‘Ach, stop it, y’wee numptie!’ Jeannie looked in the direction the dog was looking – in fact, straight at Mal. ‘You’re seeing ghosties again!’
The dog’s growl was really quite scary.
‘Are you any good with animals, Mal?’ Lachlan asked casually. ‘Generally, I mean. Because the ones here really react to you, don’t they?’
‘I’ve got a cat,’ Mal said, keeping a wary eye on the dog, which had hunched itself down close to the floor and was still growling a low, warning growl. ‘She seems to like me. Although obviously it’s hard to tell, with cats, but she doesn’t actuallyattackme.’
‘Perhaps we’d better get Mal away from the dog.’ Lachlan led us further into the room. ‘Let’s go up here.’
I wondered why we were all following him like a straggle of goslings, but a quick look at the expressions of the others told me that they were happy to be led. I was also finding it reassuring to have someone telling me what to do. It prevented me from having to think, because joined-up thinking was beyond me right now and I presumed the others felt the same.
Another flight of stone steps curled their way up inside the wall and we climbed through the gap to follow the stairs, with the dog’s continued aggressive rumbling following us, although the dog itself didn’t.
I thought back to being in here with Lenny when the stairs had been nothing but indentations in the stonework and the walls no more than unsafe rubble framing the sky. That memory felt oddly distant, like a fragment of a dream, as though it had never been real. Reality was now, the steps leading up at an angle so steep that we had to keep our hands on the walls so as not to tumble back down over one another like skittles. At the top, a small passage led to two rooms divided by a panelled wall. The ceilings were painted, the walls were covered in tapestries and one room had a desk with papers neatly stacked on it.
As we stood in the passage, surrounded by the smell of warm wood, damp stone and an acrid smell of old fires, I caught Mal’s eye. His vertical hair rose above a startled blue gaze, but his previous terror now seemed subsumed beneath a kind of bubbling enthusiasm. He mouthed ‘wow’ at me, and all I could do was nod.
This was real.
The reality was added to by little touches like a ragged tear in one of the fabrics and a dark stain like spilled ink across the floor.
En masse, the four of us shuffled around to look into the other room. This held rough wooden chairs, an enormous fireplace and some dodgy artwork. Tiny windows were covered by wood slats that filtered the wind and when I peered out I could see that they looked out over the headland. My brain kept expecting the smell of English Heritage floor polish and potpourri but instead this room also smelled of long-extinguished fires, warm wood and held a top note of wet dog fur and leather.
Kaylinn went over and flapped at a tapestry. It was a gaudily coloured representation of something folkloric; there were unicorns and odd bird-headed dragon creatures amid lotsof flowers, with hunting parties unconvincingly rendered in the background.
‘I suppose,’ Mal said, tipping his head to one side, ‘if you don’t have YouTube and Netflix, you have to spend your evenings staring at this stuff.’
‘I just can’t believe it’s real.’ Kaylinn ran a finger over the embroidery wonderingly.
‘I can’t believe that nobody can stitch a realistic horse,’ Mal said. ‘I mean, come on. We’ve had the Renaissance; they should have got the hang of perspective by now.’ I wondered if acerbity was his way of hiding what he really felt, because there was a kind of wonder on his face as he squinted at the images and he seemed to be struggling to keep his air of world-weariness intact.
I stared around. It was no good, I had to say it. ‘When are we?’ I asked, and everyone went quiet. ‘Do we know?’
‘Not had a proper nosy yet.’ Lachlan was trying to read the papers on the desk without touching anything. ‘When we came in last time Jeannie was in here dusting and she had that wee shite of a dog with her so we had to leave.’ He flashed me a look that held the hint of a smile.
‘You mean you haven’t been through this place like…’ I groped for a simile and came up with Dad’s favourite ‘…syrup of figs through a poorly goat?’
‘No,’ Lachlan said with a raised eyebrow, ‘we have not. We can only get in when Jeannie opens the doors. We can’t walk through walls, Pax.’ Now I got a half-apologetic grin. ‘Time travel 101. We can open doors, but not if they’re locked and Jeannie locks the main door when she’s not here. The cellar door to the hall is kept locked too. I suppose they’d only open that when they need access from indoors.’
Then he winked at me, and I didn’t know whether that made it better or worse. I was so far out of my depth here that the bottom might as well have been non-existent.
Mal went round the desk to look at the documents. ‘Printed type can’t come soon enough,’ he said. ‘This looks like some hyperactive spiders went for a drag through some ink. But you have a read, Lachlan, you’re the medieval historian. I’m just a prehistoric digger. I specialise in Pictish era archaeology,’ he said to me, his cheeks dimpling with a suppressed expression that I thought might be smugness. ‘I was part of the dig; all this castle stuff is beyond my pay grade.’
‘I’m fairly sure this is all later than my period of knowledge, too. It looks like…’ Lachlan picked up the topmost piece of paper with a quick glance at the door, presumably in case Jeannie might be coming in to be scared into a fit of the ab dabs at the sight of levitating paper. ‘We might be around 1700?’ He tilted the script towards the window to try to catch more light. ‘“In the second year of the reign of our lord King George,”’ Lachlan read. ‘That must be George the First or they’d have put the regnal number. I think that’s the early 1700s, or thereabouts. Anyone know?’
‘You’re the historian,’ I said. ‘Mal’s prehistoric, I’m a chemistry teacher and Kaylinn is absorbed in the world’s largest cross stitch.’
‘And American,’ she said, from her close examination of the tapestry work on the other side of the fireplace in the other room. ‘Ask me about George Third and I’m good to go.’
‘I’m medieval, 1200 to 1500,’ Lachlan said slowly, ‘so I’m a wee bit hazy. I lose interest around the time the English stopped playing ping-pong with Berwick, and the Battle of Sauchieburn. But I think George the First was somewhere around the early 1700s.’ Then he looked up brightly at us. ‘Well, we’ve learned something new. We knowwherewe are, and we know roughlywhen. Shall we go on up to the top?’
The klaxon in my head started up again, with the wordWhyalmost shrill enough to drown out the sound of the gulls thatshrieked their rusty-nail-on-glass calls below the headland. I thought about asking Lachlan what he thought, but I didn’t want to rock any sanity boats right now, not when we were sailing in the relatively smooth waters of Being Practical.
I stood aside to let him pass me onto the next flight of steps, and, as he did so he gave me another little wink, which made my ears go very hot.
Stop it,I told myself. It was the shock, that was all. We were in a heightened state of anxiety – all emotions were bound to be felt more keenly. Friendships would feel like attractions, enmity probably meant all-out war. And Lachlan just wanted to make me feel more comfortable here. The others had had days to get used to it. Plus he was blond and he’d probably scrub up nicely, and he had a bit of a twinkle about him that made me think… No. We were more than three hundred years in the past and this was most definitelynotthe place to be noticing men. I couldn’t be doing with setting that kind of precedent. Besides, it would make the ‘where did you meet?’ question absolutely unanswerable if I didn’t want to get put away. Plus, for all I knew he was married and the father of nine little Scottish children, all messy-haired and dressed in hand-knitted jumpers.
If I were any more rational, I thought with a wry smile, following the others onto the stairway, I’d have us home before dinner.
