Chapter 8
The castle was heaving with people now. We emerged into the big hall where a huge fire blazed in the enormous grate, throwing out enough heat to scorch skin within a three-metre radius.
Some of the kilted men were sitting at a respectful distance from it, grouped together on more wooden stools, warming their bare legs.
Others brought bundles and packages in from the carts or carried armfuls of horse tack and stacked it in a corner.
Dogs wandered in and out of the open main door, lifting their legs randomly against any fixed object and giving Lachlan and I a very wide berth as we walked through.
The high-ceilinged room, with its coloured-plaster walls and carved beams, echoed with ribaldry, shouts of laughter and the snap and snarl of dogs.
There was an atmosphere of suppressed energy, almost as though everyone was waiting for something big to happen.
‘Lachlan.’ I pulled him to a stop at the base of the staircase that spiralled up between the walls to the upper chambers. ‘We need to talk.’
Voices echoed up and down here, orders called from room to room mixing with the laughter from the hall.
He sighed. ‘Aye, we do.’
‘What happened earlier…’ I stopped. I wasn’t going to specify whether I meant that impossible barrier or his crumpled admission of vulnerability. I wanted answers to both, but he could choose where to start.
‘But not now.’ Lachlan turned to face me. His eyes were greyer in the firelit darkness of the hall, where the windows were all now closed and shuttered against the wind and weather. He looked more serious. ‘Please.’
‘We need to…’ I began again, but he turned away, leading me onward.
‘I want to see yon earl in case he rides off again,’ Lachlan said, tugging me onto the staircase and up the narrow winding flight.
We emerged onto the little landing and saw the earl go into the first-floor chamber, the one with the desk and all the tapestries.
Lachlan put a hand on my arm. ‘Quietly now,’ he said. ‘And let’s stay hidden.’
‘Lachlan, they can’t see us,’ I said, but very quietly too. I didn’t know why I was whispering suddenly when we’d just come through a hall full of people where we could have been staging a whole segment of Traitors without anyone noticing.
‘On the safe side,’ he said, still in my ear. ‘We don’t know what might happen with direct relatives. What do you think to him?’
Like an episode of a comedy spy thriller, we poked our heads cautiously around the edge of the hanging tapestry.
Earl McKell was slumped in a chair, spread out in a way that irritated me with its louche carelessness.
Downstairs he’d got everyone working away purely to make sure that he was going to be well looked after, and he couldn’t even be bothered to walk among them?
I silently agreed with Mal’s twonk assessment.
‘A bit of a git,’ I said.
Lachlan nodded. ‘I don’t know anything about your family,’ he whispered, and his breath against my neck made my skin feel very sensitive suddenly.
‘This isn’t my period. But Jeannie and Fergus were talking when we arrived and they mentioned your earl there.
I seem to recall that he’s supposed to be a good guy.
Pays well, kind to his animals, that sort of thing. ’
We stared at the man in the chair. Someone further in the room was talking, we couldn’t see them because of having to stay hidden, but the earl didn’t really seem to be listening.
‘John,’ he drawled eventually, ‘stop your yammering and go and find me something to eat, will you? It was a long ride and I’m hungry. ’
Voice-off said something but the earl just waved a floppy-sleeved arm. Lachlan pushed me back into the recess at the top of the staircase as a breeched-and-coated man came past, tidying the tapestry back into place as he went.
‘Bastard,’ he muttered under his breath before starting down the stairs.
In the dimness of the stairwell, I could only agree.
It felt horrible, finding out that my ancestor was a foppish bloke with no real regard for anyone lesser.
He wasn’t even good-looking. For some reason, and I couldn’t remember whether Dad had told us stories of the Earls McKell or whether it was purely my imagination driven by seeing the ruined castle, in my head I’d built all my relatives up to look a bit like Lenny.
So he ought to be tall and dark-haired, big brown eyes, broad shoulders and long legs; fine on a horse and an excellent runner.
The version sitting in front of us, when we tweaked the tapestry to be able to see, looked several porridge bowls short of a good meal, had thinning sandy hair tied back by a velvet bow and an expression of near-terminal distaste about everything.
