‘Does that mean she has to try the prostitute thing again?’
‘Mal, I am never again going to “try the prostitute thing”, all right?’ I snapped.
‘Maybe not, butthisone might be able to see or sense you.’ Lachlan gave me a long, serious look. ‘You are so certain you know who he is.’
‘It’s a feeling,’ I tried, waving my hands and failing to capture the essence of exactly what it was that I felt. ‘Odd. Like almost a recognition. Like… like meeting someone you used to know a long time ago.’ Plus, I didn’t add, the overwhelming relief that self-important Mr Smuggo, the ‘previously believed to be earl’, might not actually be a direct relation. ‘But I think we ought to give him a chance to rest first before I try to find out for definite. He looked exhausted.’
‘We’ll let him get a good night’s sleep, then.’ Lachlan sounded a little impatient.
‘He’s cute,’ Kaylinn said with a smile. ‘The earl, I mean. Cute. A bit like Chris Hemsworth and he’sgorgeous.’
I hadn’t seen anything particularly Hemsworthian about the earl, but he had had a certain presence, with that upright seat on his horse and those dark eyes.
Lachlan drew me to one side. ‘I think we need to have a discussion, you and I,’ he said quietly.
‘What do we need to talk about?’ I asked. I had a suspicion that he just wanted to get me alone again and it gave me a pleasant anticipatory tingle.
‘Your family.’
‘There’s no history of madness,’ I said, ‘if you’re worrying. All pretty sane, oh, except for Aunt Louise and she’s fine as long as nobody mentions cats.’
‘What?’
The other three had wandered off again now. I wanted to think they were giving Lachlan and I some space, but itwas more likely that they wanted to talk about us between themselves. They would have had to be blind not to see us doing the ‘obvious attraction’ fandango and I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that we weren’t the subject of gossip.
‘Madness. I thought, you know, if we were going to have anything between us, you wanted to make sure that I’m not going to suddenly reveal a streak of insanity?’
Lachlan looked at me for a few seconds, then burst out laughing. ‘No, Pax, I was not enquiring intothatkind of family history.’
‘Oh. What did you want to know, then?’ I hoped he hadn’t noticed the fact that embarrassment was making me hot from the neck up. I tried to focus elsewhere. Over at the row of dwellings, a man was up on the roof restacking the turves that insulated the little buildings. He straddled the ridge as though it were a wide horse and leaned at a vertiginous angle, patching holes. He was far less mortifying to look at than Lachlan, so I kept my eyes on him.
‘Just a few things you might be able to iron out for me.’ Lachlan took my elbow and led me away, so I was forced to stop watching the roofer and look at my feet so I didn’t trip over the muddy ruts as we walked over to the only quiet area available to us, outside the little stone kirk. Lachlan peered over the headland wall.
‘What do you know about your family history?’ he asked, keeping his eyes on the restless waves. ‘With particular reference to the eighteenth century, please.’
‘I neverlistened.’
‘Try.’
‘Does it matter? I mean, really?’ I looked over the edge as well now. The drop was sheer and broken only by occasional seabirds crouched on windswept ledges.
‘It might do. So please try to remember anything you can about what you were told. Although I must say that you do seem to have a wee bit of an odd attitude about the family stories.’
I stared at him. ‘I do not!’
‘Every time I ask you, you start about your brother.’
‘Well, Lenny…’ I trailed off. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I mumbled.
Lachlan tilted his head. ‘Try me,’ he said softly.
Nobody had ever asked before. Jack hadn’t cared, no one else had been close enough to tell, so the thoughts had rattled around in my head without words put around them, for all this time.
Even the thought of family history threw me back to the sour smell of indoor-drying, the feel of unfamiliar beds and the sullen feeling of being misunderstood. Dad had lived in an old flat in Stirling and I’d spent a lot of time staring out of the window wishing I were galloping Finch over the distant hills.
‘I thought Lenny was faking it,’ I said eventually, the words bursting out as though they had spent the last couple of decades fermenting. ‘I thought he was pretending to be interested in history just so that Dad would love him more than me.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I was really quite horrible to him back then. I used to say dreadful things. And Dad – he must have wondered why he bothered having me to stay when all I did was talk about horses.’ I stopped talking. There was still a hatful of shame hovering above my head, waiting to descend on me and make me feel that horrible sense of being left out all over again. ‘And now I feel stupid and guilty about being so awful to my big brother, who went on to take a degree in history because he reallywasinterested in what Dad was telling him.’
‘Ah,’ said Lachlan. ‘Sibling rivalry. Well, I know about that. I once cut the hair off all my sister’s Barbies because she had the biggest bedroom.’
