“I told him I was his maiden aunt to try to encourage him to stop screaming.” She shrugged. “I thought if he considered me a friendly spirit, he might stop taking refuge in senselessness every time I attempted to speak to him.”
“Very sensible.”
“I thought so,” she agreed. “He eventually accustomed himself to me long enough to take down a few tales that he thought were fiction, though they were actually my memories. ‘Twas more palatable for him that way.”
“No doubt,” he said, nodding. “What happened then?”
“He rushed off to make an appointment with a printer in Inverness, then fell into a bog and drowned.”
Oliver put his hand over his eyes, then shook his head and laughed a little. “Oh, Mair,” he said with a miserable smile. “I’m sorry.”
She couldn’t help but return the smile. “It was a bit of a tragedy, especially given that he’d already penned several in his series of essays about traveling through our beautiful land. He put his work in a strongbox that was buried alongside him, though who knows if it survived. He decamped for the south of France two hundred years ago, but I could find him.” She paused. “Perhaps.”
“I’ll help you find him,” he promised, then he hesitated. “Would that be enough? Those memories you have written down?”
She looked at him seriously. “I thought we were going to try to make a life as we are,” she said quietly.
Though in truth, sitting with the women in Oliver’s circle of family and friends that morning whilst pleasant had been difficult. Especially when she’d watched those same women becollected by their men or go off themselves to collect their children and all she’d been able to do was stand and watch.
But what Oliver would give up…
“Jamie lifted his eyebrows this morning,” Oliver said. “I think that was meant to give me complete autonomy where the gate in the meadow is concerned.”
She pursed her lips at him, but he only smiled in return.
“He stroked his chin twice.”
“Thrice,” she corrected. “I counted.”
“See? I’m sure that signals approval.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his expression sobering. “Please let me try one more time.”
“But your memories,” she protested.
“I wrote them down last night.”
“I thought you were working on your book from your lads.”
He shook his head. “I thought it might be a handy thing to have. And I didn’t tell you what I discussed with Zachary yesterday, did I?”
“You did not.”
“It was an interesting conversation,” he said began carefully. “Do you know anything about your aunt Iolanthe?”
Mairead shook her head. “Who was her father?”
“I didn’t get that far,” Oliver admitted. “We were too busy discussing the fact that when Thomas met her, she’d been a ghost for almost six hundred years.”
Mairead felt the world around her suddenly go very still. That happened occasionally, when something of great import had been on the other side of a few hours or days from where she’d been lingering. She’d felt it several times in the past before happenings in the world or in her clan or, if she were to be precise, in Oliver’s life.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt it in relation to her own poor self.
“A ghost,” she managed. “How interesting.”
“It is,” he said carefully. “From what I understand Thomas went back before she was slain and saved her—which is interesting but not the most interesting part. Apparently she wrote down her memories whilst she was a ghost. Or, rather, others wrote them for her as she dictated them.”
“As I tried to do with Sinclair McKinnon.”
He nodded. “Exactly that. But even though she’d written those things down, she apparently began to remember things all on her own.”
