Chapter 5
Later, while David was clearing up the dishes and rinsing them in water from a stolen bucket – ‘poor Fergus, he still can’t work out where it went’ – and complaining again about no one taking their turn, I tried to get more information from Kaylinn.
‘Do we need to sleep? And what about, you know, if we need to pee?’
She was sitting on the bottom step of the wooden flight. Late afternoon sun came in and made her hair shine as she sat with her knees drawn up, looking young and rather vulnerable.
‘Yeah, we’ve been sleeping down here. It’s out of the way.
Lachlan says it used to be the old kitchens, but they rebuilt those over there,’ An arm indicated the other side of the keep.
‘Probably kept burning the place down. Nobody comes down here now. We stole some blankets when Lachlan and Mal went up into the castle for a look-see, so we’re warm enough.
And if you need to pee…’ She shrugged. ‘We’re invisible. Who’s to watch?’
‘We’re not invisible to each other,’ I pointed out, but she shrugged again.
‘We’re archaeologists. You get the hang of peeing outdoors. Oh, but watch out for the horses – they go bananas if we get too close. And Jeannie’s got a little dog.’ She pulled a face. ‘You don’t want to go near that thing. It can’t bite us, but it sure does a good impression.’
I sat down next to her. ‘So, what? We all wait here to see if someone else drops in from our time?’
She shrugged again. There was a hopelessness to the set of her shoulders that I didn’t like. ‘What else can we do?’
‘Find out what happened? Why we’re here?’
Kaylinn sighed. ‘I guess.’ She gave me a smile that had ‘struggling for bravery’ all over it.
‘While we’re here I’m gonna gather information.
For when we get back. I’m gonna write my thesis on daily life for women in a castle in the eighteenth century.
Let’s face it, I’ve got lived experience.
’ Her face crumpled for a moment, then she swallowed hard.
‘I gotta stop crying. The guys think I’m pathetic. ’
I thought of Lachlan sitting on that log, hiding his face from me. ‘I’m sure they don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s such a weird situation, anyone can be excused for being a bit emotional.’ My own complete collapse being a case in point, I thought. I still felt embarrassed about that.
Kaylinn gave another wobbly smile. ‘My mom… she’ll be missing me. Do you know…?’ Another pause and a deep breath. ‘Do you know what they think has happened to us?’
I wiped my palms down my legs. Breaking the news of someone’s death was hard enough, breaking the news to the person in question was even harder.
‘They think you went over the cliff,’ I said, trying to be gentle.
I didn’t want to set off more tears. ‘There’d been a big storm, apparently.
It’s partly why the farmer who owned the headland and the castle site decided to sell to us.
He said the storms were going to start damaging the castle remains soon and he wanted to sell while there was still something to sell. ’
‘Oh yeah.’ She nodded. ‘That storm sure was something. Came outta nowhere, wind and rain and all. We kinda scrambled down here to get away from the weather and…’ Another shrug.
‘You weren’t unconscious or anything?’
‘Nope. We were all sitting around in here, it got real dark, like night-time, y’know? And when we went out again to see if the storm had passed – there were stairs and we were here.’
The same as happened to me, I thought. Sudden rain out of nowhere. When I got out of here, wherever here was, I was going to invest in an umbrella and never go in search of cover again.
‘I only came on the dig to help out,’ she continued sadly.
‘I’m supposed to fly back to finish the semester at college; I just finished my year studying abroad.
’ A snorted kind of stifled sob. ‘Didn’t think abroad would be this far from home.
’ I put an arm around her and she sighed and shook her hair back.
‘Thanks. I’m okay. Kinda getting my head around it now.
I mean, it’s crazy but, hey, it’s great research. ’
Her pitiful attempt at looking on the bright side made my eyes prickle but I didn’t dare give in to tears. It would only set Kaylinn off again, and crying, while natural, wasn’t going to help the situation. I tried not to think that nothing was going to help this situation.
‘Hey.’ It was Lachlan again. ‘Mal and I are going to go into the castle and I wondered if you’d like to come too.
For a look?’ He’d left his coat off and the big hairy jumper made him look like a 1970s Open University lecturer.
