I felt an odd wash of pleasure at seeing Jack’s name. I’d forgotten I’d given him the card. This was followed by a complete wave of embarrassment. The nice journalist or writer or whatever he was who’d rescued me from the mob scene in Philly now knew all about my trip to chase down a fictional character. From his home country, no less.
To make the embarrassment go away, I re-read Sophia’s comment five or six times before shutting the lid of my laptop. Nothing like the love and support one gets from family. And, yeah—that was nothing like it. After my trembling-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss love note to her, too!
Standing up, I peered out the window of the tiny room in the Edinburgh bed and breakfast house. It was dark as a cell in Wentworth prison outside, so I was unable to even discern what the weather was like, though I did quickly learn that standing anywhere near the window guaranteed a swirl of icy-cold air around the ankles.
I drew the curtains across the window, counting on the heavy Scots wool to cut the worst of the cold. The heater was cozy, the kettle was efficient, and the lady of the house had even left me a little plaid packet of shortbread. I wasn’t really sure of the era of manufacture of said cookies—or biscuits, as they were called on the package. They might have been made ten years before, for all I knew. The wrapper looked suspiciously old-fashioned.
I ate them anyway. The way I saw it, if they were old, maybe they were time-travel cookies. That had to help on this trip, didn’t it?
The truth was that I had just spent the only night I would be able to afford in such luxurious circumstances, low-season discount notwithstanding. I had survived the flight and my first night in this gloriously brisk and brilliant country, and it was time to put my plan into action.
Yes. THE plan.
The one where I was to journey to Scotland, blink my eyes fetchingly and immediately meet a rugged, red-heided Scotsman who would endure any amount of suffering to remain stalwart at my side.
Reality wrapped its cold fingers around my heart. The actual hard details of how I would find this man, and what I would do next remained decidedly unclear in my brain. I sighed, and leaned back against the wall, my sister’s words echoing in my ears in the pre-dawn light. And hers was not the only voice I heard in the gray of that Edinburgh morning.
Sophia had told me I was an idiot on a wild goose chase. Sharan Stone had been strictly concerned with faux-Jamie genitalia. And Genesie had been right, at least about Jamie. He was fictional. I knew that. I did.
But I also knew that right up the street was an enormous castle looming over the city. And wild goose chase or not, I could hear it calling my name. I pushed all my doubts aside, gulped the last of my bitter tea, and headed out to find my fate.
Firth of Forth…
4:15 pm, February 26
Edinburgh, Scotland
Twelve hours, ten flights of stone steps, eight misheard conversations, six cups of coffee, four shortbread biscuits and two sore feet later, my first full day on the shores of the Firth of Forth is winding to a close. I mean, it is only just after five in the afternoon, but I am seriously toasted. Not sleeping on the plane didn’t help. But know what?
I actually have a plan. A sleep-deprived, caffeine-overloaded, adrenaline-fueled sort of plan, but a plan, nonetheless.
Remember the map on the inside of my copy of OUTLANDER? Well, that day——the day of an event I try very hard not to recall——in Philadelphia, while the lineup to have our books signed snaked back and forth for more than three hours, I tried to trace out Claire’s route, with a purple Sharpie I borrowed from the lady behind me in line.
Apparently she used it to write poetry.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen an implement that would bleed through to the dedication page. But no matter. Because the map is now indelibly written on my soul. Or, at least the soles of my shoes, since I think I’ll be walking a whole lot more than Claire ever did. In the end, the map-making proved a little difficult, as I had trouble locating many of the places Claire visited, but I did my best.
So, though I do not have a stalwart horse, complete with kilted horseman to hand, nor even the modern equivalent of car and driver, and though the ground is covered in ice and not likely to offer the joy of a summertime stroll through balmy air, and even though Claire’s route as mapped from the story is strangely convoluted and several of the locations are entirely fictional, none of these things will stay me from the swift completion of my appointed rounds.
Or round, technically.
Because that’s what the plan is. A circumlocution of this lovely country in which I find myself, with significant stopping points as visited by one Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser a mere 250 fictional years ago. At each of these stops, I shall leave no stone unturned in my search for a Jamie-like man of my dreams.