The air was also fresh, though the lack of diesel fumes highlighted how far we were from the twenty-first century. The only real pollution was from the smoke that billowed from every chimney and a general overarching lack of personal hygiene.
‘I’m sorry.’ Lachlan caught up with me as I stood in the shelter of the already ruined gatehouse that guarded the steep approach to the castle.
‘What have you got to be sorry about?’ I didn’t look at him. I was feeling slightly ashamed of myself and didn’t want to see any hint of amusement on his face. My teenage sullenness that meant I hadn’t paid attention to family history looked like being a much bigger problem than I had ever thought when I’d sat on Dad’s window seat and stared out into the soggy garden while my friends all bonded over rosettes and left me out.
Lenny, of course, had been lapping up the history. He’d go and draw pictures of battles and castles and Dad would put them up on his fridge. He wasn’t quite so interested in my stories about how Fionnula and Jericho were bound to win the jumping now I wasn’t there to compete, and that my pony Finch would be missing me. He tried, I know he did, but Lennylistenedand his drawings were really good. All I was was a bundle ofattitude who insisted on wearing my jodhpurs every day to show everyone else what I was missing.
If I’d known I was going to get taken three hundred years into the past and it would be important, thenIwould have listened harder too.
‘I’m not sure.’ Lachlan hitched himself up onto a low alcove. ‘What have you got?’ Then he laughed. ‘Nobody is blaming you, Pax,’ he said. ‘They’re all too busy blaming me. And they’re right, Ishouldhave told them what I suspected, I just didn’t really know how to put it without making it seem…’
‘Silly? Contrived? Self-important?’ I swivelled a bit now so that I could half see him. ‘I’m tired of it all now, Lachlan. I want to gohome. And the longer this goes on, the more afraid I am that it’s not going to happen.’
There was a silence into which the wind whistled and the gulls called off the cliffs. We could see them from here, dropping like blown papers into the sky and then rising again on an updraught to wheel and spin high above.
‘Do you think the gulls in our time are relations of these?’ he asked easily, as though the subject wasn’t being changed with a crowbar.
‘Probably. I don’t know. Do gulls migrate?’
‘Not these, I don’t think.’
More silence. ‘I’ll see if the earl knows anything,’ I said eventually, and Lachlan blew out a long breath.
‘That’s good. I thought for a moment you might refuse to talk to him again.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I kept my eyes on the gulls but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. His ruffles were blowing in the wind, a visible echo of the sea’s uneasy surface below.
‘I’m aware that we’re putting a lot onto you, Pax. Because you’re the only one that can be seen or heard.’
‘That’s you and losing control again though, isn’t it?’
He laughed now. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘David seems to know a bit about the history of Scotland.’ I wanted to get him away from the subject of how I felt about this total time fuck-up. I wanted to believe that the powers that be had at least some vague idea of what they were doing, otherwise where did that leave literally everything? ‘More recent than yours, anyway.’
I couldn’t bring up justwhyDavid knew more. All that reading. All those evenings. And the way we all shied away from talking about it, as though his sister was a secret that must not be mentioned. It made my shame at being a spoiled child who hadn’t listened even worse.
‘He does. Maybe the others being picked up wasn’t the total accident that I thought.’ Lachlan reached out and stroked my hair. ‘You’ve cobwebs all tangled.’
‘I don’t think Jeannie dusts. She sweeps a lot though, have you noticed? She’s always there with her broom.’
Two men went past behind us leading their horses out for exercise. The horses half reared as they sensed us, panicked ears flat and nostrils flared. The men quietened them with a puzzled look right through us. Cellar Dog sent them on their way with a happy bark.
‘And I do hate to say this, but I think we’re all counting on you,’ Lachlan went on as he brushed his fingers lightly over my hair. ‘To find something out from Earl George that might get us back.’
‘No pressure, then.’ I sounded tight, that remnant of teenage sulk still evident.
‘None at all.’ His hand fell away. ‘And if, when we get back, we never meet again, I hope you remember me, and this. And know that what I felt about you was real, even if it didn’t come back with us.’
I listened to the gulls scream, felt the wind on my face. All of it real. Just impossible. ‘That’s a weird sentence,’ I said eventually.
‘This entire experience is built of weird sentences.’
We weren’t looking at each other, carefully avoiding making eye contact. ‘I want to get back,’ I said eventually. ‘I wantusto get back. We can’t have any kind of relationship here, after all, can we?’
‘You mean because of the tendency of Mal to barge into intimate moments?’
That made me laugh. ‘No. I mean, what can we do? We can’t settle down, have a house and a family. I don’t even want tocontemplatechildbirth out here, and invisible babies? Doomed to a life of never being able to meet anyone else unless they’re a direct relation, and even then they can’t touch them?’
