Chapter 5 #2
En masse, the four of us shuffled around to look into the other room.
This held rough wooden chairs, an enormous fireplace and some dodgy artwork.
Tiny windows were covered by wood slats that filtered the wind and when I peered out I could see that they looked out over the headland.
My brain kept expecting the smell of English Heritage floor polish and potpourri but instead this room also smelled of long-extinguished fires, warm wood and held a top note of wet dog fur and leather.
Kaylinn went over and flapped at a tapestry. It was a gaudily coloured representation of something folkloric; there were unicorns and odd bird-headed dragon creatures amid lots of flowers, with hunting parties unconvincingly rendered in the background.
‘I suppose,’ Mal said, tipping his head to one side, ‘if you don’t have YouTube and Netflix, you have to spend your evenings staring at this stuff.’
‘I just can’t believe it’s real.’ Kaylinn ran a finger over the embroidery wonderingly.
‘I can’t believe that nobody can stitch a realistic horse,’ Mal said.
‘I mean, come on. We’ve had the Renaissance; they should have got the hang of perspective by now.
’ I wondered if acerbity was his way of hiding what he really felt, because there was a kind of wonder on his face as he squinted at the images and he seemed to be struggling to keep his air of world-weariness intact.
I stared around. It was no good, I had to say it. ‘When are we?’ I asked, and everyone went quiet. ‘Do we know?’
‘Not had a proper nosy yet.’ Lachlan was trying to read the papers on the desk without touching anything. ‘When we came in last time Jeannie was in here dusting and she had that wee shite of a dog with her so we had to leave.’ He flashed me a look that held the hint of a smile.
‘You mean you haven’t been through this place like…’ I groped for a simile and came up with Dad’s favourite ‘…syrup of figs through a poorly goat?’
‘No,’ Lachlan said with a raised eyebrow, ‘we have not. We can only get in when Jeannie opens the doors. We can’t walk through walls, Pax.
’ Now I got a half-apologetic grin. ‘Time travel 101. We can open doors, but not if they’re locked and Jeannie locks the main door when she’s not here.
The cellar door to the hall is kept locked too.
I suppose they’d only open that when they need access from indoors. ’
Then he winked at me, and I didn’t know whether that made it better or worse. I was so far out of my depth here that the bottom might as well have been non-existent.
Mal went round the desk to look at the documents.
‘Printed type can’t come soon enough,’ he said.
‘This looks like some hyperactive spiders went for a drag through some ink. But you have a read, Lachlan, you’re the medieval historian.
I’m just a prehistoric digger. I specialise in Pictish era archaeology,’ he said to me, his cheeks dimpling with a suppressed expression that I thought might be smugness.
‘I was part of the dig; all this castle stuff is beyond my pay grade.’
‘I’m fairly sure this is all later than my period of knowledge, too.
It looks like…’ Lachlan picked up the topmost piece of paper with a quick glance at the door, presumably in case Jeannie might be coming in to be scared into a fit of the ab dabs at the sight of levitating paper.
‘We might be around 1700?’ He tilted the script towards the window to try to catch more light.
‘“In the second year of the reign of our lord King George,”’ Lachlan read.
‘That must be George the First or they’d have put the regnal number.
I think that’s the early 1700s, or thereabouts. Anyone know?’
‘You’re the historian,’ I said. ‘Mal’s prehistoric, I’m a chemistry teacher and Kaylinn is absorbed in the world’s largest cross stitch.’
‘And American,’ she said, from her close examination of the tapestry work on the other side of the fireplace in the other room. ‘Ask me about George Third and I’m good to go.’
‘I’m medieval, 1200 to 1500,’ Lachlan said slowly, ‘so I’m a wee bit hazy.
I lose interest around the time the English stopped playing ping-pong with Berwick, and the Battle of Sauchieburn.
But I think George the First was somewhere around the early 1700s.
’ Then he looked up brightly at us. ‘Well, we’ve learned something new.
We know where we are, and we know roughly when. Shall we go on up to the top?’
The klaxon in my head started up again, with the word Why almost shrill enough to drown out the sound of the gulls that shrieked their rusty-nail-on-glass calls below the headland.
I thought about asking Lachlan what he thought, but I didn’t want to rock any sanity boats right now, not when we were sailing in the relatively smooth waters of Being Practical.
I stood aside to let him pass me onto the next flight of steps, and, as he did so he gave me another little wink, which made my ears go very hot.
