Ruby Boat, Topaz Sea

By Brian J. Buchanan

Ruby Boat, Topaz Sea is an imaginative romance about two kinds of redemption, one from terrible childhood tragedy, the other from personal dissolution. Set in the present day on the pastoral Scottish coast, the novel brings troubled, 40-year-old Ford Graham together with the mysterious wanderer Haddy Langland. On the remote, windy, decaying estate of Dunsmore Hall, amid thrilling and at times dangerous natural beauty, they explore unsounded personal depths. As Ford struggles toward personal honesty and an ability to love, Haddy seeks to construct from natural forces a self with which to transcend profound personal loss. Through various adventures, an effort to save the beleaguered ancient estate, and difficult inward searching, they and other characters approach an affirmation of love, human truths and self-discovery.

The tale takes place a step or two removed from absolute realism, with touches of mystery and demonic menace, harsh storms, a perilous rescue, and hints of unexamined realms of human feeling and experience. Ruby Boat, Topaz Sea is about how a man may fail to be honest with women because he fails to understand himself. It's about the powerful force that an individual can become -- Haddy Langland is a kind of character whom you have not seen before. It's about finding a true home. And it's about the power of love to resist the seductive evils of vengeance and transform a closed, incomplete heart into a full one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2000
• ISBN: 9781491860250

Brian J. Buchanan

Brian J. Buchanan received a bachelor's in journalism from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a master's in English literature from the State University of New York College at Brockport. He has worked for a daily newspaper, published poems, and edited online news. He and his wife live in Nashville, Tenn.

Book preview

Copyright © 2000 by Brian J. Buchanan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 1-58721-280-3

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6025-0 (ebook)

1stBooks-rev.05/10/00

Contents

About the Book

Preface.

Prologue.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Chapter 18.

Chapter 19.

Chapter 20.

Chapter 21.

Chapter 22.

Chapter 23.

Chapter 24.

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.

Chapter 40.

Chapter 41.

Chapter 42.

Chapter 43.

Chapter 44.

Epilogue.

About the Author

About the Book

Ruby Boat, Topaz Sea is an imaginative romance about two kinds of redemption, one from terrible childhood tragedy, the other from personal dissolution. Set in the present day on the pastoral Scottish coast, the novel brings troubled, 40-year-old Ford Graham together with the mysterious wanderer Haddy Langland. On the remote, windy, decaying estate of Dunsmore Hall, amid thrilling and at times dangerous natural beauty, they explore unsounded personal depths. As Ford struggles toward personal honesty and an ability to love, Haddy seeks to construct from natural forces a self with which to transcend profound personal loss. Through various adventures, an effort to save the beleaguered ancient estate, and difficult inward searching, they and other characters approach an affirmation of love, human truths and self-discovery.

The tale takes place a step or two removed from absolute realism, with touches of mystery and demonic menace, harsh storms, a perilous rescue, and hints of unexamined realms of human feeling and experience. Ruby Boat, Topaz Sea is about how a man may fail to be honest with women because he fails to understand himself. It’s about the powerful force that an individual can become-Haddy Langland is a kind of character whom you have not seen before. It’s about finding a true home. And it’s about the power of love to resist the seductive evils of vengeance and transform a closed, incomplete heart into a full one.

… as the keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral.

—Alexander Pope, A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry

___________________

Preface.

This is a pastoral romance, which is to say it’s a somewhat outlandish tale set in a rural place. In pastoral romance various characteristics of countryside and character give rise to some (but let’s hope not too much) disquisition on the nature of love, mixed in with a bit of adventure.

The agreeable reader of such a tale waives expectations of strict adherence to mere realism, and thereby admits the possibility of other marvelous realities. This does not mean that everything in what follows is unrealistic. It’s that any realism is incidental, just as any similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are coincidental.

Besides—this, like all outlandish tales, is true.

Brian J. Buchanan

Dec. 1, 1999

The Groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long, Live in description, and look green in song.

—Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest

___________________

Prologue.

Heavy sea clouds catch on the ridges and peaks of coastal mountains in western Scotland and hang there, brooding, as fog spills fairy-like down the slopes.

It is a thick brew that keeps secrets. It is a vapor that calls mysteries into being, and in which certain spirits are born.

A spirit comes out of the fog.

No, not exactly a spirit.

A garden of Eden, with the amusements of the pastoral life, was no longer suited to the advanced state of society which prevailed under the Roman empire.

—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

___________________

Chapter 1.

Ford Dunsmore Graham arrived in late summer at Dunsmore Hall in a bad mood, tired, troubled by love affairs, butchered by the pace of business and expecting to stay no more than a week.

The trip had been the last thing he needed. He could ill afford the time away; the company he owned was struggling. Its fits and starts and flounderings worked Ford’s nerves like puppet wires, and this irksome, ill-timed expedition—the excessive heat and rough, uphill roads to Scotland’s west coast—had sunk him into a sour-mouthed glower. Ford Graham had no use for an estate on an unfrequented stretch of the Scottish coast, but that was what his irascible old Uncle Walter had left him upon his death. Amid everything else, Ford would have to deal with this useless distraction. He would have to set things in order quickly and then sell the estate, or rent it out. Preferably sell, he thought, blowing grit off his tongue and squinting through the windshield against drifting dust raised by sheep passing near the road.

