Chapter 14
At the bottom of the stairs in the hall, while unconcerned men sat cleaning weapons, eating or talking, Mal and Lachlan were engaged in a discussion so furious that I was worried that even the unpsychic might hear them.
‘You think you know why we’re here!’ Mal was yelling, despite David’s quite frantic tugging at his arm.
He was red-faced and leaning towards Lachlan as though he wanted to punch him.
‘You’ve been letting us think that we’re here by some fluke, and now we find out that you think you know why it happened! ’
Kaylinn revolved around the group of men like a small worried satellite. The whole image of a fight about to break out was shattered every now and then by someone walking right through the opponents, who were angry enough not to care.
‘No,’ Lachlan said, his voice remarkably quiet and steady for someone confronted by a ferociously angry Mal. ‘Nobody knows anything.’
I walked closer. ‘It’s true, Mal,’ I said. ‘We think it might be something to do with my family, but we don’t know what. There’s nothing to tell you, honestly.’
‘You didn’t even tell us that much though.’ Mal stepped back, to David’s obvious relief. ‘And you should have done.’
‘Aye, maybe we should.’ Lachlan also looked relieved. For all his steadiness, Mal overtopped him by a good ten centimetres and had the wiry frame that suggested he was stronger than he appeared. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We’ve been trying to work it out,’ I put in quickly, keen to capitalise on the step down from DEFCON One.
‘We think I was the target of whatever time scoop dragged us all here, and maybe…’ I saw Lachlan’s widened eyes and decided not to admit that we thought the archaeologists had got caught by accident in Lachlan’s removal.
‘Maybe you’re all here because you know about history,’ I finished, sounding slightly breathless.
Mal was still a little pink around the cheekbones and was breathing deeply, but he’d calmed down enough to say, ‘Right. So, something to do with the history of this place?’ without sounding as though he wanted to brawl on the ground with Lachlan.
‘Possibly, possibly,’ Lachlan’s shoulders relaxed, I saw the ruffles on his linen drop.
‘But we can’t be sure. If, as it seems, the earl is an ancestor of Pax, it could be significant, and the fact that he can see and hear her must mean something.
Pax only remembers that her family lost the castle and maybe that’s why we’re here now. ’
‘The earl mentioned a battle,’ David said. ‘We’re in the early seventeen hundreds. Would he be fighting for or against the Jacobites, do you reckon? James staged an uprising about now, got driven back to France – it was quite a big thing.’
We all stared at him.
‘I know you said you read a lot, but this is outside your brief by a thousand years!’ Lachlan said.
‘I’m interested in Scotland. I mostly read Scottish history books.
’ David went on, speaking carefully as though he didn’t want too much to come out.
‘Once Amber is in bed, I can’t go out. I have to keep an eye on her.
So I sit with her and I read and I watch her machines, and that’s every evening.
’ For the first time a note of angry impatience entered David’s usually calm voice and his face creased up as though a momentary pain had passed through his body. ‘I read a lot,’ he went on.
None of us spoke. Nobody knew what to say again. It was as though every mention of his sister struck us silent.
With a return to his usual steady tone, which made me realise just how much he must be repressing on a daily basis, David continued. ‘It means I know bits and pieces about Scottish history. The interesting parts, anyway.’
I took a breath. I wanted to acknowledge what he’d said, I wanted to offer some kind of sympathy, but David’s expression told me that it wouldn’t be welcome and that he would prefer we pretended he hadn’t given us that insight into his life back at home.
So instead I looked at Lachlan. ‘You’re Scottish, you must know about the Jacobites too, surely? ’
Everyone flicked their gazes to Lachlan now, all clearly relieved that the subject had moved on.
‘Aye, but I didn’t think all this—’ he waved a hand wide, going straight through a young man wandering unconcerned over towards the huge fire burning in the grate ‘—was anything to do with that. I thought this was all more… local.’ He groped for the word. ‘More personal.’
‘If the earl fights for the wrong side and the family loses everything as a result, I’d take that pretty personally, wouldn’t you?’ Mal now looked more interested than murderous.
Lachlan turned to me. ‘What do you think, Pax? Do you know who your family supported? Is this the turning point? Is this where everything breaks down?’
I was horrified at being put on the spot.
