SEVEN
In hindsight, three days might have been optimistic.
Chrissi pondered this the next morning as she walked the stone circle and earthen mound, Alis at her side.
After coming to terms with Alis the day before, she had used the remaining sunlight to comb the site with a groom as an assistant—getting her bearings, examining the layout of the various elements, and making notes of things she wished to explore.
But today, she and Alis needed to establish a methodology for their excavations. It felt surreal to be walking an archaeological site with Alis once more, sharing ideas and theories.
Chrissi tried to ignore how appealing he looked today, the wind snapping his frock coat and tousling his hair into wild shapes.
He appeared unfettered. Free. He had given up on his top hat the second time the Scottish breeze had snatched it from atop his head.
Standing at her side now, he tapped his hat against his thigh.
“I think we should start there.” Chrissi pointed to a section where the mound dipped a few feet into the earth.
Despite the early hour, the sun was already high in the sky.
“That area faces east and is the most likely spot to find an entrance tunnel. Most mounds tend to be oriented toward the rising sun. If, of course, this is a burial mound.”
“Do ye have doubts?”
“Not really. The standing stones there—” She pointed to the stones resting fifty yards from the mound. “—indicate that this was a site of some importance. But everything is conjecture until we put shovel to earth.”
Nodding, Alis gave her a soft look, the sort she had once taken for granted.
As ever, she felt the siren call of him—the magnetism that had always spilled in his wake. It whispered at her senses, the teasing brush of a feathered wing luring her to throw off all caution and reach for adventure and far-off shores.
Well.
She had done that once and now knew that feathered wing belonged to an albatross—a harbinger of heartache and grief.
No more.
Granted, her personal vows were easier to remember without the scent of Alis’s masculine cologne filling her nostrils and the coiled power of his large body at her elbow.
“What will we be looking for, then, as far as the entrance is concerned?” he asked, thankfully breaking the spiral of Chrissi’s thoughts.
She lifted an eyebrow and tilted her head.
“Typically, chambered cairns have three distinct features: a long tunnel-like entrance, a central chamber, and small niche side chambers. Given the height of the tunnel entrance, the earth leading to it needed to be shored up. Therefore, the ancient builders would have constructed a breastwork on either side of the entrance—large stone walls to hold back the dirt. The stones would have sloped from the height of the door to the ground, creating a channel of sorts. My goal is to begin hunting for a channel.”
Alis stared at the landscape, obviously trying to envision what she could already see in her mind’s eye. Her father and her husband had always praised Chrissi’s ability to think like people and cultures long since passed.
“You have a knack for seeing a landscape as the ancients would have,” Stephen had said on more than one occasion.
He was not wrong. While on an excavation, Chrissi would often feel a hum, a sense of how past peoples would have viewed and interacted with their surroundings. It had led to more than one find.
“Your instincts were always uncannily accurate,” Alis said now, unwittingly agreeing with her late husband. “I’ll send my men up so ye can begin.”
He had designated a crew of five men to do the digging—field hands who welcomed the extra coin, he said.
“Thank you.”
“I look forward to your notes. Just leave a list of what ye would like me to do each day, and I will see it done.”
Chrissi looked up at him, wind tugging at her bonnet.
Alis gazed back, his dark eyes reflecting the green grass at their feet and the clouds racing overhead. A whole world contained there, Chrissi supposed.
A world she had once adored with every atom that comprised her body.
A world she would have to fight daily not to tumble headlong into once more.
That was the problem.
She could (and would) work with Alis on this excavation.
She would earn funds that were pivotal to her future.
But could she do both of those things without pining for him? Without stewing in a mire of jealousy as he courted and wed another woman?
Without ending up alone and clutching the tattered shards of her heart?
She forced her eyes away from his, afraid he might see the truth there.
That her love for him had never ebbed. Never died.
Swallowing, she took in a deep breath.
You can do this, she encouraged herself. Just focus on the excavations. Just breathe through each day.
Naturally, telling herself to focus on the excavations and ignore Alis as much as possible was rather different than actually accomplishing said goals.
