Home, whatever that meant to each of us, might be within reach but we could not,dared not,imagine we might get back, because any disappointment might well finish us altogether.
Cellar Dog whined at my feet and looked up at roughly where my face was. I wondered if he was starting to be able to see me and hoped he couldn’t. I didn’t need to worry about becoming more real here and all that might imply. Besides, Cellar Dog was a bit mad already; clearly not one of the pack of hounds that roamed the castle.
Great. Trapped in the past with three archaeologists, a historian whose knowledge of history didn’t cover where we were now and a mad dog. Even Netflix wouldn’t make a series out of that.
‘Come on,’ Lachlan said.
‘Where?’ My musings had reached my voice, which sounded dull and a bit hopeless.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Over here?’ He took my elbow and guided me out of the gatehouse and a few metres down the wide, muddy track that, in our time, had been stepped and paved and signposted, ‘Access: No disabled access available. Please only visit Dunaire Castle if you can climb stairs – views of the castle are available from the fields opposite.’
It was still vertiginous, walkable just, but it was a good job we had the postern track and gate for carts and horses.
Lachlan and I ventured down the track. Two of the soldiers stood halfway down, before the incline meant walking sideways and watching where you put your feet. They were clearly supposedly on duty but in reality sitting on the rising edge of the path and playing a game involving dice. We couldn’t reach them. Before we got ten metres away from the gatehouse the air thickened in the same way as it had on the postern path. Two more steps and it was as immovable as granite, like walking into a wind tunnel with the wind set to ‘maximum speed’, except that it wasn’t moving, just ‘there’.
Lachlan prodded the barrier. ‘Checking. Looks like we’re not meant to leave the castle at all.’
‘So, whatever we have to do, it’s definitely here.’ I knew that I ought to feel encouraged by this, as though we were groping forward inch by inch towards a solution. In fact, I really felt slightly sick. That solution was still absolutely nowhere to be found.
‘What do you think?’ He spun around and looked me in the face.
There were so many things I was thinking right now that I needed him to be more specific. ‘What do I think about what?’
Lachlan inclined his head towards the on-duty soldiers, gaming away. ‘These two.’
‘Well, they’re on guard, aren’t they?’ I watched a double six come up and one soldier clap the other on the back and hand over some coins.
‘Two of them? What are they guarding against, a vicious squirrel uprising?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ I sounded irritable, even though Lachlan’s tone had been more teasing than accusatory. ‘My knowledge of the running of a castle is limited to some cut-and-stick exercises in primary school and a visit to Harlech on holiday with my mum!’
Lachlan looked out. This entry to the castle came directly from the headland, so the view was farmland rather than the sea. A stretch of woodland dominated the view, small stunted trees, which were obviously whipped a little too vigorously by salt winds, broken by small patches of cleared land. ‘I think they’re watching for a signal,’ he said.
‘They’re not watching very efficiently, then.’ I still sounded sullen. ‘Not exactly the prime military force I would expect George to be commanding.’ I tried to imagine being an eighteenth-century soldier stuck in a castle waiting for a signal to ride to battle. It made me shiver. ‘Maybe they don’t want to see a signal. Maybe everyone here isn’t quite as keen to fight for James as George is?’
Lachlan scratched his chin. His stubble was a most definite beard now, pale and bordering on the ginger. It suited him. With his grey eyes and blond hair, he looked as though he should have had one foot up on a rock and be declaiming something about Scotland the Free. ‘That could be it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Why would Time bring us somewhere if change was impossible?’
‘Oh, come on, this whole bloody thing is impossible!’ I sounded more peevish now. ‘I’m still waiting to wake up and find all this has been a dream inspired by a documentary coming through the walls from next door and that I’ve got my head in a tikka masala and only two hours to finish prepping a lesson on the Bessemer process.’
The wind caught the back of my head. My practical short haircut was beginning to grow out – I generally needed a trim every six weeks and I’d been close to that already when Lenny had spontaneously invited me up here. I tried to smooth it back down with my hands.
‘It’s okay, Pax,’ Lachlan said gently. ‘We’re all scared.’
‘I know! I just?—’
‘Look. Sit down. Don’t think about it. Tell me about your family.’ He patted the steeply rising side of the pathway, where Cellar Dog was currently draped over a rock in a way that looked incredibly uncomfortable.
‘I’ve already told you, I don’t remember much.’ I hesitated for a moment and then sat down. What else did I have to do with my day anyway?
‘No, not that. I meant recently. Now.’ Lachlan’s eyes could be very piercing, I had discovered. It was a gaze that could drag answers out of a stone. ‘You, your brother. Your parents got married twice, I think you said?’
I stared at him for a moment, then at the dog and then finally out at the agrarian landscape. ‘Nope, sorry,’ I said after the wind had threatened to take the skin off my eyeballs. ‘I am failing to see whatanythingin my upbringing could do with us having to be here.’
‘Absolutely nothing.’ Lachlan stared alongside me, his eyes scanning the headland although I didn’t know what for. There was no sign of life apart from a tracery of smoke rising in the distance. Then he turned abruptly. ‘This is me, wanting to get to know you. This is our “over the coffee” chat; our “meeting for dinner” talk. The sort of conversation we’d be having if we’d met properly.’
‘Oh.’ My cheeks grew hot with the embarrassment. I’d become so focused on the here and now that I’d lost sight of anything else. ‘Right. Sorry.’
‘No need. So, you grew up with divorced parents and Pony Club, that’s about all I know.’