Stop it, I told myself. It was the shock, that was all.
We were in a heightened state of anxiety – all emotions were bound to be felt more keenly.
Friendships would feel like attractions, enmity probably meant all-out war.
And Lachlan just wanted to make me feel more comfortable here.
The others had had days to get used to it.
Plus he was blond and he’d probably scrub up nicely, and he had a bit of a twinkle about him that made me think…
No. We were more than three hundred years in the past and this was most definitely not the place to be noticing men.
I couldn’t be doing with setting that kind of precedent.
Besides, it would make the ‘where did you meet?’ question absolutely unanswerable if I didn’t want to get put away.
Plus, for all I knew he was married and the father of nine little Scottish children, all messy-haired and dressed in hand-knitted jumpers.
If I were any more rational, I thought with a wry smile, following the others onto the stairway, I’d have us home before dinner.
Up the stairs were more rooms. Two were enormous bedchambers.
Dominating the spaces were huge four-poster beds, draped with more embroidered hangings, which looked ominously dusty and cobwebbed, and chests which, examination told us, held men’s clothing.
The other rooms were empty and unused and, like downstairs, smelled of dog.
‘It’s a bit bleak,’ Mal said, hands on hips. ‘Just shows what happens when you haven’t invented IKEA yet.’
‘It’s fantastic,’ Kaylinn breathed. ‘Real, honest to gosh, four-poster beds.’ She shook one of the heavy fabric curtains that surrounded the bed. A small rain of unhappy spiders resulted. ‘I mean, I’ve always wanted to sleep in a four-poster bed.’
‘What do we do about sleeping?’ I asked, looking dubiously at the coverlet.
There was a small patch of suspiciously flat fabric near the head end and I strongly suspected Jeannie’s terrier of having requisitioned this as a sleeping place.
‘Kaylinn said we roll ourselves in stolen blankets and sleep in that basement? All in the same room?’
‘We did,’ Lachlan said. ‘We asked Kaylinn if she wanted a room to herself.’
‘Hey, no way am I sleeping on my own down there! This entire situation is spooky enough already, I am not waking up in the dark by myself,’ Kaylinn retorted.
‘But there’s nothing stopping us sleeping in here?’ I looked around. These rooms were infinitely more inviting than the idea of sleeping on the floor in that dank cellar. ‘Nobody can see us, and we could just open a window downstairs to get out if the doors are locked.’
The other three looked at each other. ‘Damn,’ said Mal. ‘You mean we could have been sleeping in actual comfort, rather than pre-Dickensian misery? Why didn’t we think of that?’
‘You three could have that other room with the bed and Kaylinn and I can share in here,’ I said, trying not to sound smug, while another part of my brain was yelling at me about how utterly, totally and ridiculously mad all this was.
‘Chemistry teacher for the win,’ Lachlan said and grinned at me. ‘Someone go and tell young Davey. He’s probably polishing his pewter again down there, and I have to stop saying that.’
‘I’ll go,’ Mal said cheerily. ‘All this lack of conspicuous consumption gives me hives.’
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Practical. No fripperies.’
‘Nothing wrong with a bit of frip.’ Lachlan was staring out of the window. ‘And those tapestries are hardly basic.’
Kaylinn sat on the bed. It made a dull sound that did not give off luxurious-feather-mattress vibes. ‘Bit hard,’ she announced. ‘But it’s okay.’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘Okay? Okay? We are trapped in the past here and you’re behaving as though we just booked into a Premier Inn!’ Then I caught Kaylinn’s eye and she gave me weird little smile. Keep pretending, it seemed to say. Don’t think, don’t let go.
‘I wonder where the earl is?’ Lachlan went on. ‘But then he’ll have other castles, I suppose.’
Keep pretending this is all dinner-party conversation.
Don’t let go. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly.
‘I wish I’d listened to Dad and his tales of the family now.
But I’m fairly sure if there were other castles then Lenny would have dragged me all over Scotland to take a look at them.
He’d probably have put an offer in on those too,’ I finished bitterly.
‘Hmm,’ said Lachlan.
‘The ceilings are painted in here too,’ Kaylinn said, lying back on the bed. ‘Look. It’s beautiful.’
I looked. On the roof above us unrealistic lambs cavorted in startlingly green fields, crucifixes hovered in an unlikely fashion surrounded by roses in various shades of red and pink. It all looked tiringly allegorical.