Pratt, “On the Shore”
CHAPTER 1
IT WASN’T CHANCE. THERE wasn’t any part of it that happened just by chance.
I learned this later; though the realization, when it came, was hard for me to grasp because I’d always had a firm belief in self-determination. My life so far had seemed to bear this out—I’d chosen certain paths and they had led to certain ends, all good, and any minor bumps that I had met along the way I could accept as not bad luck, but simply products of my own imperfect judgment. If I’d had to choose a creed, it would have been the poet William Henley’s bravely ringing lines:
So on that winter morning when it all began, when I first took my rental car and headed north from Aberdeen, it never once occurred to me that someone else’s hand was at the helm.
I honestly believed it was my own decision, turning off the main road for the smaller one that ran along the coastline. Not the wisest of decisions, maybe, seeing as the roads were edged with what I’d been assured was Scotland’s deepest snow in forty years, and I’d been warned I might run into drifting and delays. Caution and the knowledge I was running on a schedule should have kept me to the more well-traveled highway, but the small sign that said ‘Coastal Route’ diverted me.
My father always told me that the sea was in my blood. I had been born and raised beside it on the shores of Nova Scotia, and I never could resist its siren pull. So when the main road out of Aberdeen turned inland I turned right instead, and took the way along the coast.
I couldn’t say how far away I was when I first saw the ruined castle on the cliffs, a line of jagged darkness set against a cloud-filled sky, but from the moment I first saw it I was captivated, driving slightly faster in the hope I’d reach it sooner, paying no attention to the clustered houses I was driving past, and feeling disappointment when the road curved sharply off again, away from it. But then, beyond the tangle of a wood, the road curved back again, and there it was: a long dark ruin, sharp against the snowbound fields that stretched forbiddingly between the cliff ’s edge and the road.