‘Oh! I don’t… all I know is that there were battles.
I never took any notice of which side we were on – I mean, I know vaguely about the whole Bonnie Prince Charlie and the king over the water stuff, but only in the abstract.
They were all just names to me. Dad wanted us to have Scots heritage and understand our history, but I didn’t care.
I’m sorry, I didn’t pay more attention!’ I almost wailed now.
‘I was angry at being sent away when I was in the Pony Club and they were in all these competitions and having fun and I’d had to put my pony out on loan over the summer because Mum wanted us to come to Scotland and spend time with Dad!
’ It all came out in one long breath, accompanied by more teenage whine than I’d intended.
Everyone was looking at me. ‘Well, I was,’ I finished sulkily. ‘It wasn’t fair.’
Mal, with a return to his more usual acerbity, pointed to the entrance to the hall. ‘There’s a big door over there. You can go and slam it if you like.’
‘No. People might see,’ I muttered, not confessing how much I was filled with the desire to do so.
Lachlan didn’t say anything. I wondered if he was remembering my confessing my other reason for my guilt about not listening – my assumption that my brother was pretending to listen just to make Dad like him more than me.
All of it sounded pathetically childish now, in retrospect, but I hoped that he had been able to read between the lines.
I felt guilty and it made me accept more from Lenny than I might otherwise have done.
I sighed and stared around the castle again.
‘So, you were a stroppy teenager who didn’t want to know about your family history,’ Mal said, as though he had read between the lines and wanted to rub it in.
‘Hey, no fair,’ Kaylinn chimed in. ‘My mom is all about family too. She talks about China as though she just got off the boat, and she’s never even been there.
There’s four generations of my family on our block, and none of them have ever been back either, but we’re all expected to live like we’re still into the four virtues of women and complicated poetry.
’ She gave me a weak smile. ‘So, yeah, I kinda know how it is not to want to get all wrapped up in what used to be.’
‘Yes, lovely, very bonding.’ Mal was back to being waspish. ‘But we need to know.’
‘I’m going to talk to the earl tonight. In the kirk, while he’s on his own.
’ I returned Kaylinn’s smile. She seemed to be the only one who understood how teenagers wanted to disconnect themselves from the family stories.
‘We could be jumping to conclusions here – there might be nothing he can tell me.’
‘There’s not that much else it could be,’ Lachlan said. ‘Losing his castle is a life changing deal.’
‘Perhaps he seduces the king’s sister. Or wife,’ David put in. ‘That could do it.’
‘Did King George have a sister?’ Mal asked.
‘Now you’re asking.’ Lachlan frowned.
‘George wouldn’t,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s not like that at all. I think he loves his wife and children.’
‘That doesn’t mean much,’ Mal muttered.
‘Well, he wasn’t subject to my charms anyway,’ I snapped back. ‘And he seemed very concerned for his wife – he’s left her and the children behind and he sounded really fond of them.’
Cellar Dog was back, pressing himself between us.
I half reached down to fondle his ears. All this drama and high tension was getting to me and I’d forgotten again that I was invisible and untouchable.
Even the earl couldn’t touch me. I suddenly felt very lonely and filled with a longing for home, small, noisy and filled with the half-hearted homework of Year Ten as it was.
‘Are you all right?’ Lachlan’s voice was in my ear.
‘I didn’t ask for any of this!’ I burst out and, followed by Cellar Dog, who didn’t seem to bear me any ill will for not being able to stroke him, I walked out of the hall and into the yard beyond.
There was something calming about watching people go about their daily tasks.
Jeannie was sweeping the cottage floor and brushing the detritus out of the doorway; another woman was feeding the cows with armfuls of rough fodder.
Fergus moved about in the stables, where the horses stood in their patient row and his small son played in a puddle with some floating sticks.
The sun shone on it all as though last night’s storm had never been, although the air felt colder with the edge of winter sneaking in.
The air was also fresh, though the lack of diesel fumes highlighted how far we were from the twenty-first century. The only real pollution was from the smoke that billowed from every chimney and a general overarching lack of personal hygiene.
‘I’m sorry.’ Lachlan caught up with me as I stood in the shelter of the already ruined gatehouse that guarded the steep approach to the castle.