The Vanished Days
Also by Susanna Kearsley
The Winter Sea
The Rose Garden
Mariana
The Shadowy Horses
The Firebird
The Splendour Falls
Season of Storms
A Desperate Fortune
Named of the Dragon
Bellewether
The Deadly Hours
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Susanna Kearsley
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Faceout Studios
Cover images © Leonardo Baldini/Arcangel, Irochka_T/Getty Images, freedomnaruk/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The poem “The Word” by John Masefield is used by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kearsley, Susanna, author.
Title: The vanished days / Susanna Kearsley.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022117 (print) | LCCN 2021022118 (ebook) |
(trade paperback) | (epub)
Classification: LCC PR9199.3.K4112 V36 2021 (print) | LCC PR9199.3.K4112
(ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022117
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022118
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
II
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
IV
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
V
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
VI
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
VII
Chapter 40
VIII
About the Characters
A Word about Accuracy
Excerpt from The Winter Sea
Excerpt from The Firebird
Reading Group Guide
A Note of Thanks
About the Author
Back Cover
For James Graeme and the hundreds, known and nameless, who set sail for Darien, with Scotland’s hopes and future in their hands; whose passing left holes in the hearts and lives of those who loved them, and who deserve to be better remembered.
* * *
My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love’s refinèd gold,
May love’s gold coin be current with us still.
May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
In the dear March of a most sacred year.
May what we are be all we might have been,
And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
In our love’s acre, comrade, till the end.
And may we find when ended is the page
Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.
—John Masefield, “The Word”
I
I was a younger man when I first met her. I should tell you this in fairness, not because the years have dulled my recollection of that moment, for in truth I could still lead you to the spot where I was standing when she looked in my direction. I’ve forgotten many things. That is not one of them. I’m telling you because even the wisest man, when young, is ruled by other things than wisdom when he meets with such a woman. And when I met Lily Aitcheson, I knew I was in trouble.
There are many who believe they know what happened, but they do not know the whole of it. The rumors spread, and grow, and take their hold, and so to end them I have been persuaded now to take my pen in hand and tell the story as it should be told—both in the parts that are my own and in those pieces that were hers, as they were told to me by others and as I came to discover them.
You may ask how closely you can trust my narrative, when I have waited until now to set it down, and when those days must surely seem so distant to me, like a magic lantern show of memories played against the coming darkness. I can only reassure you we kept notes from our inquiries—Gilroy’s and my own—and I have those beside me here now in my study, for my reference.
As to memory, you may understand this better for yourself, when you are old, but there are some corners of the mind imprinted so indelibly with what we have experienced that, long after the less important things have slipped away and we have lost the simple function of recalling where we last set down our spectacles, those deeper memories yet remain. The slightest thing may make them stir—a wafting scent, a few notes of a song half-sung, the darkness of a passing cloud.
Most evenings in my armchair by the fireside, I drift now to those memories and assure you they are every bit as clear as when I lived them.
Me at fourteen in the scorching bright sunlight, the day I was taught how to fire a musket.
A turn, and I’m deep in the jungles of Darien, fighting the Spaniards, and Lieutenant Turnbull, my friend and commander, is urging me onward in spite of the shot to his shoulder that’s just made him fall. “Go,” he says. “Do not stop. Go!”
Turn again, and it’s several years on and I’m once again following Turnbull’s directions, his letter inviting me to come and visit him tucked in my pocket as I climb the worn stones of Edinburgh’s High Street in search of his door.
He lived, that year, in Caldow’s Land—the term land being commonly applied in that town to those great, high tenements in which each floor was, of itself, a separate dwelling, serviced by a common stair. It was a narrow building, and an old one, and the evening I arrived in mid-September under skies that threatened rain, it looked unwelcoming. The hollow shadows lying deeply in the arched shop booths at street level, the several looming stories of dark windows, and the jagged roofline cutting at the sky all seemed to warn me not to stay.
But I was stubborn, I was weary, and I did not heed the warning.
So, for what came next, I’ve no one but myself to blame.
Chapter 1
Monday, 22 September, 1707
MacDougall was watching me. It was unsettling to waken and find him half-shielded by shadow, an arm’s length away from my bed. For a sick moment I thought I was still in the grip of the trembling fever that had been my curse these past years and that had, as it always did, struck without warning, the same night I’d set foot in Caldow’s Land.
Making things worse, my friend Turnbull was not even here in town.
Instead, on his threshold, I’d found myself facing his wife, great with child, who had offered apologies. “But do come in. You can sup with us, surely?”
He’d written to me that he’d married and that they were well matched, but this was my proof—for few women, upon opening their door to find me standing there, a stranger, would have welcomed me inside. And fewer still, when I had shown that night the first signs of my fever, would have brushed aside my protests and insisted that I stay.
I should have protested more strongly. But before I could collect my wits I’d found myself installed within a bedchamber, attended by the Turnbulls’ rough-edged and rough-handed manservant, MacDougall.
He was not pleased by my presence.
“It’s not right,” he told me one evening. “Ye should not be here when the master’s away.”
I’d have gladly obliged him by leaving, but I had no choice. There was naught to be done for an ague like mine but to faithfully drink my infusion of Jesuits’ powder and wait while the hot fevers cycled their course.
