Chapter 20
I couldn’t sleep.
I lay wrapped in my blanket, listening to the sleeping breaths of my companions.
Cellar Dog, who had lain himself down at my feet, kept waking and scratching vigorously, which didn’t help my insomniac thoughts, and the floor was rough and cold underneath me.
Even Lachlan, who I’d half hoped might lie wakefully alongside me, was nothing but a roll of blanket bearing a tuft of blond hair and some gentle snores.
David was on guard, a silent presence at the table, and no kind of comfort.
My mind kept drifting back to what I’d said to the others.
Were we just waiting for it to be impossible for George to take his very small army to join the fight for James?
Didn’t that mean that Time wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t go?
And if even Time itself had no certainty about the future – where did that leave us?
It was no good. Lying here with the bones of the floor jutting into me and the increasing frequency with which the dog alternately scratched its ears or gnawed at a paw, I was never going to get to sleep.
It wasn’t as though I needed to be fresh and alert for work tomorrow, after all, was it?
Carefully, so as not to wake anyone, I uncoiled myself from the itchy blankets.
‘Can’t sleep?’ David looked up from scouring a bowl.
‘Just need some air.’
‘Pax…’ David looked as though he might be going to stop me – an arm came up but then returned to the bowl as though weighted down with hopelessness. ‘Do you really think we’re going back?’
I wanted to say, ‘I have absolutely no idea. I’m as much out of my depth as the rest of you. If you want someone to be in charge, then ask Lachlan, because he’s good at it and I’m as terrified as you are that we might not.’ Instead I said, ‘I hope so.’
‘Only, Amber…’ His gaze went down to the wooden bowl and he slid it between his hands, a thoughtless action to distract himself. ‘She needs me,’ he finished.
‘I know.’ Nothing else I could say.
David sighed and shook his head. His hair flopped and tumbled. ‘You’re doing your best,’ he said. I wasn’t sure whether he meant it for me or himself and left him to the bowl.
I passed through our little basement and out into the total darkness of the cellar, found the wooden steps by touch and tiptoed up and out into the starlit night.
It was very dark. A few faint glows came through cracks in the shutters over windows where lamps or firelight escaped to brighten slices of wall or ground, but apart from that there was only the dim grey light from a half-moon to show that a frost had crisped the mud.
I wandered out to the cattle enclosure, causing a degree of perturbation among the cows, and the goat broke off chewing to regard me evenly.
‘No, you carry on,’ I said to it and it flicked an ear and went back to the forage.
A few people walked the darkness. One of the women was returning to the cottage from the privy shed and two men strolled casually along the wall that marked the edge of the headland.
Horses stomped inside the stables and someone called to someone else.
Small domestic sights and sounds, all backed by the restless swirl and swish of the sea below.
The atmosphere seemed to have relaxed. I couldn’t explain it but there had been a tension in the air when the men had thought they were heading to battle.
There had been constant activity around the stables; men had been polishing broadswords and sharpening daggers and conversation had been clipped at the edges, faces had worn lines of strain.
All that had evaporated now and the whole castle seemed to have slouched against the horizon, now that it was no longer buttressed by anxiety.
The message that the McKell involvement in the battle was off must have travelled.
Good, that would make it much harder for George to change his mind, should he want to, I thought as I approached the kirk and stared off into the darkness.
The slanted moon was giving just enough light to tinge the ridge of the roof and pick out the edges of some of the stones in silver and I remembered how desolate this all looked in my own time.
Now it looked utilitarian and solid, a proper purposeful building rather than an outline in stone against grass.
I felt an odd little jolt at the incongruity, and at the realisation that all these people – these characters whom I had dismissed when Dad had tried to tell me their stories – were real, thinking, living people.
The past had been just that to me, dead, fixed, a ‘thing’.
Now that thing was laughing, sleeping, arguing, eating meals and grooming horses and I felt guilty again that I had disregarded my past so glibly.
I’d never thought of it before when they’d been nothing but names and breeches, as though history had been some kind of fancy-dress party attended by actors moving to a script.
Here they were in reality, as uncertain and undecided as anyone from the twenty-first-century, and so utterly and believably real.
The knowledge prodded me in the guilt-glands.
If I hadn’t carried that vague weight of shame about being the cause of my parents’ marriage ending because of my birth, I might not have been so keen to blame Lenny for sucking up to Dad.
If I hadn’t thought his interest in our history was pretended just to please our father, then I might have taken more interest myself.
Then I might have more of an idea what might happen next. So, basically, it was my fault. Again.
I leaned against the bone-cold wall and gazed up at the moon, which kept hustling off to hide behind random clouds.
I’d been stupid. I’d been self-centred – my parents’ marriage was down to them, I had no influence, and Lenny had genuinely enjoyed Dad’s stories.
I’d just been a sulky, stubborn teenager who’d wanted everything her own way.
It wasn’t all about me. I knew it. I just needed to believe it.
Over towards the bulky ruined shape of the gatehouse I was torn away from my pondering when my eye was caught by a movement.
Black against black, a dark sweep as something flickered against the walls in a highlight of moonshine, a sudden glitter as though the grey beams had caught something metallic.
I pushed myself away from the wall where I’d been brooding and wandered over to see what it was.
I couldn’t break the habit of creeping along in shadow and hiding behind outcrops of wall.
Thirty-two years of being solid and visible were a hard habit to break and so I tiptoed up to the figure, who was wrapped up and muttering, before realising that it was Jamie.
Clearly, he too couldn’t sleep. He had a big black coat draped around him and as I crept closer I could see that the gleam was the moonlight reflecting from an unwieldy gun, which Jamie was swinging around, occasionally bringing up as though to fire.
He was muttering to himself, nothing I could understand, and it was almost comical.
He was bringing the gun up in front of him in an overdramatic, stagey gesture and it reminded me of the way small children played with toy guns.
Very much ‘bang bang, you’re dead’ posturing.
I felt that squeeze of sympathy again, watching him pretending to pick off enemies with his heavy and awkward piece of outdated weaponry. Poor Jamie, the last of his line, jealous of his sister, subordinate to his brother-in-law.
Judging by the posturing and dramatic gun-swinging that was going on, Jamie had held aspirations of being a hero, of riding into the fight for James and single-handedly winning the day.
He wasn’t so far removed from some of my Year Ten boys, I thought as I watched Jamie pointing his gun down the steep entrance to the castle, playing at defending against an enemy that would never come.
He wanted to be the Big Man, wanted respect and admiration from his peers, when all he had was a depleted family entitlement and a sister married to an earl.
I turned away from Jamie and went back to the cellar where everyone was still sleeping, wrapped myself up in my blanket and, trying not to put my legs through the dog, fell asleep.