MOST GHOST STORIES begin or end with a ghost. Not this one. This begins and ends with a love affair. That one of the partners was a ghost has little to do with things, except for a complication or two. The heart need not be beating to entertain the idea of romance. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of the universe.
To think otherwise is to miscalculate the odds of love.
Andrea Crow did not look at all like her name, being fair-haired and soft voiced. But she had a scavenger’s personality, that is she collected things with a fierce dedication. As a girl she had collected rocks and stones, denuding her parent’s driveway of mica-shining pebbles. As an adolescent she had turned the rock-collection into an interest in gemstones. By college she was majoring in geology, minoring in jewelry making. (It was one of those schools so prevalent in the ’80s where life-experience substituted for any real knowledge. Only a student bent on learning ever learned anything. But perhaps that is true even in Oxford, even in Harvard.)
Andrea’s rockhound passion made her a sucker for young men carrying ropes and pitons and she learned to scramble up stone faces without thinking of the danger. For a while she even thought she might attempt the Himalayas. But a rock-climbing friend died in an avalanche there and so she decided going to gem shows was far safer. She was a scavenger but she wasn’t stupid.
The friend who died in the avalanche was not the ghost in this story. That was a dead girl friend and Andrea was depressingly straight in her love life.
Andrea graduated from college and began a small jewelry business in Chappaqua with a healthy jump-start from her parents who died suddenly in a car crash going home from her graduation. They left a tidy sum and their house to Andrea who, after a suitable period of mourning, plunged into work, turning the garage into her workroom.
She sold her jewelry at crafts fairs and Renaissance Faires and to several of the large stores around the country who found her Middle Evils line especially charming. The silver and gold work was superb, of course. She had been well trained. But it was the boxing of the jewelry—in polished rosewood with gold or silver hinges—as well as the printed legends included in each piece—that made her work stand out.
Still, her business remained small until one Christmas Neiman Marcus ordered 5,000 adder stone rings in Celtic scrolled rosewood boxes. The rings, according to legend, “ensured prosperity, repelled evil spirits, and in 17th century Scotland were considered to keep a child free of the whooping cough.” She finished that order so far in the black that she only had to go to one Renaissance Faire the following summer for business.
Well, to be honest, she would have gone anyway. She needed the rest after the Neiman Marcus push. Besides, she enjoyed the Faire. Many of her closest friends were there.
Well—all of her closest friends were there.
All three of them.
Simon Morrison was the son and grandson and great grandson of Crail fisherfolk. He was born to the sea. But the sea was not to his liking. And as he had six brothers born ahead of him who could handle the fishing lines and nets, he saw no reason to stay in Crail for longer than was necessary.
So on the day of his majority, June 17, 1847, he kissed his mother sweetly and said farewell to his father’s back, for he was not so big that his Da—a small man with a great hand—might not have whipped him for leaving.
Simon took the northwest road out of Crail and made his way by foot to the ferry that crossed the River Forth and so on into Edinburgh. And there he could have lost himself in the alehouses, as had many a lad before him.
But Simon was not just any lad. He was a lad with a passionate dream. And while it was not his father’s and grandfather’s and great grandfather’s dream of herring by the hundredweight, it was a dream nonetheless.
His dream was to learn to work in silver and gold.
Now, how—you might well ask—could a boy raised in the East Neuk of Fife—in a little fishing village so ingrown a boy’s cousin might be his uncle as well—how could such a boy know the first thing about silver and gold?
The answer is easier than you might suspect.
The laird and his wife had had a silver wedding anniversary and a collection was taken up for a special gift from the town. All the small people had given a bit of money they had put aside; the gentry added more. And there was soon enough to hire a silversmith from Edinburgh to make a fine silver centerpiece in the shape of a stag rearing up, surrounded by eight hunting dogs. The dogs looked just like the laird’s own pack, including a stiff-legged mastiff with a huge underslung jaw.
The centerpiece had been on display for days in the Crail town hall, near the mercat cross, before the gifting of it. Simon had gone to see it out of curiosity, along with his brothers.
It was the first time that art had ever touched his life.
Touched?
He had been bowled over, knocked about, nearly slain by the beauty of the thing.
After that, fishing meant nothing to him. He wanted to be an artisan. He did not know enough to call it art.
When he got to Edinburgh, a bustle of a place and bigger than twenty Crails laid end to end to end, Simon looked up that same silversmith and begged to become the man’s apprentice.
The man would have said no. He had apprentices enough as it was. But some luck was with Simon, for the next day when Simon came around to ask again, two of the lowest apprentices were down with a pox of some kind and had to be sent away. And Simon—who’d been sick with that same pox in his childhood and never again—got to fetch and carry for months on end until by the very virtue of his hard working, the smith offered him a place.
