‘Well, we can tell him his future,’ Lachlan said. ‘If he wants to know. Well, nothing specific, but you know that your family loses the castle.’
‘We shouldn’t,’ I said and George stopped rubbing to peer at me between his fingers.
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he said. ‘If God sends me demons, he should at least drop some hints about why they’re here.’
‘The demons would also like a heads-up,’ Mal said, snippily. ‘Because it sounds like these two have got plans.’
‘We really don’t know,’ I began, answering them both, but Lachlan came over and bundled Mal out, flipping up the tapestry to exit, which made George take another deep breath.
‘Have they gone?’
‘Yes. I suspect they’re arguing ferociously outside now.’
‘Do demons argue? I thought you blasted with your demonic powers?’
‘We’re not that kind of demon,’ I said weakly. ‘I’m going to have to go now and sort them out.’ Then I remembered I was supposed to be other-worldly. ‘But I shall return!’ I added, trying to fill my words with supernatural import.
‘But… you have told me nothing of your mission!’ George sounded disappointed. I, in the meantime, was acutely aware of raised voices coming from beyond the room.
‘I’m… we’re not going anywhere. I’ll speak to you again soon.’ I was getting worried by the volume of the shouting. It seemed to be coming mostly from Mal, with intercessions at a more sensible tone from Lachlan.
‘Will you come to me tonight?’ he asked.
Kaylinn, who was still hovering about outside, gave a muffled giggle.
‘I shall be in the kirk later, praying for our safety and that of our King. I’ll be alone. It might be a good time for us to talk.’ He hesitated. ‘Would you be willing?’
Willing probably wasn’t the right word, but I had to do something. The others were relying on me to make this work. The responsibility was mine and it was a very lonely feeling.
‘Yes,’ I said, sounding impressively sure of myself.
‘Then let us speak later.’ I got a small smile now. ‘And if you can enter the kirk then I shall know you are no demon.’
He bent his head back to his papers with an impressively insouciant wave of dismissal, but before I turned to leave I noticed that his hands were shaking.
14
At the bottom of the stairs in the hall, while unconcerned men sat cleaning weapons, eating or talking, Mal and Lachlan were engaged in a discussion so furious that I was worried that even the unpsychic might hear them.
‘You think you know why we’re here!’ Mal was yelling, despite David’s quite frantic tugging at his arm. He was red-faced and leaning towards Lachlan as though he wanted to punch him. ‘You’ve been letting us think that we’re here by some fluke, and now we find out that you think you know why it happened!’
Kaylinn revolved around the group of men like a small worried satellite. The whole image of a fight about to break out was shattered every now and then by someone walking right through the opponents, who were angry enough not to care.
‘No,’ Lachlan said, his voice remarkably quiet and steady for someone confronted by a ferociously angry Mal. ‘Nobodyknowsanything.’
I walked closer. ‘It’s true, Mal,’ I said. ‘We think it might be something to do with my family, but we don’t know what. There’s nothing to tell you, honestly.’
‘You didn’t even tell us that much though.’ Mal stepped back, to David’s obvious relief. ‘And you should have done.’
‘Aye, maybe we should.’ Lachlan also looked relieved. For all his steadiness, Mal overtopped him by a good ten centimetres and had the wiry frame that suggested he was stronger than he appeared. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We’ve been trying to work it out,’ I put in quickly, keen to capitalise on the step down from DEFCON One. ‘We think I was the target of whatever time scoop dragged us all here, and maybe…’ I saw Lachlan’s widened eyes and decided not to admit that we thought the archaeologists had got caught by accident in Lachlan’s removal. ‘Maybe you’re all here because you know about history,’ I finished, sounding slightly breathless.
Mal was still a little pink around the cheekbones and was breathing deeply, but he’d calmed down enough to say, ‘Right. So, something to do with the history of this place?’ without sounding as though he wanted to brawl on the ground with Lachlan.
‘Possibly, possibly,’ Lachlan’s shoulders relaxed, I saw the ruffles on his linen drop. ‘But we can’t be sure. If, as it seems, the earl is an ancestor of Pax, it could be significant, and the fact that he can see and hear her must mean something. Pax only remembers that her family lost the castle and maybe that’s why we’re here now.’
‘The earl mentioned a battle,’ David said. ‘We’re in the early seventeen hundreds. Would he be fighting for or against the Jacobites, do you reckon? James staged an uprising about now, got driven back to France – it was quite a big thing.’
