Chapter 12
I spent a couple of days avoiding Lachlan again.
I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the level of communication and trust we seemed to have, and, honestly, it rather scared me.
Jack and I had had a pleasant relationship, no real depth but I had thought that was what I wanted.
Now – I was being faced with something a lot darker.
Real frailties, real emotions. And I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted either.
Besides, as a teacher, I wasn’t sure I had time for any of that.
It was hard enough to get through the day with my own emotional state intact.
So, I thought, it was best to keep Lachlan at a distance.
I hoped, desperately and with a kind of ear-glowing embarrassment, that he hadn’t noticed my previous predilection for his company, and I wished that I’d thrown his filthy shirt at him and told him to wash it himself.
He, on the other hand, carried on being his usual affable self to all of us and not showing any more tendencies to try to talk to me in the dark of the night.
I managed to convince myself that it was ridiculous for me to get attached.
After all, what had I been hoping? That we’d travel back to our own time and seamlessly begin a relationship, when all we had as a basis was having been stuck in the past together?
Get real, Pax, I told myself and then had to laugh because if anything smacked of unreality it was the situation we were in.
I should stop noticing those steady grey eyes and that well-honed body under the dreadful sweater.
It was stress, that was all. The stress of being here.
Like Stockholm Syndrome only – more Scottish.
All the self-pep talks worked, and the longer I managed to avoid being alone with Lachlan, the easier it became to forget our previous closeness.
Well, maybe not forget, but I could pretend it hadn’t happened and that the whole thing had been a crisis bonding situation. I was over that now. I was fine. Yes.
Life in the castle carried on, although the level of ‘bustle’ had increased somewhat in the last day or so.
The earl had eventually stirred himself sufficiently to come down and supervise the men, who were seemingly either training for a battle or working off a lot of inter-clan ferocity as there was a degree of hand-to-hand fighting going on.
Some of the men had cleared an area past the animal enclosures and were, bare-chested, practising with items from the ‘museum of fallen armaments’ that we’d seen in the hall.
Axes were hefted and swung; long pikes were tested for balance and jabbed into the air.
Whenever I saw them at it, I thought about those men I’d seen and that scar and shuddered. This was real. People could die.
The earl watched, often while deeply in discussion with others.
He and a few men would gather on the castle steps, watching the action below, and I found myself staring at him, trying to see any ancestral resemblances.
Did his hairline look a bit like Dad’s, receding slightly at the temples?
Was the way he stood familiar? Or was I straining to see what wasn’t there, because I needed to believe that the earl was the reason we were here?
I had to hold on to that belief. We were here for a reason, for something to be accomplished. Then it would all be over.
Much of the singing and casual chat had stopped, in favour of a more determined and grim air.
The chilling of the weather lent itself to the downturn too, suddenly everything had the edge of cold to it and an iron hardness – the men, their concentration and the wind all joined to make little ripples of foreboding travel down my spine whenever I went outside.
The sea too was beginning to swirl with oncoming winter.
It was audible even up here as a booming backdrop to the mooing and neighing and shouting, and on this particular day I was sitting out on the wall of the animal enclosure ignoring goaty stares, watching Cellar Dog lying in the sun and listening to the waves.
Overhead a ragged V of geese flew into the wind, honking and whistling, a timeless arrow of avian life heading to warmer climes while the seabirds hurled themselves against the breeze.
It was, I thought, both perpetual and momentary.
The geese would be gone, but they would fly the same path next year, in the same pattern.
And the next year and so on until their descendants reached the twenty-first century.
I wondered if I would be there to see them.
As I sat perched on the drystone wall a rider rode in. His horse galloped up through the postern gate and I didn’t know how he’d managed to get up the path at such speed without dropping into the waters below.
The galloping rider and his sweating, wide-eyed horse distracted me from my not-very-deep musings. He clearly distracted lots of other people too, because quite a crowd gathered around him as he threw himself to the ground and stood, propped up by shoulders and clearly exhausted.
‘He’s on his way,’ I heard him say before he was helped away into the castle and Fergus came to lead the horse gently off into the stables.
‘Someone’s coming,’ I announced to the other four, who were sitting eating some kind of stew of David’s invention down in the cellar. ‘An outrider just arrived.’