And that is how young Simon Morrison the fisherlad became not-so-young Simon Morrison the silversmith. He was well beyond thirty and not married. He worked so hard, he never had an eye for love, or so it was said by the other lads.
He only had an eye for art.
Now in the great course of things, these two should never have met. Time itself was against them—that greatest divide—a hundred years to be exact.
Besides, Simon would never have gone to America. America was a land of cutthroats and brigands. He did not waste his heart thinking on it, though—in fact—he never wasted his heart on anything but his work.
And though Andrea had once dreamed of Katmandu and Nepal, she had never fancied Scotland with its “dudes in skirts,” as her friend Heidi called them.
But love, though it may take many a circuitous route, somehow manages to get from one end of the map to another.
Always.
Because of the adder rings—a great hit with the Neiman Marcus buyers—Andrea was sent to Scotland by Vogue magazine to pose before a ruin of a fourteenth century castle. The castle, called Dunottar, commanded a spit of land some two and a half hours drive along the coast from Edinburgh and had at one point been the hiding place for the Scottish crown jewels.
Windy and raw weather did not stop the Dunottar shoot; in fact it so speeded things up, the shoot finished early on a Thursday morning. Andrea then had three and a half days to explore the grey stone city of Edinburgh.
She loved the twisty streets and closes, with names like Cowgate and Grassmarket and Lady Wynd, and the antique jewelry shop on a little lane called Thistle.
Edinburgh seemed to be a city of rain and rainbows. A single rainbow over the Greek revival temple on the hill, and a double over the great grey castle.
“If there is such a thing as magic…” Andrea found herself whispering aloud, “it’s here in this city.” For the first time she actually found herself believing in the possibility.
The first two days in Edinburgh went quickly, but she soon tired of tourists who spoke every language except English. She knew she needed some quiet, far away from the Royal Mile and its aggressively Celtic shoppes, and far from the Americanization of Princes Street, the main shopping road, where a Macdonalds (without the arches) sat right next to British franchises.
It was then that she discovered a hidden walk that wound around and under the city.
Leith Walk.
Leith had been the old port on the Firth and once a city in its own right, but was now a bustling part of Edinburgh. The old port area after years of decay was now being tarted up, and modernized flats with large To Let signs dotted the streets. At first Andrea kept misreading the signs, wondering why toilets were advertised everywhere. Then giggling over her mistake, she went aboard a floating ship restaurant for a quiet lunch alone.
She didn’t mean to listen in, but she overheard an elderly English couple near her talking about Leith Walk, which sounded wonderfully off the beaten tourist path.
“Excuse me,” she said, leaning over, “I couldn’t help hearing you mention Leith Walk. It’s not in my book.” She pointed to the green Michelin Guide by her plate.
They told her how to find the walk which, they said, snaked under and over parts of Edinburgh along the Leith River.
“Though the locals call it the ‘Water of Leith,’” the woman said. “And as you go along, you will often feel as if you had stumbled on to a lost path into faerie.”
Andrea was struck by how earnestly she spoke.
“The Walk looks as if it ends up in Dean Village,” the English woman added.
“An old grain milling center, that,” interrupted her companion. “End of Bell’s Brae. Off Queensferry. Solid bridge. Pretty, too.” His bristly ginger moustache seemed to strain his words for they came out crisp and unadorned.
“But do not be fooled, my dear,” the woman continued. “It becomes a mere trickle of a path. But it does go on.”
“The path…” Andrea mused, remembering her Tolkein, “goes ever on…”
The English couple laughed and the man said something in a strange tongue.
“I beg your pardon,” Andrea said. “I don’t speak…” She wasn’t in fact sure what language he had used.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said. “Certain you’d know Elvish.” His eyes twinkled at her and he no longer seemed so starchy. “I simply wished you a good journey and a safe return.”
“Thank you,” Andrea said.
She smiled at them as they stood, and went out, without—Andrea noticed—leaving any kind of a tip.
Simon was not much of a drinker, certainly not as Scots go. He rarely went out with the lads.
He was a walker, though.
Hill walking when he could get out of the city bustle on holiday.
Town walking when he could not.
He always took his lunch with him and during a work day, he would spend that precious time walking, eating as he went.
Fond of hiking up Calton Hill or Arthur’s Seat—both of them affording panoramic views of the city—Simon also liked strolling to the Royal Botanic Garden. There he’d dine amidst the great patches of carefully designed flower beds or, in winter, in the Tropical Palm House, enjoying the moist heat.
Occasionally he would take a sketch book and set off along the winding Water of Leith walk in the direction of St. Bernard’s Well. He passed few people there, unlike his walks up Calton Hill or Arthur’s Seat. And he enjoyed the solitude.
