Finding Fraser(64)

I fell on it like I hadn’t eaten in a week.

Afterwards, after I’d gratefully returned the dishes to the kitchen, Mrs. McGuinty shooed me out into a strangely sunshine-y morning, refusing my offer to help wash up. I squinted up at the blue sky and thought about riding back into town to find an Internet cafe. I could even return and use the library’s computer. But I had the bicycle rented for a few more hours, and I had saved the map Mrs. Henderson had given me in Inverness. There was an old fort nearby, and that meant I had enough time to go exploring.





Fort George bristled belligerently on an outcropping into the Moray Firth in a place called Ardersier. It took me about an hour to ride over there from Mrs. McGuinty’s farm, through winds that must have blown straight in from an iceberg-laden North Sea.

When I’d read the bit of history on the fort that I found in my mangled Nairnshire pamphlet, and it seemed so near, it felt crazy not to go see it. But by the time I’d finally gotten there, I had reason to be happy for every calorie I’d downed at breakfast.

There were only a couple of cars in the parking lot as I approached, and I was so grateful at the prospect of getting out of the biting wind that I didn’t feel at all intimidated by the large, military drive leading up to the place. I pedaled across a sturdy drawbridge over a gorge of a moat that must once have held water, but these days was only filled with closely mown grass. A few specks of green showed here and there, but the grass was mostly frozen—just like me.

Inside the front gate, I sighed in relief to be out of the wind, and paid a little more of my rapidly dwindling cash reserves to tour the place.

The huge fort was about as different as possible from the battlefield at Culloden. With the enormous stone walls and carefully laid-out grounds, it felt almost like a modern military installation, which, in fact, it turned out to be. It was hard to wrap my head around the idea that men who had fought the Scots on the broken, barren fields of Culloden had returned to build this enormous place. Designed to quell Scots rebellions and the Jacobites in particular, the fort built by the King’s men and soldiers had never fallen, and continued to be home to a battalion of soldiers.

I wandered around, mostly sticking to the inside exhibits because of the chill wind. I peeked inside the brew house and the bakery to get a feel for how the soldiers of Jamie’s time ate and drank in such large numbers. After I tired of examining rows of iron pots and pans, I left the kitchens and stuck my head inside the little chapel.

It turned out to be not so little. The place was completely empty when I crept inside, but the bright, spring sunlight shone in through one of the most beautiful stained-glass windows I had ever seen.

I took a moment and slipped into one of the pews near the back. It was cold inside, and profoundly quiet. I leaned back on the bench, stared up at the glass and let my mind empty.

This fort hadn’t left me with the deep feelings I’d had in Culloden, but there was a certain peace to be found, bathed in the dancing light coming through the glass. Those windows had been there since the time Jamie had joined the rebellion.

“Am I interruptin’?” said a quiet voice in my ear.

I jumped a little, and instinctively slid a bit along the bench. “No—not at all. Just looking at the lovely stained glass.”

The young man who sat beside me was in uniform, but not period-style. He was dressed as a full-out modern soldier.

“Aye,” he said. “It is, at that. Until you’re assigned to clean it, and then all them wee panes suddenly seem more like work.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. Do you have to clean it often?”

“Nae, on’y once for me. Bu’ tha’ was enough, believe me.” He held out a hand. “And you are …?”

“Emma.”

“Brian Morrison,” he said. “Corporal.”

His hand was very warm. It’s possible I held on a moment longer than he expected, but covered by grinning at him. “You pronounce your first name Bree-an? I’ve never heard that.” (In a boy…, I thankfully managed to not say aloud.)

He smiled back at me and broadened his accent further. “Ach, weel, ah’m from Glasgae, ye ken, an’ we have our oon way of dooin’ t’ings.”

I’d never have been able to understand that accent two months earlier, and I felt a moment of pride that I’d mastered what practically amounted to a foreign language.

I also felt a little flushed, to tell you the truth, as I looked into those brown eyes.

The eyes of a warrior.

I gave him my sweetest smile, and then almost immediately blew it. “Glasgow? Ah—you don’t know any gnomes, do you? By the name of Rabbie?”