Chapter 14 #2
‘What have you got to be sorry about?’ I didn’t look at him.
I was feeling slightly ashamed of myself and didn’t want to see any hint of amusement on his face.
My teenage sullenness that meant I hadn’t paid attention to family history looked like being a much bigger problem than I had ever thought when I’d sat on Dad’s window seat and stared out into the soggy garden while my friends all bonded over rosettes and left me out.
Lenny, of course, had been lapping up the history.
He’d go and draw pictures of battles and castles and Dad would put them up on his fridge.
He wasn’t quite so interested in my stories about how Fionnula and Jericho were bound to win the jumping now I wasn’t there to compete, and that my pony Finch would be missing me.
He tried, I know he did, but Lenny listened and his drawings were really good.
All I was was a bundle of attitude who insisted on wearing my jodhpurs every day to show everyone else what I was missing.
If I’d known I was going to get taken three hundred years into the past and it would be important, then I would have listened harder too.
‘I’m not sure.’ Lachlan hitched himself up onto a low alcove. ‘What have you got?’ Then he laughed. ‘Nobody is blaming you, Pax,’ he said. ‘They’re all too busy blaming me. And they’re right, I should have told them what I suspected, I just didn’t really know how to put it without making it seem…’
‘Silly? Contrived? Self-important?’ I swivelled a bit now so that I could half see him. ‘I’m tired of it all now, Lachlan. I want to go home. And the longer this goes on, the more afraid I am that it’s not going to happen.’
There was a silence into which the wind whistled and the gulls called off the cliffs. We could see them from here, dropping like blown papers into the sky and then rising again on an updraught to wheel and spin high above.
‘Do you think the gulls in our time are relations of these?’ he asked easily, as though the subject wasn’t being changed with a crowbar.
‘Probably. I don’t know. Do gulls migrate?’
‘Not these, I don’t think.’
More silence. ‘I’ll see if the earl knows anything,’ I said eventually, and Lachlan blew out a long breath.
‘That’s good. I thought for a moment you might refuse to talk to him again.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I kept my eyes on the gulls but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. His ruffles were blowing in the wind, a visible echo of the sea’s uneasy surface below.
‘I’m aware that we’re putting a lot onto you, Pax. Because you’re the only one that can be seen or heard.’
‘That’s you and losing control again though, isn’t it?’
He laughed now. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘David seems to know a bit about the history of Scotland.’ I wanted to get him away from the subject of how I felt about this total time fuck-up.
I wanted to believe that the powers that be had at least some vague idea of what they were doing, otherwise where did that leave literally everything? ‘More recent than yours, anyway.’
I couldn’t bring up just why David knew more. All that reading. All those evenings. And the way we all shied away from talking about it, as though his sister was a secret that must not be mentioned. It made my shame at being a spoiled child who hadn’t listened even worse.
‘He does. Maybe the others being picked up wasn’t the total accident that I thought.’ Lachlan reached out and stroked my hair. ‘You’ve cobwebs all tangled.’
‘I don’t think Jeannie dusts. She sweeps a lot though, have you noticed? She’s always there with her broom.’
Two men went past behind us leading their horses out for exercise. The horses half reared as they sensed us, panicked ears flat and nostrils flared. The men quietened them with a puzzled look right through us. Cellar Dog sent them on their way with a happy bark.
‘And I do hate to say this, but I think we’re all counting on you,’ Lachlan went on as he brushed his fingers lightly over my hair. ‘To find something out from Earl George that might get us back.’
‘No pressure, then.’ I sounded tight, that remnant of teenage sulk still evident.
‘None at all.’ His hand fell away. ‘And if, when we get back, we never meet again, I hope you remember me, and this. And know that what I felt about you was real, even if it didn’t come back with us.’
I listened to the gulls scream, felt the wind on my face. All of it real. Just impossible. ‘That’s a weird sentence,’ I said eventually.
‘This entire experience is built of weird sentences.’
We weren’t looking at each other, carefully avoiding making eye contact. ‘I want to get back,’ I said eventually. ‘I want us to get back. We can’t have any kind of relationship here, after all, can we?’
‘You mean because of the tendency of Mal to barge into intimate moments?’
