Chapter 6
“Ye come with me,” Isla said, placing a gentle hand on Nancy’s arm.
Nancy hadn’t moved in a while, hadn’t said anything, hadn’t been able to think beyond What the heck. It was all fun and games, having a six-foot-five-at-least Highlander whispering dark and sexy things at a kissable distance, until the fact that it might all be real hit.
Swords and sarcastic remarks and playing along with the fantasy had lost their edge, dulled by the potential danger she was in.
“Aye, let’s get ye in a nice guest chamber, and I’ll have a maid come up to tend to ye.
I’d offer ye the help of a healer, but we daenae have one here anymore,” Isla said in an uneasy voice as she took Nancy by the hand and tugged gently.
It was no easy feat with the baby sleeping in the crook of the older woman’s other arm.
The realization that she was being an inconvenience snapped Nancy out of her daze a little. Just enough to follow Isla without much resistance, though she paused to collect her bag first, and checked twice to make sure her medicine was still in there.
What am I going to do? Run off? If I’m really in 1710, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go.
Her stomach lurched at the thought, her head prickling as if it were filled with static. She was no great fan of physics or even science fiction, but she’d picked up enough to know that what she was thinking wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t.
How many big-brained physicists and theorists had mulled over the idea of time travel, done the complicated math, looked at it from every angle, and figured out it was impossible? They were experts, and they claimed it couldn’t happen, so what the heck was going on?
I should take notes for Emily, she thought absently as she wandered back up the damp and drafty stairwell and followed Isla through cavernous hallways, adorned with fine tapestries and banners and paintings.
Her mind drifted back to the tapestry in the museum. It had been timeworn and damaged in places, which was no surprise, considering it had survived over three hundred years of hanging on walls, being lost and found.
But these tapestries and banners were pristine, the colors bright and appealing. And none, as far as she could tell, depicted anything quite as grisly as the tapestry she’d pulled down onto herself.
Why did I do that? Why didn’t I just make a run for the exit?
Having grown up in and around New Jersey and New York for a few years, she hadn’t had much training in how to survive an earthquake.
Am I still there, as well as here? People believe in past lives; what if I’ve somehow connected to one of mine, and my future self is wandering around or unconscious at a hospital in 2026?
It was somehow more rational than the other possibilities she’d considered. Nevertheless, her head began to pulse; the complexity of the situation was too overwhelming for her poor brain to process.
Through a labyrinth of hallways that she’d never be able to remember, Isla finally drew her to a halt outside a door.
They’d come up a fair few staircases, so Nancy assumed this was somewhere up high.
A turret, maybe. Somewhere that she wouldn’t be stupid enough to escape from, since it would take her twenty minutes to get back to the gates where she’d started.
“I think this will serve ye nicely,” Isla said with forced cheer as she pushed open the door and led Nancy inside.
A gorgeous, airy room greeted Nancy’s blurring vision, the casement windows open to let in some fresh air and to grace her eyes with the most beautiful view: a sweeping landscape of dramatic, brooding mountains, full-canopied forests in their spring plumage, and the distant glitter of a river.
Sheepskin rugs created a sort of path across the flagstones, leading to a cheerfully crackling fire, a small but serviceable writing desk, a solid oak wardrobe, and the kind of fairytale four-poster bed she’d probably dreamed about when she was a little kid.
“Ye settle yerself by the fire, lass, while I fetch ye some proper clothes to wear,” Isla added, as she set the sleeping baby down on the bed, fashioning a sort of nest for her out of pillows, before heading to the wardrobe.
Suddenly overcome with the desire to take the weight off her feet, Nancy obliged. She groaned as she sank down into a comfortable armchair, wondering if any chair had ever felt so good.
Across the room, Isla chuckled. “Do ye think ye might have been walkin’ for a long time?”
“I have no idea,” Nancy replied, closing her eyes.
The fire was so warm and comforting, she knew she could easily doze off right there. In a way, she wished she would, because then she wouldn’t have to think about where she was and how she’d gotten there. She could just sleep through the rising panic.
“Are ye really from the Americas?” Isla asked.
Nancy cracked open one eye and stared suspiciously at the older woman with the youthful eyes. “You heard that?”
“Let’s just say I was… waitin’ for the right moment to enter.” Isla flashed her a wink and then returned to what she was doing, sifting through a rack of what looked like… dresses.
Oh God, no. Anything but that.
“So, are ye?” Isla prompted when Nancy didn’t answer, too horrified by the sight of so many flowing skirts and fussy fabrics.
“I am.”
“Cannae say I’ve ever met anyone from so far away before. I didnae think ye’d look so…” The older woman frowned as she searched for the right word.
