Finding Fraser(49)
I glanced down at my watch again. It was nearing six o’clock and the sun was almost down. “I just need an hour,” I said. “I only want to be here until dark. I’m sure I won’t freeze in that time.”
I pulled up my hood and jammed my hands in my pockets.
“Well, at least take my torch, then. And mind ye don’t walk too near the far side. The drop’s steep and it’s straight down into a damn cold loch.” He thrust a flashlight into my hands.
“Thanks. I’ll wave it at you when you come back so you can see me.”
“Righ’, then. I’ll jes’ nip inta Mallaig for a dram an’ be back for ye by seven, latest,” Alec promised me. “Stay away from any wee ghosties!”
Mallaig was the last tiny, seaside village we had passed through, following the notes on Gerald’s map. It was a testament to my newly acquired faith in the Scots constitution that I didn’t even blink at the thought of the driver hitting the road after a ‘wee dram’. I just clutched my copy of OUTLANDER to my chest and nodded.
As soon as he pulled away, the truth of his assessment of the weather became clear. I thought fondly of the extra sweater I’d pulled out of my pack at Auntie Gwen’s place, to lighten my load on the walk to the hospital. Susan hadn’t stolen that one from me, as I’d been wearing it the day we went to Culloden.
I wished I was wearing it again.
As I watched the cab bump off up the road, the insanity of the situation settled in my brain. It was Gerald who was searching for ghosts, not me. I was looking for a flesh and blood Scotsman. And I’d just had a very nice one right beside me in the car. The chances of meeting another in this windswept corner of nowhere were below calculable.
“You need to focus, Sheridan,” I muttered to myself.
A thin line of yellow reflected off the top of the mountains to the West, but the last of the sunlight rode atop a bitter wind. Above me, a castle stood on a rise of land, perched like a tall box on the back of a turtle hunched by the sea.
Alec—who was appearing more fetching in my memory as every moment passed—had given me a brief history. The castle had been built in the fourteenth century, long before Jamie’s time. As castles go, it was pretty tiny. I’d seen bigger mansions on Hollywood reality television.
When it was built, the rise of land it was on had served to protect it from the enemies of its Laird and people. Alec assured me that four hundred years ago the tide did indeed sweep in and cover the road twice a day, cutting the castle off from the mainland.
“But these days, the roadway has been silted up. Now it jes’ serves as a route in for the Laird tae shoo his sheep along,” Alec had explained. In his handsome Scottish way.
I kicked myself mentally, and kept walking. The place was entirely deserted. Above the castle, the craggy peaks in the distance were all snow-topped, and the wind carried every frozen degree down with it. I tightened the cord on my hood and started across the causeway.
The tide was out, but Alec had declined to drop me along the pathway closer to the castle. “It’s protected passage, against motorized vehicles,” he’d said. “Not to mention private property. I’ll just leave ye here, and be back in a tick.”
From the direction I faced, at least, the wind was behind me, and it pushed me along toward the old building, now haloed in light from the setting sun. The castle was much tinier than any castle had a right to be, but perhaps this was as big as they could make them in the fourteenth century. It stood sentinel on its small tidal island, with the loch lapping the far shore. The line of the high rock wall was tessellated, and unbroken even by arrow slits. There were two triangular-shaped protrusions at the very top that may have once supported a roof, which probably would have been made of wood. But it was long gone, and all that remained were the bones of the place, cast in ancient, gray stone.
As I approached, the corona of the setting sun rested briefly on the curtain wall of the castle, and for a moment, I was entirely bathed in golden light. With the light … came clarity.
“Leoch,” I breathed. “Gerald, you devil—you thought this might be the Castle Leoch.” Dougal’s home. Home, in fact, to Jamie’s mother and her politically astute brothers, who together had ruled the entire MacKenzie clan.
Book in one hand and Alec’s torch in the other, I began to climb the slope toward the old monument.
Walking briskly, I circled the building in under five minutes, at least the parts of it that did not hover on a cliff above the water. Along that side, as Alec the winsome cabbie had noted, the curtain wall rose three stories above the cliffs, most of it constructed with carefully placed rocks. Very little, if any, mortar was in evidence, and I had a sudden pang of sympathetic vertigo for the young stonemasons who climbed those long-ago heights and had put this jigsaw puzzle of a wall together.