That made me laugh. ‘No. I mean, what can we do? We can’t settle down, have a house and a family.
I don’t even want to contemplate childbirth out here, and invisible babies?
Doomed to a life of never being able to meet anyone else unless they’re a direct relation, and even then they can’t touch them? ’
‘Getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves there. I was thinking more dinner, film, maybe showing you my cottage, with the childbirth for maybe some time in the future – but I see where you’re going.’
‘We can’t have a life here, is what I’m saying.
So we’ve got to go back. And everyone must be looking for us.
Lenny will be desperate.’ I spared another thought for my brother, searching the castle site for me probably with increasing distress.
I might be his snappy, resentful sister but he would be missing me, because he cared.
He’d have called the police and my parents, they would all have gathered on that windy hilltop, gazing out to sea.
Police launches would have gone out, the coastguard would be searching for my body amid the undulating waves.
I’d lost track of how long we’d been here, tucked away in this little fold of time, while my family would have suffered through every day passing.
And there I had been, thinking I’d managed to stop feeling guilty about Lenny, only for it to start all over again with a new topic.
I had to get back, even if it was just to apologise.
‘I don’t think staying was ever the option, was it?’ Mal slid down from the alcove and landed in front of me. ‘What’s this bit of the castle?’
‘You’re the one writing about it.’ I looked up at the soaring walls, broken by window gaps in a line all the way up, like buttons on a ruined coat.
‘Gatehouse, then. Not much use now for guarding the entrance.’
‘Lenny wants to turn it into staff accommodation,’ I said. ‘When we rebuild the castle as a hotel. If we ever do, which is unlikely, but we have to do something with it or it’s money we don’t have down the drain.’
Lachlan blew out a breath. ‘The twenty-first century has its drawbacks, doesn’t it?’
‘But we need to get back.’ I sounded a little less definite than I meant to. ‘People are missing us.’ Now I turned so that I was confronted by his flapping shirt. ‘Our families, people need us. Just because the realities of life there are a bit grim…’
‘As opposed to no toilets, terrible food, no washing facilities…’
‘Differently grim,’ I said. ‘You’re unemployed…’
‘Hey, I’m working for Historic Environment Scotland, I’ll have you know! It’s only temporary but if I make a good impression they might keep me on.’
‘All right, you’re temporarily employed. I’m a reluctant chemistry teacher. I live in a rented flat and my boyfriend has decamped to find someone who’s free to travel outside school holidays and doesn’t have to spend most evenings on paperwork.’
‘People have it worse, Pax,’ he said seriously. ‘It’s a life. We’ve got potential. Whereas what we have here is mostly turnips.’
‘And a dog to whom we are invisible.’
We both looked down at Cellar Dog, who had lain down alongside us panting slightly. ‘He’s very philosophical about it all, isn’t he? He’s decided he belongs to a group of beings he can only sense.’
‘Who give him meat scraps and let him share their blankets.’ I thought about the other dogs, who milled around the castle and didn’t seem to get more than the occasional boot. I remembered them huddling together outside in the storm, their coats wet and showing their ribs.
‘I’m pretty sure he’s a talbot. They’re extinct in our time. Crossbred with too many other types of dog, you see. Excellent hunting dogs, apparently.’
This ‘excellent hunting dog’ had mud smeared up his stomach and sides forming a Plimsoll line of grubbiness along his flanks. He scratched behind his ear and flopped a tongue in our general direction.
‘Right.’ I stepped back slightly. ‘We need to work out what I’m going to say to George tonight. I need help with the sort of questions to ask, bearing in mind we still aren’t sure of his connection to us being here.’
‘Do you want us to come with you?’ Lachlan scratched his chin again. ‘You might need help – that earl is a bit tall, dark and handsome for my liking.’
‘You cannot possibly be jealous of a man who’s been dead for donkey’s years and is my however-many-greats-grandfather.’
‘Kaylinn is prepared to see how much contact she can make with the dead,’ he said archly.
‘And I don’t think she has a séance in mind.
But I think we grab Davey and get as much as he knows about the history of Scotland with particular relevance to now.
’ He sighed. ‘I can join in where I’m able.
We’ll see what we can piece together. You, your family, what the earl is here for, we might be able to stitch together some story that we’re here to be part of. ’