Chapter 12 #3
Nobody had ever asked before. Jack hadn’t cared, no one else had been close enough to tell, so the thoughts had rattled around in my head without words put around them, for all this time.
Even the thought of family history threw me back to the sour smell of indoor-drying, the feel of unfamiliar beds and the sullen feeling of being misunderstood.
Dad had lived in an old flat in Stirling and I’d spent a lot of time staring out of the window wishing I were galloping Finch over the distant hills.
‘I thought Lenny was faking it,’ I said eventually, the words bursting out as though they had spent the last couple of decades fermenting.
‘I thought he was pretending to be interested in history just so that Dad would love him more than me.’ I took a deep breath.
‘I was really quite horrible to him back then. I used to say dreadful things. And Dad – he must have wondered why he bothered having me to stay when all I did was talk about horses.’ I stopped talking.
There was still a hatful of shame hovering above my head, waiting to descend on me and make me feel that horrible sense of being left out all over again.
‘And now I feel stupid and guilty about being so awful to my big brother, who went on to take a degree in history because he really was interested in what Dad was telling him.’
‘Ah,’ said Lachlan. ‘Sibling rivalry. Well, I know about that. I once cut the hair off all my sister’s Barbies because she had the biggest bedroom.’
His reducing my story to a childhood misdemeanour made me feel better. Or less guilty, anyway, and I forgot my self-pity. ‘You did what?’
‘I was six. Complex issues of bedroom equality weren’t exactly topics of family discussion so I used passive demonstration.’ He grinned. ‘She forgave me. Eventually. Round about her eighteenth birthday.’
I couldn’t help myself and smiled back at him. ‘It’s not quite the same though, is it? I shouldn’t think you still feel guilty about it.’
‘Of course not. I made it up to her, I gave her my Action Man. And, honestly, Pax, I appreciate you telling me. I think you needed to tell me. But I think we might need to leave the intra-familial guilt aside for now because I think you being linked to this time through family might be key to getting us home.’
I looked up now. My blood was stinging my cheeks. ‘You think…?’
‘If this is the real earl, then yes. We got it wrong before, but I’m pretty sure that this is our key to getting home.’
Home. ‘If whatever brought us here needed someone to know what happened when, then it should have brought Lennox through instead of me.’
Lachlan looked thoughtful. ‘Good point,’ he said. ‘You’re here, so it must be something, something particular to you and not your brother.’
I shook my head. ‘Lenny lives and breathes all this history stuff. The only things I know that he doesn’t are to do with chemistry and horses.’
‘Nothing that your dad used to tell you that you were particularly fascinated by?’
‘No!’ I gazed down into the swirling water again. ‘Except, I remember being really angry that we came to lose it all.’
‘I’m listening.’
I looked across at him. His hair was beginning to matt into little dreadlocks that caught in the incipient beard when he turned his head.
With the linen shirt he had begun to look as though he belonged here in this castle, but with an added touch of vulnerability.
Those two covered faces on his chest that came from another time almost made me want to weep.
‘I’m wearing linen and ruffles,’ his clothes said, ‘but I’m thinking about The Proclaimers. ’
‘I don’t know when it was, but I think Earl McKell went into battle – I’m not entirely sure what happened.
Dad kept saying that it was a no-score draw, which Lenny thought was hysterical, but somehow it meant that we lost the land?
’ I rubbed my hands through my hair, which felt very much like Lachlan’s looked, trying to force memory out of myself.
‘I can’t even remember much about how we lost it, only that we did.
Which was why I got angry about it all. I always thought “what if?” What if we hadn’t lost everything and we’d stayed as landed Scottish gentry, how different would our lives have been?
But I guess that’s the story of a lot of families, isn’t it?
’ I sighed. ‘It was pretty much the only time I listened to Dad,’ I went on.
‘And I think that was only because I liked having an excuse to be angry again. God, I was a sullen little thing.’
I looked at Lachlan again. He was standing very still, those steady eyes trained on the breakers cascading down the cliff edges. For a moment he was no longer the confused historian snatched from time but a feature of the landscape, as natural as the weathered stone and hanging gulls.
Then he turned suddenly and slid down the wall to sit on the muddy slip of grass with his back against the rock.
He banged his forehead lightly on his knees.
‘Damn! I had a thought there but it’s gone.
I wish this were my period of history, but I completely lose interest somewhere around the Union of the Crowns – 1603,’ he added.
‘So you might feel guilty for not listening to your dad, but I feel stupid for being in the wrong period of history.’ He still had his head down so his voice was muffled.
I sat down beside him. The grass was damp and the ground cold but I thought that the risk of piles was probably secondary to us working out what the hell was going on here. ‘You’re not stupid,’ I said.
Lachlan grunted. ‘I’m not exactly showing my PhD to its advantage though, am I? Go back another couple of hundred years and I’ll be amazing.’
‘You’re feeling out of control again, aren’t you?’ I tried to keep my voice brisk. I got another grunt in response. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you might have to let go a bit here?’
He raised his head from his knees to look at me out of one eye. ‘Are you trying psychology on me here, Pax?’
My lips twitched. ‘Someone has to. And always being the most intelligent person in any gathering might have given you an inflated idea of your own importance here. We’re all struggling, you aren’t unique.’
‘Yeah, okay, I think you can ease up on the psychology angle now, before my self-esteem ends up in the dirt.’ There was a hint of a smile in his tone. ‘And maybe we’re wrong and the earl turning up is nothing to do with anything. Maybe we’re not meant to go back.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Going back has to be the end game. Otherwise, really, what’s the point?
Bring us here to change things and then just let us fester with the knowledge of what happened before?
Running two separate timelines in our heads?
That’s got to contravene some kind of cosmic law, surely. ’
‘I think we’ve already concluded that whatever brought us back here is perhaps not the sharpest tool in the box, haven’t we?’ His hand came out and touched my arm.
‘No,’ I said again. ‘No. I’m not having that. I think Time has to play fair.’
His forehead came up until he was looking at me from under a messy tangle of hair. ‘You do?’
At our backs and down in the depths, the sea thrashed in agreement. The air tasted of salt and the gulls were circling, wailing overhead.