“Like you?”
Isla frowned. “Aye, I suppose so.”
“There’s a bit of Irish, a bit of Polish, a bit of Russian, and a bit of Scottish in my heritage,” Nancy explained, a tiny lightbulb going off in her mind.
Was that why she’d switched bodies or had taken over the body of an ancestor? She couldn’t remember exactly what her heritage was, but she knew there was some Scottish blood in her. A meager percentage, but maybe enough to confuse whatever was responsible for this time travel event?
“This is insane,” she muttered, propelling herself out of the armchair. “I can’t seriously be considering this. Like, this isn’t just a huge news story. This would be… completely world-altering. This goes against the laws of science and nature. This is…”
She began to pace back and forth on the sheepskin path, toying anxiously with the zipper of her leather jacket.
“It’s what, lassie?” Isla asked, her voice so warm that it thawed the barriers that had been holding Nancy back.
“I was in a museum. I was searching for the Hawk because I saw his name in a note while investigating the mystery of two missing women. My friend is researching him for a book, and it was too weird to me that his name popped up twice. So, I went there, to this museum in North Carolina, on a friggin’ whim.
Just following an old note because I’d run out of leads and I was worried someone was watching me and… ”
Nancy huffed out a breath. “There was a tapestry there, and… some woman, some teacher, started telling me about it. But then a kid was touching the exhibit, so she walked off… And then there was an earthquake, so I grabbed the tapestry. It fell on me, and… I woke up here, about three hundred years earlier than where I’m meant to be, not far from the gates.
” She paused. “So when I say I don’t know how I got here or how to get home, I mean it.
I’m in the past, and I don’t belong here.
It’s not like there’s a ship or something that can take me to the future. ”
She sucked in a deep breath, uncertain of whether she felt relieved or worse. Laid out like that, it didn’t seem any less crazy.
You’ve done it now, you idiot. They’re going to think you’re some kind of lunatic, a sorceress, or a mythical monster.
She glanced at Isla with worried eyes, suddenly very afraid. “You must think I’ve lost my mind, and I know it sounds impossible, but it’s exactly what happened. I swear it on my mother. I swear it on my best friend.” Her throat bobbed. “She’ll be so worried about me.”
Isla abandoned her search for frocks and wandered over to rest her hands on Nancy’s shoulders, looking her square in the eyes.
“I’d say that stranger things have happened, lassie.
” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Ye have to remember, ye’re in Scotland now.
There are things in these lands that nay one can explain: spirits, creatures, monsters, myths, ghosts, any strange thing ye can think of. ”
A wary frown creased Nancy’s brow. “You’re being very open-minded about this, Isla. Even I don’t know if I believe it.”
The older woman seemed completely unfazed, in fact.
“Aye, well, I’ve a friend who often tells me wild tales,” she replied with a shrug. “Yers is nothin’ compared to hers.”
Nancy had to wonder if she’d actually fallen asleep in the armchair and this entire exchange was some kind of fever dream. How could this woman be so okay with the idea of time travel? How could anyone just nod and accept it when the very idea was a struggle to wrap one’s head around?
“Now, ye get into bed and have yerself a wee sleep while I choose somethin’ appropriate for ye to wear so ye daenae stand out,” Isla instructed, with the stern but kind voice of a mother who wouldn’t tolerate any refusal.
“I’ll drape it over that chair over there and have a maid come to help ye, or I can come back and help ye. ”
Nancy swallowed thickly. “You’re not going to tell the Hawk, are you?”
“Yer secret is safe with me, lass,” Isla assured her with a smile. “Others may nae be so forgivin’, but they need never ken. And his name is Hunter, nae ‘the Hawk.’ None of us call him that here.”
Hunter… of what, exactly?
If it was the truth, then it was going to be a very awkward stay at the castle. A man like that, so stern and serious, would never understand. If Nancy told him what she’d just told Isla, he’d have had her back in the dungeons faster than she could say, You’ll die in a month.
A horrible tremor ran through her as she pictured that tapestry in her mind’s eye. She’d completely forgotten her dazed horror when he’d told her the date. But if all of this was real, and she actually had traveled three hundred years into the past, then… his time was running out.
But he had a wife. Is he engaged again?
A funny feeling coiled in the pit of her stomach, her face heating up as she thought of him leaning in to whisper those titillating words. A pity.
She managed a small nod in Isla’s direction. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“And remember what we said,” Isla pressed, ushering her toward the bed and pulling back the blankets for her. “Ye’re a nursemaid.”
As if to punctuate the ridiculousness of that, and probably her protest, the baby on the other side of the bed began to cry.
Nancy knew just how the poor thing felt.