Dagger Magic

Peregrine had his portable campstool firmly planted in the sand a short distance away, his travelling easel propped up on its tripod in front of him. He was overlaying thin washes of watercolor to a developing study of his wife where she sat perched above him on a large flat-topped boulder, with the intense blue-green waters of the North Channel for a background. Julia's question came just as he was trading the fine sable brush in his hand for one finer still. Lifting his hazel gaze from the paintbox, he gave her a grin.

' 'Given the way the currents run in these waters, I suppose this stretch of shoreline is as likely a place as any for an Irish-born saint to have made his landfall. As for the footprints themselves - I don't know about you, but-1 am a firm believer in miracles."

The fond look that accompanied this declaration left Julia in no doubt as to the romantic nature of his meaning. She accepted the tribute with a chuckle and said wryly, "I hope that's not meant to be an assessment of my driving ability."

"Not in the least!" her new husband averred. "You and Algy are getting along famously."

The dark-green Alvis so named was parked at the side of the narrow road overlooking the beach where the couple had just finished picnicking on oatcakes, smoked salmon, and "truckles," a creamy variety of local cheese. It was the third day of their honeymoon, the second since their arrival in Kintyre, a wild and scenic peninsula on Scotland's west coast. Among the places they had explored since leaving their guesthouse in Campbeltown earlier that morning was the spot where the seventh-century Irish missionary, St. Co-lumba, was purported to have preached his first sermon on Scottish soil. A set of footprints visible on the flattened summit of a rock near the local village of Southend was said to be a permanent memento of that historic visit.

From Southend the pair had driven west along a road that was little more than a paved one-lane farm track, making for the point at the southwestern tip of the peninsula known as the Mull of Kintyre. From where they were sitting now, they had a view of the Kintyre lighthouse, built in 1788 and one of the first of its kind to be erected by the Trustees for Northern Lighthouses. Julia's expression turned meditative as she surveyed the lighthouse's turret-like outline, rising off its rocky base like some seagirt tower out of a Scottish folk tale.

"I always thought I'd like to live in a lighthouse," she observed dreamily. "To live balanced between the land and the sea and the sky, and to listen by night to the songs the silkies sing…"

Silkies were the mer-people of Scottish legend, gifted with the ability to shed their seagoing skins of seal-fur in order to go about ashore in the likeness of men. Softly Julia began to sing the ballad of the Great Silkie, which told how this lord of the sea had fathered a child on a woman of the land, returning from the waves thereafter to claim his son. Clear as a crystalline bell, her soprano voice floated up over the surrounding rocks, carrying with it the words of the Silkie himself:

"I am a man, upon the land, An I am a silkie in the sea; And when I'm far and far frae land, My dwelling is in Sule Skerry…."

Had they been at home, Julia would have accompanied herself on the harp, but even without the delicate counterpoint of harp strings, her rendition of the melody had the power to arrest Peregrine in the midst of his work. As he listened, he was reminded how it had been her singing which first had captivated him, even before he ever set eyes on her.

The occasion had been a sad one: the funeral service for Julia's godmother, the same Lady Laura Kintoul who had made Peregrine a present of the Alvis in her will. A mere apprentice then in the use of the Deep Sight which was now second nature to him, Peregrine had come to the church with Adam, half-dreading to find himself confronted by spectres of the dead. Instead, he had found not only peace but a new direction, for which Adam had been the catalyst and of which Julia was the living embodiment.

The silvery lilt of her voice lingered in his ears even after she had finished her song. He roused himself from contemplating a host of pleasant memories to discover that she had gone back to her guidebook. Bestirring himself to return to his work, he asked, "Where are you proposing that we should go tomorrow?"

"If it's all the same to you," she said, " I rather fancy taking the ferry across to Arran to see Lochranza Castle and King's Cave. That's where Robert the Bruce reputedly met the famous spider."

Peregrine smiled. Every schoolchild in Scotland was familiar with the legend of how Bruce, discouraged- and demoralized after a string of military reversals, had drawn fresh resolve from the sight of a small grey spider painstakingly rebuilding a shattered web.