‘It’ll pass soon,’ Lenny said, ever the optimist.
‘Well, until it does, I’m going to find some shelter.’
‘I just want to go over here and have a look at that big wall.’ Lenny jogged off, ignoring the downpour that still teemed andsplattered off the stones and flat-grassed land as though trying to compete with the sea below. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Put your hood up, then!’ I called after him and he flipped up the hood to his sweatshirt with a cheery wave, almost tripped over a protruding boulder and righted himself. ‘And be careful! Don’t go near the edge.’ The habits of a hundred school-trip supervisions died hard.
The rain was finding its way down the neck of my down-filled jacket now. My hair was sticking to my head with the weight of water, dripping onto my shoulders and over my face, and the niggly wind that had accompanied the cloud was making me shiver. It might be July, but clearly no one had told Scotland.
I backed slowly into the main ruin, that of the tower house. This was the earliest part of the structure, built, so Lenny had told me as he’d dragged me around the site, around 1460. The walls still stood to a height of thirty feet, there were remnants of floor joists, and smears of plaster still adhered to protected corners. I looked around me as the rain lashed down inside the building, and sighed. Lenny was so sure we could rebuild and turn this into a bijoux hotel, and now we were both up to our eyeballs in debt, but all I could see was ruin, both of the crumbling-wall variety and financial.
Over in one corner, set in a recess, was the remains of a small flight of stairs that ran four steps high, originally to the upper storey, which was now no more than a few jutting stones and some holes. During our tour, Lenny had pointed these out, together with the few crumbling steps that had once gone down into the kitchens beneath, now just a cavernous space, inaccessible because of the disappearance of the rest of the staircase. There would once, Lenny had informed me gleefully, have been two ways down to the basement rooms – these stone stairs as a permanent fixture giving access from inside the building, and a wooden structure leading in from the yardoutside. Peasants, apparently, warranted only an unsafe and mostly rotting way down, whereas the castle occupants were entitled to a proper staircase. There was now nothing left of either. Most of the stone steps had probably, as with much of the rest of the stone, been carted away by local farmers to repair farm buildings. I stood for a second looking down into the dark, dank-smelling hole and wondered how desperate the farmers must be for rock in order to clamber all the way up here just for something that seemed to be a major crop in local fields otherwise.
At least in here the wind was mitigated by the thick walls, although it gusted and whistled through passages and corridors in its attempt to search me out. The rain, though, would not be diverted and was coming straight down, slicking the stones and pushing my wet hair further down inside my coat. I shivered again and decided to go and sit on what remained of the basement steps, where the floor of the entrance hall provided a kind of roof. It might keep me dry enough not to again want to murder Lenny when he came back, no doubt soaked to the skin but with a renewed enthusiasm for doing something expensive to what remained of the buildings.
Cautiously I inched my way into the gap that led to the staircase, keeping one hand on the three feet of stone for security. There was a worn groove here, a smooth patch where the otherwise gritty sandstone had been eroded, and I stopped for a second to look at it. It came just at the end of a run of small holes where, so Lenny had told me and he was the one with the history degree, a support had stood to help those going down to the kitchen below not to plummet down the staircase. This must have been where hands had rubbed, using the wall as a guide before grabbing for the rail or rope or whatever had been fixed by those holes. A connection with the long-gone past, I thought, imagining all those hands sliding along, desperate tograsp at the safety of something fixed. For a moment I could almost understand Lenny’s passion for history, those people of long-ago living lives so like and yet so unlike our own, and then I shook my wet head. History was, like my brother, impractical. Our family might be old, but so was everyone else’s – we could trace ours, that was all. It didn’t make us any better or any more worthy, and Lenny’s obsession with the past was just a symptom of his general desire not to have to live within the confusion of the twenty-first century.
History didn’t pay the bills. History didn’t tell you what to do when your on-off boyfriend decided to become permanently ‘off’ and when your summer holidays from your job attempting to teach the rudiments of chemistry to uninterested teenagers suddenly turned into a trip to a ruined Scottish castle. Lenny’s defence when challenged was always that we could learn from history. History was, I mused as I turned to sit down on the second step, resoundingly silent on the subject of what to do when your life seemed to be turning to shit.
As I bent my legs to sit, a loose stone rolled beneath my foot and unbalanced me. I lost my footing, grabbed for the edge of the step above and missed. History might not be up to much in the real-life stakes, but physics obviously knew what it was doing and gravity took over as I slid down the remaining two steps and then onto what was left of the rest of the staircase, which turned out to be what felt like a stone chute, propelling me downwards into the dark of the basement on my back and bottom amid a shower of loose stones and a torrent of very bad language.
