‘But that’s…’ I started, having no end to the sentence in mind. The inability to walk on was impossible, stupid, ridiculous. And yet, there it was.
‘I’ll try going round. Hang on to me,’ Lachlan said and then, alarmingly, stepped off the path. I grasped his jumper and held on as it stretched and he hung out over the drop, pushing at the air. A gull flew right through him and circled above his head for a moment, giving us both a beady-eyed look of assessment. ‘Nope. It seems to go all the way out.’ Lachlan got hold of me to pull himself back and I reeled in the acres of deformed wool that flopped in an elephantine way around him with a sense of weak-kneed relief.
‘So, we can’t go down here?’ I wanted to hug him for not falling over the cliff. ‘Why not? It’s… stupid,’ I finished in a worrying lack of available vocabulary.
‘Doesn’t look that way, nope.’
We looked at one another again. I was keeping my eyes on him to prevent me from thinking about the horrible drop. In the end I couldn’t help myself and looked down at the hundred feet of sheer cliff between us and the sea and inched my way back up the path again, keeping my hold on his jumper, just in case he was wrong about the whole ‘not being able to die’ thing.
Once we’d reached solid, wide ground back through the gate, we had to jostle our way through an unruly flock of geese, who hissed and stretched their necks at us in a most unfriendlyfashion. I relaxed and tried not to give in to the urge to throw myself flat on my face and kiss the grass.
‘What the hellwasit?’ I asked as soon as I got control over my vocal cords again and could be confident that I could speak rather than squeak.
‘A barrier of some kind.’ Lachlan threaded his way through the geese and found us a quiet spot behind one of the little dwellings, where the garden was now full of dumped wooden crates. Three women, two young and one grey-haired and wrinkled with age, wound around with huge blanket-type shawls fastened with pins and tucked into belts over linen shifts came barefoot across the ground, chatting incomprehensibly among themselves.
‘Yes, Lachlan, I’d worked that much out for myself,’ I said, snippy with uncertainty, and sat down, thoughtlessly pulling at a crate to see what was inside. One of the women gave a sharp intake of breath, crossed herself and nudged the others. They all stared at the crate and I held my hands up so I wasn’t tempted to touch anything else that might be visible.
‘Rats,’ one of the women said, and the others all nodded and went back to their discussion as they began pulling up some green stalks that I was very afraid might be kale. Turnips were bad enough, I really didn’t want to have to eat kale as well.
Lachlan slumped down alongside me. ‘Shit,’ he said.
The fear needled at me again and I looked at him. His mouth was twisted and he was looking at his knees. ‘It’s something, anyway,’ I said.
‘Something, nothing, I don’t know. Do you know how stupid this all makes me feel? How utterly fucking useless?’
His voice held such a note of hopelessness that I patted his shoulder. It was so tense that I was surprised that my pat didn’t knock him over. ‘You’re no more useless than the rest of us, though,’ I said sympathetically because he really did look abjectwith his knees drawn up and his hands around the back of his neck, pulling his head down.
‘I’m a history lecturer. Getting stuck in the past is the sort of thing I ought to dream about, instead it’s like some kind of Groundhog Day, only with added mud. I should beuseful.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘Sorry, Pax. Like I said, we’re all scared and processing. I just keep thinking – I’ve done my time circling the drain. Things were on the up, I thought. New starts, new house, and then – yeah, well. I’m not in such great shape. And now—’ he threw his hands out to indicate walls and baskets and boxes ‘—this.’
I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant when we were interrupted by Mal.
‘There you are!’ He marched up to us, walking around the group of women and literally through one of them. She shivered and pulled her blanket closer around her, gathering it under her chin.
‘It looks like we can’t leave,’ Lachlan said baldly. ‘There’s some kind of barrier.’
I glanced at him quickly and he gave me a look that said, very clearly, ‘What I said just now was between us.’ It had an edge of desperation to it.Great. I’m not only trapped in the past, I’m trapped there with a depressed history lecturer. This gets better and better.
‘VeryTimestorms. So, Kay has been into the kitchens – they’re firing up the ovens and baking bread now like there’s no tomorrow, which there very well might not be, who can say?’
‘Where’s Davey?’ Lachlan asked.
‘He’s checking out the men. Typical. Hesayshe’s getting an in-depth look at eighteenth-century clothing types but if you believe that you’ll believe anything. I thought he was all about the Picts, now it turns out he’s history-curious.’ Mal curled his lip.
I looked around. Most of the men seemed to be wearing a variety of linen shirts and kilts wrapped around their waists, then draped over a shoulder and pinned into place. Everyone was barefoot, except for a couple of the men with horses, who were in breeches, boots and overcoats. All the material looked as if it wanted to be tartan when it grew up, but for now it had settled on being a wide selection of stripes and checks in a heavyweight wool. Nobody looked as though they could feature as a romantic lead in a TV series; they mostly looked tired and a bit hairy and smelled of hot fabric and horse sweat.
I was working on something reassuring to say, dredging through my pedagogic list of positive and affirmative statements and discarding all of them, when there was a kerfuffle over where the postern path opened into the castle grounds. Three men, better dressed than any here, rode through on horses that were blowing hard. ‘Make way for your lord!’ One of them shouted, pushing at a young man who was leading a cow into one of the stone enclosures. Behind these men rode a man on a horse of dappled grey, which stood out among all the bay and black animals that were thronging about. He sat tall, wearing a cocked hat, long boots that came over his knees and a coat that looked like silk.
We stared, open-mouthed.
‘Bet that’s the earl,’ Mal said smugly. ‘You can tell because he’s clean.’
Lachlan took a deep breath. ‘We ought to go over there.’ He did not, I noted, stand up.
I watched the earl ride in. Watching something happen was a good distraction from the impossibility of finding we couldn’t leave. The feel of that invisible, intangiblething, pushing us back, being impenetrable, made me shiver and my brain swerved around any contemplation of it.After all,it told me,ifthat’s the earl, then he’s a relative – and it can’t be often that you get to see a distant ancestor going about his daily business.
I was a little disappointed to see that he had rather small eyes, beady in his aristocratic face, and a thin mouth. Certainly not the handsome, heroic figure I’d pictured him as. I couldn’t see any family resemblance at all, or maybe I just didn’t want to.
All the other men bowed as he rode by, with four further men bringing up the rear in much less fancy gear. He swept off his horse and marched off into the castle, being bowed all the way in and then followed by the now-dismounted retinue.
