Chapter 8 #3
‘Although I do have to say that being up close and personal with all you lot is a sight better than being stuck in my flat, sweating over my thesis, with no company except a bad-tempered tabby,’ Mal went on, seeming to have got into his stride now.
He stopped glaring at me and his gaze travelled up and towards a group of men who, heads bent close together, seemed to be comparing knives.
‘Unwashed as we might be,’ Lachlan said laconically.
‘Obviously.’ Mal kept watching the men. His cherubic cheeks had slumped as his mouth turned down. ‘You might be unwashed, but at least you’re here.’ He almost whispered the last words.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him, keeping my voice similarly low.
Mal sighed. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever been a twenty-first-century gay man, Pax, but it is not the all-night sex festivals and heavy drug use that it’s advertised to be.
’ I went to touch his arm but he shied away.
‘It’s lonely,’ he said. ‘I’m lonely. At least here there are people around and there’s always someone to bitch to.
’ Now I got a smile and a return to his usual acid-toned ebullience.
‘So, yay for the eighteenth century, yes?’
Lachlan had stayed quiet throughout this.
He didn’t even seem to be listening, instead he was staring towards the castle, where the earl had put in an appearance and was standing at the doors staring around with a proprietorial air.
Mal didn’t say anything more and he didn’t seem to want my sympathy, so I turned to Lachlan.
‘Did you think the earl might be able to see me?’ I asked him. ‘Was that why you made us hide?’
He shrugged. ‘Direct relation. Could be?’
‘Then we need to find out.’
‘I dunno, it might be dangerous.’ That grey stare was very level, assessing me. Mal was eyeballing the goat, who was eyeballing him right back. If Mal had a gift for animals, I really hoped he’d kept hold of the receipt.
‘How can it be?’
‘Well, if you look real to him then he might think you’re a spy.’
‘If he does, he’s going to have a job explaining himself, isn’t he? Won’t everyone think he’s gone mad?’
‘Good point.’
‘We could disguise you,’ Mal said, leaving the goat alone. ‘I mean, dressed as you are then as soon as he sees you, he’s going to start yelling about you being a spy. You’re dressed as a man by their standards.’
I looked down at my sturdy boots, put on to clamber up and down the millions of steps that, in our time, were necessary to get up to the castle.
Jeans, boots, a T-shirt and a down jacket that still hadn’t properly dried after the rainstorm.
Mal was right: I looked more like the soldiers that had ridden in with the earl than anything else. I even had short hair.
‘I’d still be an invisible spy though,’ I pointed out.
‘Just for first impressions with the earl though, Pax. We want to know if he can see you or sense you, so we don’t want to alarm him.
If he thinks you’re… if he thinks you’re a normal…
if he assumes you’re a woman of his time, he might talk to you and we can find out what’s going on.
’ Lachlan, trying to avoid any prejudicial words, tiptoed his way around the subject.
‘You want me to dress as a prostitute,’ I said baldly. ‘One of the camp followers?’
‘That was what I was hinting at, with a fair degree of circumlocution, yes. If he can’t see you, then there’s nothing lost, but if he can, then he won’t be worried by your presence. It would be perfectly natural for you to be there.’
‘Offering myself to my great-great-however-many-greats-grandad? That is not natural!’ I didn’t know whether to be offended, distraught, angry or amused. ‘What happens if he can see me, thinks I’m one of the other women and wants to have sex with me?’
‘I can give you some good get-out lines if you need them,’ Mal said cheerily, leaving the goat to its sullen evil intent. ‘Although I don’t suppose that suddenly realising the time is going to have quite the effect we need, unless you can claim being three hundred years late for the last bus.’
‘We can be there too,’ Lachlan said. ‘In the background, so to speak. If he can see you, we can listen in, and if you’re just a presence he can sense then maybe we can prompt you what to do. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds like you’re all going to stand around watching me have sex with a relative,’ I said sulkily.
‘As long as your contraception is watertight,’ Mal chipped in. ‘Because otherwise the complications don’t bear thinking about.’
‘Shut up.’
I knew what was happening, of course I did.
In the back of my mind I was even grateful for it.
We were trying to gain control. Humour and planning, however pointless it might be, gave us the feeling that we were doing something and being proactive rather than milling about like the shuffling cattle in the pen behind us.
While we were arguing, teasing, getting insulted, we weren’t panicking, screaming and falling into despair.
We might not have the faintest idea what we were doing, but at least we were doing something.
If destiny or time or whatever brought us here had a plan, it must be getting very impatient about now.