He stood up and glanced at the tapestry over the door then got up and walked to the window.
Propping himself against the ledge, he gazed out over the busy scene in the yard beneath.
‘My lands, gone,’ he muttered. ‘All gone to dowry my sister and what remains for me? Naught but a horse and to live at others’ pleasure. ’
I frowned at Lachlan but he shook his head.
‘Does that mean he’s lost the castle?’ I whispered. There was a cold draught down my back and I wasn’t sure whether it was real or imagined. Lachlan shrugged.
Earl McKell moved from the window to the desk where the papers were stacked.
I lost sight of him then. Lachlan, a bit less cautious than me, which was a cheek when I thought about it, as staying hidden was his idea, poked his head further out.
I supposed, as an unrelated person, he didn’t think he could be visible anyway.
‘He’s reading the documents,’ he said and I peeped around a fold in the hanging fabric to see our man standing by the window and leafing through the papers on the desk.
Two men ran up the stairs, surprising us, passed right through us and on into the room, one carrying a pan and the other a covered bowl.
‘Hot water, sir, and a little food. There will be more later, they say, when the kitchens are fully working and all the supplies are unloaded.’
The earl was no longer by the desk, now he was back in the chair. He grunted – not even a word of thanks, the tosser – and moved to strike the cap off the head of the man with the bowl.
‘Uncover your head in my presence,’ he said laconically, as though he didn’t much care whether hats were worn or not but wanted to establish his dominance.
‘Yes, sir, my apologies, sir.’ The two men, one now clutching his hat, the other snatching his off to hold it to his chest in an attitude of supplication, backed out of the room and onto the staircase, where they put their hats back on again with an attitude of sulky defiance.
‘Seen enough?’ Lachlan whispered, and I nodded.
The snobby behaviour of my relative, however distant, was upsetting.
I wanted to believe that every McKell who ever lived, impossible though it might be, had impeccable manners and was kind and generous.
This guy reminded me of some of the Year Ten boys I taught, all posturing and having to be the Big Man with rudeness and arrogance.
They at least had chance to grow out of it; Earl McKell looked pretty set in his ways.
I did feel a small squeeze of pity for him though – when he’d looked out over his land and spoken of losing it all his voice had been so full of sadness that I could almost forgive him his otherwise unpleasantness.
Maybe we weren’t the only people here suffering.
‘I was hoping that we’d get some idea of why we’re here,’ Lachlan explained as we went back down the stairs to the hall below. ‘Maybe you seeing your relative might make something happen?’
‘You think that he might be something to do with why we’re here?’
‘Why, don’t you?’ He stopped walking. We were sheltered in a corner near a group of men who had spread a gaming board of some kind on the floor and were involved in playing something that involved a lot of throwing and shouting.
I was going to answer with a reflexive ‘of course not’, but stopped myself. ‘You think,’ I said slowly and weighing the words before they came out so I didn’t make a fool of myself, ‘that barrier is to stop us leaving because we have something to do in the castle?’
‘It did cross my mind, yes.’
‘Nope, sorry, that’s weird.’
‘Think about it. Your family own the castle. Him up there…’ A jerked thumb indicated the staircase we’d come down. ‘He’s a direct relation. It can’t be coincidence, Pax. It just can’t.’
The thought of having been dragged backwards for three hundred years to perform some time-altering task in favour of that arrogant, narrow-featured bloke did not fill me with joy. Then an idea struck me. ‘Maybe we’re here to kill him?’
‘Wee bit extreme, I’d have thought.’ Lachlan took my arm to make sure we didn’t get separated as two men walked between, and half through, us.
‘This is the eighteenth century, after all. People still die from an infected hangnail. I’m pretty sure Time could have arranged something fatal for the lord and master up there without having to go to all the effort of getting us here. ’
We ran down the steps and out into the bleary light of the lowering sun. There was no heat in it, but the light and fresh air were welcome after the closed-windowed stuffiness of the hall and the smell of so many men and dogs running around. I turned to Lachlan.
‘So, why do you think we are here? You’ve obviously got ideas. We’re hardly a team of crack time-shifting troops, are we? Surely Time could do better than us.’