‘How can I? You’ve woken me up properly now.’
Kaylinn muttered and turned over. I looked at her but, even though the faintest light greyed the little window, she was no more than a blob.
‘Come with me, then.’ The shuffling darkness that was Lachlan took a couple more steps. ‘I want a word with you anyway.’
I had a sudden hot flashback to asking him if he was moving into his cottage alone and hoped that it wasn’t going to be the sort of ‘I like you, but not in that way. Let’s stay professional and, besides, we’re three hundred years in the past so any “where do you see this going?” talks can only really consist of the word “forwards”’ that I probably needed. False intimacy, I reminded myself. Stress.None of this was real.
‘All right.’ I groped about and found my coat. The night air beyond the linen and body heat was chilly and I was glad I had kept my socks on.
‘Downstairs. I’m not overkeen on being listened in to by this lot.’ The latch to the door was lifted; I heard the metal rattle. ‘They’re great, but they’re a bit young and green.’
‘Are you saying I’m old?’ I shuffled after him with my socks snagging against the wooden planks of the floor.
‘You’ve more experience on you is what I’m saying, Pax.’
‘That’s just saying I’m old but in a different way.’
The staircase was even darker, having no windows to let the meagre starlight in, and we edged our way down and around with one hand on the wall and carefully placed feet. On past the doors that led to the lower rooms we shuffled, with my socked feet sweeping the gritty steps clear on the way, and down to the ground floor. Here a wooden window shutter was slightly ajar, which meant that a narrow trickle of moonlight could come in and illuminate a patch of floorboards. Outside the sea was audible now that the gulls had gone quiet, a gentle rhythmicslapping against the cliffs, and the air smelled of a clean salt breeze.
I had a sudden burst of homesickness for my flat in York, with the constant background noise of neighbours and the fumes of the city. I squashed it down. People paid good money for fresh sea air and if it came with the terror of being trapped in the past, well, there were worse things, weren’t there?
Not really,the intrusive little inner voice tried to insist. I did my best to ignore it.
Lachlan found the bucket and dipped in a cupped hand to drink.
‘Aren’t you worried about typhoid? Or some other horrible water-borne disease?’ I asked, watching him gulp.
‘We’ve been drinking it since we arrived. Well, once the two bottles of Lucozade and Kaylinn’s coffee ran out, anyway.’ He used his wet hand to rub over his face in a rather pointless gesture to cleanliness. I sympathised, because I was already feeling a little bit ‘festival’. ‘And, like I said, I don’t think we can die here.’
‘Butwhydo you think that? Who made youDoctor Who?’ I sat on one of the sacks stuffed with straw that were laid around the wooden floor like a scarecrow graveyard. It was prickly but warmer than the floor and, after a moment of wiping his hand down his jumper, Lachlan came to join me.
‘Until you arrived I’ve been thinking it was just some fluke, you know? Just something random, a pocket of time that we fell into somehow,’ he said, his voice a little echoey against the half-plastered walls.
‘But how can that happen? People would be disappearing all the time!’ I drew my knees up to my chin to try to keep warm and wrapped my arms around them.
‘Pax, peopledodisappear all the time,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you arrived, and you’re a McKell, I started thinking, what if there’s a point to all this? What if we’re here for a reason?’
I stared at him, although there wasn’t much to see in this muted light. An outline of a head with hair at an angle that made him look like a monster, a body made of shoulders and shadows. ‘Areason?’ It came out louder than I’d intended and my inflection made it sound like the maddest thing I’d ever heard. ‘What the hell kind of reason could there be? And anyway, doesn’t that imply that time is somehow sentient? And if it is then I’ve got some very stern words I want to have with it about 1999, 2007 and 2020!’
‘Sssh, now.’ Lachlan put a hand on my arm. ‘We don’t want to disturb anyone.’
‘They are two floors up in a building that’s so solid it could probably withstand a siege!’ I snapped and then realised that it had likely beenbuiltto withstand possible sieges and closed my mouth.
‘Fergus might be out seeing to the horses.’
‘Fergus can’t see or hear us,’ I pointed out. ‘And if the horses get arsey he’ll put it down to them just being awkward, like he did earlier. He’s hardly going to be out there shouting, “Jeannie, Jeannie, come quick, I think we’ve got invaders from another time in the castle!” is he?’
‘You’re still finding it hard to get your head around?’ Lachlan sounded kind and he gave my arm a bit of a squeeze. ‘That’s perfectly natural.’
‘Nothing about this is “perfectly natural”, Lachlan,’ I snapped and then felt odd for using his name because there was something very intimate about the two of us sitting here alone in the dark in the middle of the night. ‘And now you’re telling me that we might be here for a reason? How? What reason?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, letting his hand drop away from me. He sounded tired now. ‘Really, I don’t.’
‘Oh.’
‘What’s your life like? Back in our own time, I mean?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