The little drawings he did as he sat by the river found their way into his silverwork—intricate twists of foliage, the splay of water over stone, the feathering on the wings of ravens and rooks.
He had begun such drawings as an apprentice, and continued them—with his master’s approval—as a journeyman. He perfected them when he became a master silversmith himself.
In time he became famous for them.
In time.
So you think you see the arc of the plot now. They will meet—Simon and Andrea—along the Leith Walk.
They will fall in love.
Marry.
And…
But you have forgotten that when Andrea takes her first steps along the Leith Walk, heading away from the old port towards Dean’s Village and beyond, Simon is already dead some one hundred years earlier. There’s not a bit of flesh on those old bones now.
It does present certain intractable problems.
For logic, yes.
Not for love.
It was a lovely early spring afternoon and Simon was grateful to have a half day off. Having had an ugly argument with another of the journeymen over the amount of silver needed for a casting, he wanted some time to walk off his anger.
His anger was with himself more than anyone else, for the other journeyman had been right after all. Simon was not used to making such mistakes.
He was not used to making any mistakes.
The master valued Simon too much to argue over half a day. Besides, he knew that with Simon, nothing was ever really lost.
“Go on out, lad,” he said. Though Simon was scarcely a lad anymore, the master still thought of him that way. “Walk about and think up some more of yer lovely designs.”
Simon decided on following the Leith path, and he walked with a brisk stride that dis-invited even a nod from the few people he met along the way.
But by the time he got to St. Bernard’s Well—that strange stone neo-Classical folly built by the Waterworks over an actual well whose waters were quite the vogue amongst the New Town gentry—the majority of his anger had passed and he sat down for a bit to sketch, his back against the stone wall.
There was a patch of uncurling ferns near his feet and he loved the sight of the little plants as they unbent their necks. He got the patch down in seven quick lines and then, with three more lines, one fern became a horse’s head.
Simon laughed at the conceit. Rather more fanciful than his usual work, but perhaps—he thought—perhaps it was time for him to uncurl as well. He was thirty-six years old and half his life gone by. What had happened to the dream that the boy who walked from Crail to Edinburgh had had?
He realized how dreadfully misplaced his anger had been that morning.
As he was thus musing, out of the clear slate of sky there came a crack of thunder.
“By God,” Simon cried, and stood up quickly, preparing to run to the sanctuary of the folly. He was a son of fisherfolk, after all, and not about to believe the innocence of that blue sky.
As he turned…
Andrea’s walk along the Leith River had started quietly enough in bright sunshine. But the weather report on the television that morning had promised scattered sunshine and occasional rain.
“Or was it scattered rain and occasional sunshine?” she murmured. Each of her days in Scotland so far had begun with that same promise from the weather man. Each of those promises had been exactly fulfilled, Scottish weather being charmingly predictable.
The scattering began with a bit of spitting, not enough rain to be worried about only enough to be annoying.
Andrea had no idea where the next exit from the Leith Walk might be, and there was no way she was going to climb over the fence, go through that little woods, and then scale the stone wall she could almost make out, just to get away from a spatter. She’d been a mountain hiker too long to worry about such things.
Besides, she thought—jamming her pretty blue Scottish tam on her head and tucking her hair under it—in her khaki pants and Aran sweater she was more than ready for a wee bit of rain. In fact she positively welcomed it.
But the little rain suddenly turned into a downpour.
Luckily that was when she spotted the stone temple ahead. Racing for it, she got in the lee of the wall before the major flood opened up overhead.
Mounting the steps two at a time, she thought she was safe when—without warning—a bolt of lightning struck a little spire on the top of the temple’s roof, traveled down a wire, and leaped over to the metal ornament on her tam.
She did not so much feel the shock as smell it, a kind of sharpness in the nose and on the tongue. Her skin prickled, the little hairs rising up on her arms. Then she sank into unconsciousness, falling over the side of the wall and onto the slippery grass below.
A bolt from the blue, you are thinking.
How corny.
The sky was actually blue at the moment, except for patches of clouds scudding backwards, in an effort to escape time.
Andrea’s eyelids fluttered open.
She sighed.
The first thing she saw was the face of a very concerned youngish man staring down at her.
The second thing she saw was that his eyes were the same bleached blue as the sky over them.
Then she noticed the ginger eyebrows and the cheekbones sharp enough to cut cheese with.
“Am I dead?” Andrea whispered. “Are you an angel?”
Corny yes.
But most lives are as filled with corn as a Kansas field.
Or—if you prefer—a cornfield in east Fife.
Different kinds of corn, of course.
Different kinds of lives.
One minute Simon had been sitting quietly drawing. The next minute he heard the crack of thunder and after that a body came hurtling over the side of the stone wall and sprawled face up at his feet.
