Helen gave it a last salvo. “Gerald’s been threatening to leave all day,” she said. “This young lady could use his seat.”
“Gerald’s sorted, ladies. Truthfully. Dinnae worry your heads about him. Now we must be movin’ along.”
Evelyn reluctantly let go of my arm and stepped onto the bus. “But what about the ghost we saw, Angus? What about that?”
The bus driver smiled at her and reached a hand to help Helen up the stairs. “That was very exciting,” he said, and rolled his eyes at me. “Ye mus’ tell me all about it again in th’ pub t’night, awright?”
I stepped back onto the path as he swung the door closed. “So sorry,” he mouthed, as the door hissed shut.
I just smiled and waved as the taillights bumped up the road.
An OUTLANDER tour.
I felt strangely let down. It never occurred to me that anyone else would go in search of Jamie and Claire. I’d never even had the sense to look it up online before I’d come, but now that the evidence was before my eyes, I couldn’t believe I’d not thought of it. The books are best sellers, and the televised version had brought Jamie and Claire to further millions — why wouldn’t people want to investigate the mysterious Highlands for themselves? For all I knew, hundreds of fans flock to the sites from the stories every year. Why not? After all, Harry Potter had theme parks all over the world.
And yet … I couldn’t help feel that a comparison between Helen and Evelyn and myself was—what? Not the same. Just not the same. I’d never watched the show, for one thing. I wanted to keep the pictures in my head of Jamie and Claire and the others intact. Helen and Evelyn wanted to see the land of the stories, yes, but were they actually looking for Jamie? Had they actually met him in the flesh—in the form of a young man named Hamish—in Edinburgh?
Definitely not the same.
I hurried toward the cairns in the rapidly gathering darkness.
There were three of them in total. The two outer cairns looked like piles of gray rock in the deepening twilight. I could see they were hollow in the center, though, like two giant, rocky doughnuts. The mist lightened a little as I approached the final cairn, and right away it was clearly different from the other two. Standing stones radiated around it like the numbers on a clock face, and there was a path running through to an opening in the center of the mound.
It was definitely too dark to look up details in my book, but I figured that fifteen more minutes at the site would still leave me with enough light in the sky to get back to the main road, if I stood up and really pedaled. In spite of Susan’s advice, my gut instinct had been right about this not being anything like how I pictured Craigh na Dun. There were standing stones, yes, but the ancient graves were clearly the main focus of this site. Mammoth circles of piled stones, the two outer cairns each with a clear passageway to the center.
The Heritage Scotland sign had mentioned the presence of cists, which apparently were an ancient version of small, square coffins. The standing stones encircled the middle gravesite in a kind of sunburst pattern.
I wished there was less rain and more time. And maybe my laptop. I really wanted to know what had led people to leave these cairns here so many millennia ago. Long before Jamie’s time, anyway.
But dusk was already falling, and I needed a restroom. Also, I was hoping for a half an hour’s battery life on my bike lamp, so the whys and wherefores of this ancient place would have to stay on my to-do list for the time being.
I felt my hair lift a little off my neck as a thin breeze began to blow, and above me the heavy cloud that had shrouded the day began to break. This gave the brief illusion of a lightening of the sky, highlighted by the sight of a single star, low to the horizon.
The evening star.
How many times had Claire looked up at the stars, longing for her Jamie?
I made up my mind, dropped my pack near the path and stepped into the trees to relieve myself. It might cost me a minute or so of extra darkness, but it would make for a much less painful ride back into Inverness.
Moments later, I shuffled back toward the path, grateful for a pocketful of old Kleenex. Looking around, I tried to orient myself with the single, twinkling star. It seemed to be almost due east of where I stood, and I knew the road I needed to take would head almost straight north before bearing west and south down to Inverness.
I stopped for a minute, just staring into the darkness between the stones. What was I doing here? I mean, I know my plan was to retrace Claire’s steps, but maybe I needed to rethink it a little. Much as I was enjoying every minute of this visit, I had made exactly zero progress toward my goal of meeting an actual, flesh-and-blood Scottish guy.