Ford had never been to the place. His impression from what he had heard since childhood was one of a broad but not grand expanse of grounds, and an old house. Was it a castle? He thought not. Coastal cliffs and rocks and foul weather, he supposed.

Dunsmore’s main distinction in Ford’s mind was its ludicrous distance from any place of consequence. Living amid the impatient jitter of airports and computer networks, he mused,

we tend to forget that most of the world lies remote and hard to reach.

In fact, I am decidedly lost as of at least quarter of an hour ago, he muttered to himself, pulling angrily off the road to look again at the torn map. Strangers had given him directions in accents he could barely understand. Ford’s dark brows furrowed. They had a tendency to remain that way, troubled-looking, even after trouble would seem to have passed.

After some minutes of increasing annoyance with the map, Ford looked up as if to appeal to the mercy of the countryside and saw, nailed to an apple tree just across the road, an old, faded picket that read, Dunsmore, 5.

The fact that Dunsmore Hall echoed part of his name did not give it, in Ford’s mind, the family resonance we might expect. His family had not been close; Ford, who was now nearly all that was left of it, had been raised in a modern, transnational fashion, tossed back and forth between his separated parents. A year in England, a year in Spain, the United States, Russia, Holland—and so on. Most of the time Ford attended boarding schools, where he made it his practice to study strict control of the emotional wrack that he suspected could easily overwhelm him if he let it.

This regimen also required frequent public denials that anything was ever wrong. His parents’ anxious, accusatory looks whenever something in his face seemed to suggest a problem necessitated this policy. They were doing the best they could, they seemed to say, and it was Ford’s fault if that wasn’t good enough. Ford became the most eloquent of senators in a veritable Roman forum of denial. All of this would toughen him for something, he told himself for a time, though he was unsure what.

Alas, ultimately things went undeniably wrong: Momma and Father died in a car crash on their way to a divorce lawyer. A trust kept Ford in an English boarding school, his few surviving relatives—including Uncle Walter—being deemed by the court unsuitable for child-rearing. By this point he was practically an adult, anyway—nearly fifteen.

Dunsmore, 2, read another road sign, directing him to veer sharply off the road he had been following absently and onto another, rougher and even dustier, and in country now suddenly barren-looking and strange. The landscape huddled as if over a secret. It looked to be the sort of grim, windy wasteland where one might summon a spirit quite by accident.

Ford Graham would be glad to get this ridiculous Dunsmore Hall matter over with.

But when glad summer at the Zephyrs’ call Sends sheep and goats alike to glades and meadows, Let us hasten as the morning star appears To the cool pastures, while the day is young, The grass is gleaming, and on the tender blades There still is dew delightful to the herd.

—Virgil, Georgics

___________________

Chapter 2.

First time here, Lord Graham, I believe?

Yes—’Lord Graham’?

As the owner of Dunsmore Hall, you are Lord Graham.

Did Uncle Walter ask you to call him that?

He did, sir.

Well, you can call me plain Mr. Graham, or better yet just plain Ford, Mr. …

Stuart.

Mr. Stuart, sturdy and ruddy, hesitated in the main entrance of Dunsmore Hall, his eagerness to be off somewhere else contesting with his duty to greet the new heir.

And my uncle’s funeral is … ?

Was yesterday, sir.

Ah. Sorry. I should have been there, here, I suppose. I was delayed—business. Nothing accusatory showed in Mr. Stuart’s gaze, but Ford nevertheless felt defensive and ill at ease in the cool stone entranceway to this great unknown dwelling for which he was suddenly responsible. He felt himself resisting the whole enterprise of having to be there.

We weren’t close, Ford blurted.

Certainly, sir. Will you take some refreshment?

Mr. Stuart led Ford into the stately gloom of the Hall. The extent of the grounds had proved distractingly larger than he had expected, as had the size of Dunsmore Hall, a fine old baronial manor, rambling, roughened by time, yet dignified, or rather defiant, with high windows and black-stained brown walls. Aged oaks edged a pebbled, half-circle drive that he had reached almost with relief after what had seemed too many fields, gardens, woods. These latter had presented a disquieting contrast with the bleak country around them.

Unlikely warm, this weather, Mr. Stuart said. This side of the cliffs, I mean.

How old is this house? Ford asked as he sat down. Mr. Stuart remained standing in the dark, wainscoted parlor, which smelled of old wood and books. A tray of cheese, fruit, bread and ale had been placed on a low table. Please sit, Mr. Stuart.

Dunsmore Hall was built in 1720, sir, he said as he sat down, tentatively.

And the land—how the hell much of it is there? Ford sensed Mr. Stuart stiffening, as if land had been spoken of too lightly. Have some of this, won’t you? Ford said in compensation, indicating the tray.

About a hundred acres, a little more—no, thank you—and difficult to describe the dimensions of without a tour. I’ll take you on one, sir, tomorrow. Perhaps you’d like to rest from your trip now.

Mr. Stuart picked up an apple, despite his refusal, then set it down and rose abruptly. Ford, recovered somewhat from his initial awkwardness, now sought to allay whatever uneasiness Mr. Stuart seemed prey to.

Listen, Mr. Stuart, I have no extraordinary requirements and I’m not very ceremonial. No fuss needed, just basic amenities. Dinner … ?

8:15, sir. Sharp. Mrs. MacKenzie sees to that.

This sharp-faced older woman now appeared, bowed wordlessly, and with a tight smile led Ford up to a second-floor chamber. It was up a wide staircase and down a long hall hung with old tapestries.