For a moment Simon thought it was a boy. The tarn and the pants confused him. But once he’d looked carefully—at the face with its lambent skin, at the long black curls spilling out of the tam, at the soft swell of breast beneath the woolen jumper—he knew it was no boy.
Then the fallen girl’s eyes opened. They were almost purple, enormous, lovely.
“Am I dead?” she asked. “Are you an angel?”
“Och, lass, I’m a silversmith. And how could ye have died from that wee jump?” he asked.
“I mean from the lightning,” she said.
He glanced up, worried. After all—there had been thunder. But the grey clouds had sped away.
Glancing down, he said, “No lightning, lass. I think ye swooned and fell over the wall.”
“I’m not the swooning type,” she said.
“Then what type are ye?”
He meant nothing bad by the question, but she looked confused. Then she tried to sit up and seemed to be having difficulty doing it. So Simon put a hand to her back to help her up. And though he’d never put an arm around a woman before without being related to her, this seemed so natural that he did not give it another thought.
However, it was then that he realized she was not the young lass he’d taken her for. There were a few strands of silver in her hair, tangling through the curls. He imagined taking that silver and weaving it into a pattern on a bracelet.
As his master knew, nothing with Simon was ever lost.
She saw his sketches, she pulled a small notebook from a back pocket of her trousers and showed him hers. They spoke of silver and gold and the intricacies of cloisonné. They talked of working with electrum and foil and plating. They compared the virtues of enameling and embossing.
They did not speak of love.
It was too soon.
And soon it was too late.
Somewhere a minute or an hour or a day or a week later, they figured out the difference in time.
“You’re an old man when I am born,” she mused.
“I am dead when you are born,” he said.
But time has a way of correcting itself. Of making sense of nonsense.
And one minute or an hour or a day or a week later, Andrea turned a corner of a street off Grassmarket—dressed now of course as a young woman should—and she went in one step from streetcars to Suburus.
“Simon!” she cried, turning back. But Simon and his century were gone.
Andrea returned home but she didn’t feel at home. The sky over Chappaqua had a dirty, smudged look. The air reeked. She could not bear the billboards along the highway nor the myriad choices of toilet cleansers and bath soaps at the super market.
She shut off her tv and sold her fax. She went shopping for long skirts and shirtwaists in second hand shops.
She told her customers that she had a great deal of back work to do and gave them the names of several other jewelers they might patronize instead.
She said goodbye to her three friends.
“I’m thinking of moving to Scotland,” she told them. She did not tell them where.
Or when.
Then she sold her parents’ house, took the money in a banker’s check, bought a ticket on Icelandic Air, and flew with a small suitcase of second hand clothes to Scotland.
The Royal Bank of Scotland was more than happy to open an account for her, and she rented a small flat in Leith.
Then she set to work. Not as a silversmith, not as a jewelry maker. She became a researcher, haunting the Edinburgh churches to see if she could find where Simon had been buried. To see if there was some mention of him in the town rolls.
Her search took her the better part of a year, but she had time.
The rest of my life if needed, she thought. Her parents’ house had brought in a great deal of money. It was not money that worried her. It was the rest of Simon’s life she was afraid of.
Once she’d been through every cemetery in the city she was at a loss, until she remembered that Simon had once spoken of being an East Neuk lad. On a whim she went by bus out to Crail, the little fishing village Simon had mentioned.
It was a pearl of a village with a mercat cross topped by a unicorn in the center of the upper town. The tollbooth was a tiered tower with a graceful belfry. When she went along the shop row, passing a bakery and a butcher’s, she was stopped by a glass-fronted jewelry store. It sold both new pieces—rather simple and not terribly interesting—and antique ware. Glancing up at the sign over the lintel, she was stunned.
MORRISONS JEWELRY SINCE 1878
Trembling, she went in.
You’ve guessed it now.
How the story ends.
But you are wrong again.
Andrea does not find Simon—for he is long gone and no amount of standing about in electrical storms can bring her back again in time.
Who she finds is the great great grandson of Simon Morrison who is also named Simon.
And that Simon, on hearing the name Andrea Crow, immediately gives her a job as a jewelry maker in the shop because it has been a family legend—accompanied by a notarized document—that some time in the new century such a young woman would come. Black curls, violet eyes, and a master jeweler’s skill.
In his early thirties, this Simon looks nothing like old Simon. He has a roundness to his face and a sunny disposition. He does not so much make jewelry as sell what others make.
After half a year, he proposes and Andrea accepts and they marry, though Andrea explains that some part of her will always belong to old Simon.
This young Simon understands. It is, after all, part of the family tradition. Scots are big on lost causes.
Andrea’s designs become popular in Scotland and then England and then the Continent. Neiman Marcus rediscovers her work. She and Simon have three children.
And in time they fall in love.
In time.