‘It’s more that these jeans take ages to dry out if they get wet, so I don’t want to get splashed,’ I said, keeping up the mood because I didn’t want to let him slide back into that awful resignation. It dawned on me that I really did like Lachlan. Not in a ‘forced together so we have to get on’ way, and not in a ‘not had sex for a while so any decent-looking man will do’ way either. But him letting me see his vulnerability was very attractive. Jack had been invulnerable. Or, at least, he’d cruised through life without ever having a problem that couldn’t be got over by throwing money at it, or jettisoning his girlfriend. He’d been superficial and I was realising that I’d never really known him. Here, with Lachlan laying his fears and worries bare – it all felt morereal.
‘A disappointing reaction.’
‘I’m going out to… err… look for the others.’ I began backing away as Lachlan peeled the jumper off again.
‘Thank you.’
He was undoing his trousers and I fled out of the room and up the staircase. We had confided in each other and I’d cried all over him, but that didn’t mean I was ready for full-frontal nudity.
It was only when I got outside that I realised he probably wasn’t going to takeallof his clothes off and that I had overreacted somewhat. But now it was too late and I couldn’t go back and apologise. Besides,he might well have decided to go for broke since I wasn’t there, and I could feel my cheeks getting hot at the idea of bursting in, and him completely naked. There was a teeny frisson of imagination around the edges of that thought which made me raise my eyebrows at myself and rush to find a distraction.
There wasn’t that much distraction to be had. I tried Jeannie first. She was in her cottage standing over the central hearth and stirring something that smelled medicinal. The door stood open to let what little light these early winter days held illuminate the earthen floor and the fire flickered in the draught. Jeannie wrapped her hands in cloth and picked up one of the big stones that built the hearth, dropping it with a splash and sizzle into the liquid. I wanted to go over and look into the pot, but the little black dog was lying in the doorway and it growled at me without raising its head from its paws, so I left them alone and wandered off.
Two men were talking over the back of one of the small cows. I watched them for a while, half contrasting their skinny frames and bumps of muscle to Lachlan’s body. Then I realised what I was doing and snatched my mind back. Lachlan was a well-fed twenty-first-century man with access to a gym. These menlooked underfed and their bodies were corded with muscles built despite desperately poor nutrition and no knowledge of essential vitamins. When one man rucked up his kilt to reveal a half-healed gash that ran from his knee to his groin, I realised they were comparing scars and turned away, ashamed of myself.
This was not the pretty version of the eighteenth century that we’d been fed at school, or the battle-hardened bravery that Dad held to so firmly. This was real people, doing real things and just trying not to die. I wished more books showed us that reality, rather than the romance-washed and sanitised cosmetic ‘twenty-first-century people playing in the mud’ kind.
I watched Fergus hug his son and wondered at the frailty of life here. Men and women loved, children were loved, but it could all be snatched away in the beat of a heart or the cut of a knife. It made me want to cry for them all.
It also made me even more determined to get home.
12
I spent a couple of days avoiding Lachlan again. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the level of communication and trust we seemed to have, and, honestly, it rather scared me. Jack and I had had a pleasant relationship, no real depth but I had thought that was what I wanted. Now – I was being faced with something a lot darker. Real frailties, real emotions. And I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted either.
Besides, as a teacher, I wasn’t sure I hadtimefor any of that. It was hard enough to get through the day with my own emotional state intact. So, I thought, it was best to keep Lachlan at a distance. I hoped, desperately and with a kind of ear-glowing embarrassment, that he hadn’t noticed my previous predilection for his company, and I wished that I’d thrown his filthy shirt at him and told him to wash it himself. He, on the other hand, carried on being his usual affable self to all of us and not showing any more tendencies to try to talk to me in the dark of the night.
I managed to convince myself that it was ridiculous for me to get attached. After all, what had I been hoping? That we’d travel back to our own time and seamlessly begin a relationship, whenall we had as a basis was having been stuck in the past together?Get real, Pax,I told myself and then had to laugh because if anything smacked of unreality it was the situation we were in. I should stop noticing those steady grey eyes and that well-honed body under the dreadful sweater. It was stress, that was all. The stress of being here. Like Stockholm Syndrome only – more Scottish.
All the self-pep talks worked, and the longer I managed to avoid being alone with Lachlan, the easier it became to forget our previous closeness. Well, maybe notforget, but I could pretend it hadn’t happened and that the whole thing had been a crisis bonding situation. I was over that now. I was fine. Yes.
Life in the castle carried on, although the level of ‘bustle’ had increased somewhat in the last day or so. The earl had eventually stirred himself sufficiently to come down and supervise the men, who were seemingly either training for a battle or working off a lot of inter-clan ferocity as there was a degree of hand-to-hand fighting going on. Some of the men had cleared an area past the animal enclosures and were, bare-chested, practising with items from the ‘museum of fallen armaments’ that we’d seen in the hall. Axes were hefted and swung; long pikes were tested for balance and jabbed into the air.
Whenever I saw them at it, I thought about those men I’d seen and that scar and shuddered. This was real. People coulddie.
The earl watched, often while deeply in discussion with others. He and a few men would gather on the castle steps, watching the action below, and I found myself staring at him, trying to see any ancestral resemblances. Did his hairline look a bit like Dad’s, receding slightly at the temples? Was the way he stood familiar? Or was I straining to see what wasn’t there, because I needed to believe that the earl was the reason we were here?
I had to hold on to that belief.We were here for a reason, for something to be accomplished. Then it would all be over.
Much of the singing and casual chat had stopped, in favour of a more determined and grim air. The chilling of the weather lent itself to the downturn too, suddenly everything had the edge of cold to it and an iron hardness – the men, their concentration and the wind all joined to make little ripples of foreboding travel down my spine whenever I went outside.
The sea too was beginning to swirl with oncoming winter. It was audible even up here as a booming backdrop to the mooing and neighing and shouting, and on this particular day I was sitting out on the wall of the animal enclosure ignoring goaty stares, watching Cellar Dog lying in the sun and listening to the waves. Overhead a ragged V of geese flew into the wind, honking and whistling, a timeless arrow of avian life heading to warmer climes while the seabirds hurled themselves against the breeze. It was, I thought, both perpetual and momentary. The geese would be gone, but they would fly the same path next year, in the same pattern. And the next year and so on until their descendants reached the twenty-first century. I wondered if I would be there to see them.
As I sat perched on the drystone wall a rider rode in. His horse galloped up through the postern gate and I didn’t know how he’d managed to get up the path at such speed without dropping into the waters below.
The galloping rider and his sweating, wide-eyed horse distracted me from my not-very-deep musings. He clearly distracted lots of other people too, because quite a crowd gathered around him as he threw himself to the ground and stood, propped up by shoulders and clearly exhausted.
‘He’s on his way,’ I heard him say before he was helped away into the castle and Fergus came to lead the horse gently off into the stables.
‘Someone’s coming,’ I announced to the other four, who were sitting eating some kind of stew of David’s invention down in the cellar. ‘An outrider just arrived.’
‘Oh?’ Mal raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that we’re going to be invaded?’
‘Who by?’ Kaylinn looked interested.
‘The French? Aren’t we always fighting the French?’
‘The French support Scotland, don’t they?’ David put his spoon down. ‘All that “Auld Alliance” stuff?’