‘We’re still hoping we might get whisked away home as fast as we came, so we thought we’d maximise our research while we’re here. Kaylinn, are you coming too?’
I hadn’t thought he was talking to me, and it was only when he asked Kaylinn that I realised it was me that was supposed to be going ‘for a look’.
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. I really had no desire to look around.
I wanted to sit here and be depressed until we were snatched back to our real lives, and couldn’t see the point in pretending that this was just a research opportunity.
Besides, it was all history. It might currently be happening all around us, but, crucially, it had already happened. Going to watch it would be like walking round the Harry Potter studio tour: nice to look at, but a bit pointless unless you were a fan. And I was no fan of history.
‘Sure,’ Kaylinn said and stood up. ‘Not much else to do around here.’
I didn’t want to be left here on these stairs though. ‘I’ll come,’ I said quickly.
‘Great. Come on, then.’ Lachlan took hold of my shoulder and steered me up the staircase out into the open air. ‘This way.’
Mal followed us and we went around to what must be the front of the castle, where a flight of wooden steps led to a huge door made of planks ten centimetres thick, criss-crossed with massive iron bands and studded with nails the size of two-pence pieces.
It looked like the entrance to ‘Torture Chambers R Us’.
We all trooped up and inside to a big hall where Jeannie was sweeping the floor in an unconcerned way.
There were more barrels and crates in here stacked up against the walls, what looked like straw pallets were heaped in corners and there were discarded items of armour leaning against the walls.
A breastplate and helmet slumped together near a huge fireplace above which a rack held long poles topped with ferocious-looking metal.
It looked like the storeroom of a really neglectful museum.
‘This must be the garrison – like the barracks for the troops when the earl is here,’ Lachlan said to me.
In the absence of said troops, the sun slanted in through open glassless windows and laid peacefully on the floor in slabs, where the rays showed the amount of dust being generated by Jeannie and her broom.
Around her feet ran a small black dog. Every so often she’d swipe in its direction with the brush in a half-hearted and affectionate way. When the dog saw us it immediately stopped attacking the bristles and the hair on its neck rose. It growled a low growl.
‘Ach, stop it, y’wee numptie!’ Jeannie looked in the direction the dog was looking – in fact, straight at Mal. ‘You’re seeing ghosties again!’
The dog’s growl was really quite scary.
‘Are you any good with animals, Mal?’ Lachlan asked casually. ‘Generally, I mean. Because the ones here really react to you, don’t they?’
‘I’ve got a cat,’ Mal said, keeping a wary eye on the dog, which had hunched itself down close to the floor and was still growling a low, warning growl. ‘She seems to like me. Although obviously it’s hard to tell, with cats, but she doesn’t actually attack me.’
‘Perhaps we’d better get Mal away from the dog.’ Lachlan led us further into the room. ‘Let’s go up here.’
I wondered why we were all following him like a straggle of goslings, but a quick look at the expressions of the others told me that they were happy to be led.
I was also finding it reassuring to have someone telling me what to do.
It prevented me from having to think, because joined-up thinking was beyond me right now and I presumed the others felt the same.
Another flight of stone steps curled their way up inside the wall and we climbed through the gap to follow the stairs, with the dog’s continued aggressive rumbling following us, although the dog itself didn’t.
I thought back to being in here with Lenny when the stairs had been nothing but indentations in the stonework and the walls no more than unsafe rubble framing the sky.
That memory felt oddly distant, like a fragment of a dream, as though it had never been real.
Reality was now, the steps leading up at an angle so steep that we had to keep our hands on the walls so as not to tumble back down over one another like skittles.
At the top, a small passage led to two rooms divided by a panelled wall.
The ceilings were painted, the walls were covered in tapestries and one room had a desk with papers neatly stacked on it.
As we stood in the passage, surrounded by the smell of warm wood, damp stone and an acrid smell of old fires, I caught Mal’s eye.
His vertical hair rose above a startled blue gaze, but his previous terror now seemed subsumed beneath a kind of bubbling enthusiasm.
He mouthed ‘wow’ at me, and all I could do was nod.
This was real.
The reality was added to by little touches like a ragged tear in one of the fabrics and a dark stain like spilled ink across the floor.