Theoretically, Chrissi and Alis were to see one another sparingly.
In reality, they both lived in the same castle and worked at the same excavation site.
Often, Chrissi would be snugged into her bedchamber of an evening, listening to the crack of Alis’s laughter as he drank whisky with a visiting friend.
Or she would be passing his study and hear the rumble of his voice speaking with his factor, Mr. McIntosh.
And each evening, as was proper, they would dine together. It would have set servants’ tongues to wagging had she avoided the dining room altogether and taken a tray in her bedchamber.
Mr. McIntosh would always join them for dinner, for propriety’s sake, if nothing else.
But Miss Rollins and her mother were frequently in attendance. Or the vicar and his wife. Or any assortment of local gentry who Alis counted as an acquaintance.
It was torture, pure and simple.
To witness Alis happy and content in his life. To endure the crackle of his wit and the intelligence of his mind.
And worst of all, for Chrissi to imagine herself within it. To see clearly what her life might have become had she been willing to forgive and accept the terms of marriage Alis had once offered her.
But that future had been lost nine years ago when she had chosen to turn her back on him and marry Stephen instead.
A choice she now recalled almost daily.
Would the horror and pain of those days ever cease to haunt her? How long would she pay penance for her rash decisions?
True to his word, she and Alis communicated mostly through notes about their work.
We uncovered a row of eleven cut stones today, she wrote to him on the third day of their excavations. At the moment, they do not appear to be sloping toward an entrance, but we are in early days yet.
His replies were always thorough, his notes detailed.
As with his personality, Alis dove in head-first:
Excavations today have uncovered another seven stones, continuing along the line you began.
Troweling around the base of the stones revealed seventeen pottery sherds and various animal bones.
Given the depth of the finds, I presume them to be of medieval origin, not from an earlier primitive time. But I await your expert eye.
His faith in her expertise soothed her battered ego. He had even included drawings of the pieces of broken pottery, the sherds illustrated with exacting precision.
However, when Chrissi had agreed to stay, she had not thought to prepare herself for the gut-punched ache of his handwriting—confident but neat, as her father had once described it.
With each missive, she found herself staring at his notes for minutes at a time—the sight of his bold letters evoking the lazy hum of cicadas under a drowsy Tuscan sun, herself curled into Alis’s side as he wrote.
This was why working with him was doomed to failure—the enterprise held a thousand memories just waiting for the right moment to pounce. For the wrongs between them to spill out, sharp as knives. Or the beauty of what might have been to snatch the air from her throat.
For example, on the fifth day of their excavations, Chrissi caught sight of Alis helping field hands restack a section of stone fencing a rambunctious bull had knocked down. As he often had in Italy, Alis shed his coat and waistcoat, preferring to work in just trousers and shirtsleeves.
Mesmerized, Chrissi stared at the shadow of biceps flexing beneath the lawn of his shirt, the muscles bunching between his shoulder blades as he hefted a large rock.
And suddenly, she was remembering what those arms had felt like around her, how the dips and ridges of his back had moved under her palms.
Who knew how long she would have stared if a worker hadn’t cleared his throat at her side.
How was she to manage it, this constant onslaught of memory?
The never-ending pang of what might have been.
And the hollow terror of having to face the chasm of his loss yet again.
Convincing Chris to stay was a mistake.
Alis knew this shortly after he walked away that first day, leaving her to assess the site.
His initial thought had been to view the excavations in Scotland as a bookend to their summer in Italy—the Highlands and their relationship as chilly and barren as Florence had been warm and indulgent and welcoming. A final curtain before Chris exited his life for good.
But even hours after that first meeting, a humming buzz still vibrated along his skin. A sense of . . . what? Anticipation? Excitement?
He could hardly say. But it was a sensation he remembered well from their time together.
Chris, as ever, ignited a fire within his breast. An energy. A desire to reach for more—to learn and know and become.
And try as he might, he simply could not ignore her . . . this will-o-wisp come to haunt the halls of his memory.