Up the stairs were more rooms. Two were enormous bedchambers. Dominating the spaces were huge four-poster beds, draped with more embroidered hangings, which looked ominously dusty and cobwebbed, and chests which, examination told us, held men’s clothing. The other rooms were empty and unused and, like downstairs, smelled of dog.
‘It’s a bit bleak,’ Mal said, hands on hips. ‘Just shows what happens when you haven’t invented IKEA yet.’
‘It’s fantastic,’ Kaylinn breathed. ‘Real, honest to gosh, four-poster beds.’ She shook one of the heavy fabric curtains that surrounded the bed. A small rain of unhappy spiders resulted. ‘I mean, I’ve always wanted to sleep in a four-poster bed.’
‘Whatdowe do about sleeping?’ I asked, looking dubiously at the coverlet. There was a small patch of suspiciously flat fabric near the head end and I strongly suspected Jeannie’s terrier of having requisitioned this as a sleeping place. ‘Kaylinn said we roll ourselves in stolen blankets and sleep in that basement? All in the same room?’
‘We did,’ Lachlan said. ‘We asked Kaylinn if she wanted a room to herself.’
‘Hey, no way am I sleeping on my own down there! This entire situation is spooky enough already, I amnotwaking up in the dark by myself,’ Kaylinn retorted.
‘But there’s nothing stopping us sleeping in here?’ I looked around. These rooms were infinitely more inviting than the idea of sleeping on the floor in that dank cellar. ‘Nobody can see us, and we could just open a window downstairs to get out if the doors are locked.’
The other three looked at each other. ‘Damn,’ said Mal. ‘You mean we could have been sleeping in actual comfort, rather than pre-Dickensian misery? Why didn’t we think of that?’
‘You three could have that other room with the bed and Kaylinn and I can share in here,’ I said, trying not to sound smug, while another part of my brain was yelling at me about how utterly, totally and ridiculouslymadall this was.
‘Chemistry teacher for the win,’ Lachlan said and grinned at me. ‘Someone go and tell young Davey. He’s probably polishing his pewter again down there, and Ihaveto stop saying that.’
‘I’ll go,’ Mal said cheerily. ‘All this lack of conspicuous consumption gives me hives.’
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Practical. No fripperies.’
‘Nothing wrong with a bit of frip.’ Lachlan was staring out of the window. ‘And those tapestries are hardly basic.’
Kaylinn sat on the bed. It made a dull sound that did not give off luxurious-feather-mattress vibes. ‘Bit hard,’ she announced. ‘But it’s okay.’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘Okay?Okay?We are trapped in the past here and you’re behaving as though we just booked into a Premier Inn!’ Then I caught Kaylinn’s eye and she gave me weird little smile.Keep pretending,it seemed to say.Don’t think, don’t let go.
‘I wonder where the earl is?’ Lachlan went on. ‘But then he’ll have other castles, I suppose.’
Keep pretending this is all dinner-party conversation. Don’t let go.‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly. ‘I wish I’d listened to Dad and his tales of the family now. But I’m fairly sure if there were other castles then Lenny would have dragged me all over Scotland to take a look at them. He’d probably have put an offer in on those too,’ I finished bitterly.
‘Hmm,’ said Lachlan.
‘The ceilings are painted in here too,’ Kaylinn said, lying back on the bed. ‘Look. It’s beautiful.’
I looked. On the roof above us unrealistic lambs cavorted in startlingly green fields, crucifixes hovered in an unlikely fashion surrounded by roses in various shades of red and pink. It all looked tiringly allegorical.
The light was fading rapidly beyond the small windows, making the figures on the ceiling blur into twilit outlines, and it thundered home to me again that it wasn’t July any more. The shock sat me down on the bed, which was, indeed, hard.
‘Are you all right?’ Lachlan asked, gently.
‘Yes. No. I don’t really know.’ I took a deep breath and tried not to think, concentrating on Kaylinn, who was still gazing at the ceiling, to distract my mind. ‘You were a verysmall archaeological dig,’ I said to her. Anything to keep from thinking. ‘Just four of you.’
‘Oh, the others had gone back over to the campsite,’ she said, her eyes tracing complicated knot work picked out in gold above the bed. ‘They’d seen the storm coming and decided to pack up for the day. We wanted to carry on; Mal and David had found a stone that they thought might have some carving on it and I was helping.’
‘What about you?’ I asked Lachlan, who had sat down beside me but was still staring at the window as though he were trying to work out how to squeeze between the narrow wooden slats to run free across the landscape. We were more than thirty feet up, so I hoped he wasn’t going to try.
‘Me? Oh, I’m not part of the dig. I’m supposed to be doing some work for Historic Environment Scotland,’ he said vaguely. ‘Writing about lost castles, obscure ruins, that sort of thing. Sheer fluke I pitched up when this lot were here. It was meant to be a quick job, take some pictures, make some notes and go back to do some research. Like I said before, I’m moving into a wee cottage about twenty miles away…’ He stopped speaking suddenly and I saw his face change. He’d clearly got the same feeling as I’d just had, where the unbelievability of what was going on had hit him on the head with all the force of three hundred lost years.
‘We’ll get back,’ I half whispered. ‘We will.’
He swallowed hard and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he did a half-shake of his head, opened his eyes again and gave me a smile that was only a bit wobbly at the edges. ‘We have to,’ he said. ‘That’s all my money going on the mortgage and I’d like to getsomeuse out of it.’
‘Nobody moving in with you?’ I tried to sound casual but I heard Kaylinn giggle. Damn, and I’d thought I was being subtle.
‘No,’ and even Lachlan sounded amused. ‘Strictly solo. Long divorced, very amicable but she’s gone to Antarctica to track migrating whales so nobody to miss me. I haven’t even got a cat.’ He bounced a little bit, experimentally, and the bed frame jiggled. His expression was very curated, very neutral and the subject change clunked. ‘You’re right about the bed though, Kaylinn. Straw, do we reckon?’