‘Oh?’ Mal raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that we’re going to be invaded?’
‘Who by?’ Kaylinn looked interested.
‘The French? Aren’t we always fighting the French?’
‘The French support Scotland, don’t they?’ David put his spoon down. ‘All that “Auld Alliance” stuff?’
Mal stared at him. ‘I thought your degree was Pictish history? Suddenly you’re surprising us with a knowledge of the eighteenth century? I feel betrayed.’
David shrugged. ‘I read. I get a lot of time on my own.’
There was that silence I’d noticed before when David spoke about his life. Clearly nobody knew what to say, as though the existence of his sister was an embarrassment.
I tried to break that mood. ‘It’s good that one of us has a vague idea though.’
‘Yeah,’ Kaylinn chimed in. She’d obviously picked up the awkwardness in that silence too and her voice was so full of injected cheerfulness that I almost expected canned applause. ‘I gotta read more. We’re all working so hard we forget that history exists outside what we’re studying.’
That made it sound as though David wasn’t working hard and had spare time to casually catch up on everything Scottish history had to offer, but I couldn’t think of any more spin to put on the situation.
David went on. ‘But you’re right. Not really my period, I’m more down at the “everyone fighting everyone else” end.’
‘Or “Saturday night in Glasgow”, as we call it.’ Mal put in, with evident relief at the return to normality.
‘Shut up, Mal,’ Lachlan finally joined in. ‘And stop maligning my countrymen. Pax, you said a rider came?’
I explained what I’d seen and how everyone seemed to be taking the news seriously. ‘It’s not the king, is it?’ I asked.
Lachlan frowned. ‘Not if we’re right and it’s George the First. If I remember Dan Snow on the subject, he could barely speak English.’
‘He’d be right at home here, then,’ Mal said darkly.
‘He didn’t come to Scotland, as far as I know.’
‘So, who are we expecting?’ I asked, forgetting that I was supposed to be being cool to Lachlan.
‘We can always go and find out.’ To my astonishment he grabbed my hand. ‘Come on. You lot stay here and tidy up. If we’ve got a visitor then it’s likely they’ll be up and down into the cellar again, so we need everything out of sight.’
He tugged me on up the wooden steps, which were still as rattly and temporary-feeling as they had been when I arrived. As we got onto the staircase and the door closed between us and the others, he stopped. ‘You’re avoiding me, aren’t you?’
‘Not right at this minute, no.’ He’d still got my hand.
Now he turned to face me. He was on the stair above, so looked down on me. ‘You know what I mean.’
I couldn’t see anything to be gained by lying, so I nodded. ‘A bit,’ I confessed. ‘I was worried that we… you and I were… I don’t want to get attached,’ I finished, rather incoherently.
‘Any particular reason why not?’
My heart had started to drum in my chest. I wasn’t sure which way this was all going, and I wasn’t sure what to think.
‘Well, this is all such a weird situation, isn’t it?
We’re trapped in time, we’ve got no idea why or what to do about it and I’m worried that anything we think we feel might be because we’re all living in a kind of crisis. ’
‘High emotions making for false attraction?’ Lachlan came down to stand on the step with me and now he looked into my face.
He really seemed to be thinking this over; a small frown line appeared between his eyes and his spare hand scratched at his stubbled chin.
‘Aye. I can see your reasoning.’ Then he bent slightly and looked right into my eyes.
‘And what’s the real reason?’ he asked softly.
I didn’t know what to say. How could I admit that the word ‘real’ was the crux of the matter?
That our communication, our level of attraction, Lachlan’s letting me see his internal frailties made this whatever-we-had feel too real?
When we were trapped in a situation that was almost the anthesis of reality, like being stuck in a story that had no visible ending.
He was very close to me and I could feel him breathing. He’d changed the jumper, finally, for a stolen linen shirt that Jeannie was probably still looking for, and it suited him, damn it, although the faces of The Proclaimers on the T-shirt underneath rather ruined the dramatic Outlander image.
‘I got scared,’ I said, sounding reluctant, as though I were dragging the words out over broken glass.
‘Scared,’ he repeated. ‘I think we’re all scared, aren’t we?’
‘This is a different kind of scared,’ I said to the toes of my boots.