At the peak of my delirium, I’d watched MacDougall search the pockets of my coat, remove the letter I had brought from Turnbull, and unfold it. In my outrage, with my lips too dry to form the words, I told him, “Leave that!”
He’d ignored me. Reading it, he’d held the letter closer to the light to see the signature, refolded it along its seams, and with a frown, replaced it.
What else he’d searched while I was sleeping, I knew not, but from the first, he had determined I was not a man to trust.
This morning, as I woke, he watched me. Setting down my washbasin, he said, “Terrible things, tertian fevers.”
His tone had a purpose I couldn’t unravel, so when there was no need to make a reply, I kept silent. What was there to say? The fevers were a nuisance I’d been plagued with now for several years. The first infection, starting in the full heat of the jungle and continuing on shipboard, had been worst of all. Since then the agues cycled round at random, striking when they pleased, and disappearing till the next attack. I’d learned the way to live with them.
MacDougall told me, “’Tis what happens when men muck about in foreign lands. The master, thanks tae God, does have a stronger constitution and brought none of that foul sickness home with him.” He looked at me directly. “Ye must find it inconvenient, falling ill in other people’s houses.”
“I don’t make a habit of it.”
“Do ye not?”
I found his open insolence uncommon for a servant, and a contrast to the timid housemaid who kept closely to the kitchen like a shadow and was scarcely ever seen, but my hostess had already warned me that MacDougall was a law unto himself.
“You will forgive him,” she’d apologized. “He’s served my husband’s family since he was a lad, as did his father before him, and he considers it a calling. He is overly protective, more so now I am with child, but he does mean well, and is harmless.”
I was not so sure. MacDougall, for his life of service, had the hardened look of one who knew how to do violence.
I preferred to meet him on my feet. I stood, but taking up the gauntlet he’d cast down I said, “I’m here by invitation. As you know. You’ve read my letter.”
“Aye. Ye must have telt a sad tale for the master tae have written ye those lines, for him tae offer ye his outstretched hand. He is a giving man, the master. He’d turn out his pockets for ye, let ye use his name and his connections tae advance yerself, and ask for naething. But I’m sure that’s not why ye came back.”
He said that last sarcastically, and while I felt my blood heat from the insult, I held back my temper.
I owed this man no explanation. Someone like MacDougall, who had never strayed from Scotland’s shores, could never know what drove a man like me. He’d never feel the pull that made a soldier like myself, after the lonely years of hiring my sword to foreign princes under foreign skies, turn homeward once again to seek a face I recognized, a hearth that I could call my own, a wife to build a future with. He’d never understand.
I turned my back, dismissively, and reached for a clean shirt.
MacDougall said, “The master has troubles enough of his own, without looking tae yours. In the Earl of Mar’s regiment, he should by now be a captain commanding a company of his own men, and he’s written tae the earl himself saying so, as have the mistress’s high-flung relations, but he’s held back as a lieutenant while other, more cunning men rise—younger men, with less time in the army.” Men like you, he might have said, from the fierce burn of the gaze I knew well that MacDougall had aimed at my back. “With a wife and a bairn on the way, he’s no time tae be burdened with such as yerself. Ye’re not even a gentleman.”
I turned then. Met his eyes. “Then we are equal, you and I.”
There was a moment when I thought he might forget his station altogether and return the challenge in my tone with a strike of his fist. But he did not. Instead, he carefully laid out the towel he had brought, beside the basin.
Looking down, he commented, “That’s three days with no fever.”
“Aye.”
“It’s finished, then. Ye’re better.”
“Aye.”
“Good,” he said, and turned away. “Time ye were gone.”
* * *
“We must find you a wife while you’re here,” Turnbull’s wife said at breakfast. “No, you may smile, but a bachelor of your age—”
“Of my age? I’m not yet five and thirty. Still a few years younger than your husband, and I hope you will agree he’s hardly ancient.”
With a blush she laid a hand upon her rounded belly, in awareness that it proved the man she’d married was yet virile. But her wit would not be bested. “And my husband was a few years younger than he is now when he met me, so my point stands. What sort of woman do you favor? I have several friends in mind who might do well for you.”
“My dear Mrs. Turnbull—”
“Please do call me Helen.”
MacDougall cut in to serve our morning porridge. He gently set Helen’s bowl down, but set mine down hard, with a glower.
I’d had time while finishing dressing to think on his words without passion, and now that I knew my friend Turnbull was having his own struggles climbing the ranks, I agreed that my being here would only add to the weight Turnbull carried. I could not do that to my friend.
I replied, “My dear Helen, then. You’re very kind, but I’ve been in your care these ten days and I cannot impose on you longer, not now that I’m well.” I glanced at MacDougall, who narrowed his eyes as I told Helen lightly, “’Tis time I was gone.”
She looked at me, surprised. “You will not leave, I hope, until my husband has returned? He’d not forgive me if he learned that you’d been here and gone and he had missed your company.”
No more than I’d miss his, I knew, as I would miss the comforts of this house that I’d been able to explore these past few days since my last fevers had subsided and I had regained my strength.