2
I must have hit my head on the way down because after the initial confusion of the fall there was blackness. Darkness and silence and – nothing. Eventually though, by very fast blinking, I managed to get my eyes to focus on a faint glow coming from somewhere to my left. I couldn’t see light from above, where I’d fallen, but my neck and back were too stiff for me to turn and examine where I’d come from. My jeans felt dragged around the backside and where my jacket and sweatshirt had ridden up during my slide my skin was sore and basted with dust.
I gave myself one of those quick once-overs that everyone does after an accident. Teeth? All intact. Skull didn’t seem to be cracked, there was no dripping blood and I could see, even if all Icouldsee was faintly illuminated darkness. Arms and legs all worked and apart from a stinging along my back and an ache in one knee that was most definitely going to be a huge bruise – I was okay. Okay, but stuck in a cellar in the dark. The blackness behind me was so total that I couldn’t even see the staircase I had come down, so any attempt to climb back up was off the cards.
Cautiously I clambered to my feet and nothing fell off, cracked or buckled. The vague light ahead wavered at me in a narrow line and I could just about make out the outline of a door from beneath which the light was creeping. Not daylight, it was too yellow and insubstantial, so perhaps a lantern? What the hell? Perhaps there were squatters here in the ruins? Or the vanished archaeologists were hiding? Why on earth would a bunch of archaeologists want to hide in a castle basement? Presumably they’d all got a bit past the ‘dash out and shout “boo!”’ stage some while back. And even the most dedicated hide-and-seek champion was going to give up before the three-month mark.
I didn’t fancy trying to clamber up a sheer slope of loose rock without being able to see, so, keeping one hand on the gritty wall for support and limping rather extravagantly, I crept my way around the outline of the room towards the door. It must leadsomewhereand I was going to have to get myself out of here. Given Lenny’s general ability to become obsessed with trivia, it might be some time before he realised that I had vanished, and even longer before he tried to find me. I’d have to make my own way out. There must be a way, possibly on the other side of that door.
There was a smell of ancient burning, coming from the huge crumbling fireplace that my fingers found in the wall, where the smouldering remains of a fire threw out a meagre warmth. A big iron pot sat above the ashy detritus, with liquid in.Werethere people living down here? Had Lenny and I stumbled on a camp for down-and-outs? That would put the cherry on the icing, I thought as I carried on bumbling my way around to the door. We seemed to have bought not only a ruin, but a ruin from which we’d have to evict a bunch of people with nowhere else to go. Great. Thanks, Lenny. Just what I needed.
The door, when I reached it, was built of solid planks of wood and latched with an enormous metal catch that looked more suited to sealing a bank vault than holding a door shut. But the flickering light was squeezing itself between the hinges and oozing in a narrow sliver underneath like a promise of freedom and I had to get out before Lenny signed us up for more ruinous expense.
Carefully and trying to be as silent as I could in case there was a gang of international jewel thieves or murderers on the other side – because most of my reading erred towards the Agatha Christie andFamous Fiveend of the book spectrum – I put my thumb on the latch and pressed it down. The door groaned and opened inwards and I performed a kind of ‘please don’t see me’ slither around its open edge and into the room beyond.
Four people were in there, sitting around a table. In the middle of the table a candle guttered and flared as the door opened, making them all look up, except for one, who had his head in his hands.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked, although their ages, number and general state of dishevelled clothing were making me suspect that these were the missing archaeologists.
‘Oh, bloody hell, not another one!’ This was said by a thin, edgy-looking man whose hair was standing in short spikes around his head.
‘Don’t mind Mal,’ a very Scots accent came wrapped around words spoken by another man, who pushed aside his stool and wandered over. ‘He’s still salty about being here. Who are you, lass?’ I was about to answer when he confounded me completely by adding, ‘And when did you come from?’
‘Er,’ I said, it being all the vocabulary I had to hand.
‘Let the poor woman come in and sit down.’ This was a woman, younger than me and with an American accent. ‘She’sonly just arrived and it’s going to be a freaking trip.’ She pushed out a stool and smiled at me. ‘Come here. It’s okay, we don’t bite.’
The man with his head in his hands didn’t even look up. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned. ‘Is there no end to this? What are we going todo?’ Everyone ignored him.
‘Who… whoareyou?’ It was all I could come up with and it sounded a bit pathetic. Surelywhya group of people were sitting, seemingly miserably, around a candle in a basement was more worthy of an answer?
The man with the Scots accent, and who was unshaven to the point of reddish-blond stubble and dressed in a tatty waxed jacket, looked at me critically. ‘I think, perhaps, that you ought to sit down first. Kaylinn, is there any more coffee in your flask there?’
Kaylinn, evidently the American girl, shook her head. ‘We finished it way back.’
‘Bugger. Anyone got anything else that might help with shock?’
