Finding Fraser (25 page)

Once Morag McGuinty had peeled off
several layers of rain gear, she turned out to be not only more female than her
first impression left me with, but also younger. She’d taken over the farm when
her father had died and had run it since, all on her own.

“I’ll be fifty next year. Never married,”
she chuckled, over a cup of steaming tea and a plate piled high with raisin
scones.
 
“Though not for want of
suitors, I promise ye.” With the twinkle in her eye, and that strong back, I
had little doubt she was telling the truth.

After the hot tea and scones, she threw on
her coat again and took me out the back of the farmhouse to a long outbuilding.
It was gray stone with a clay roof, neat and trim.

“Built by mah great-great granda,” Morag
said, as she swung open the large wooden door. “Been kept up, o’ course. His
ghost wouldnae allow me otherwise.”

Inside the barn, the walls had been
whitewashed and a long trough ran the length of the room. We walked past
several stalls, each smelling redolently of cow and hay. Morag stopped to peer
over the top of one gate. Inside, a hornless version of the bull Morag had
battled earlier lay in quiet composure, her back tucked against the wall of the
stall. Alongside her, in a mound of fresh hay, nestled a tiny, fuzzy version of
his mother, his coat a slightly paler shade of red.

“This ’un arrived las’ night,” she said, her
voice glowing with pride. “He’ll be a braw ‘un, jes’ like his father.”

She gave a final fond glance to the calf and
his mother and then stumped up to a door at the far end of the barn. “Here we
are,” she said. “See what y’ think.”

The tiny apartment set up in her cow barn
was perfect. The room was only about fifteen feet square, but it had space for
the bed tucked under a dormer window and a tiny kitchen counter with a hotplate
and even a microwave. Fitted in beside the sink was a half-sized fridge. One
door led into the barn, and the other into a compact bathroom.

“I can’t believe you can offer this for ten
pounds,” I stammered, feeling guilty for even asking. “Maybe the woman at the library
gave me the wrong rate?”

“Nae, nae,” Morag scoffed. “The hand sleeps
here in t’ summertime, bu’ I havenae hired anyone for the job, yet. Yer safe
here for a month, at leas’.”

“Oh, I just need it for the night,” I
assured her. “I have to head south to Edinburgh and find work in the next day
or two.”

When she closed the door and stamped off
back to the house, though, I took a moment to stretch out on the bed and feel
my back crackling with the comfort of it. This bike ride had been so much more
satisfactory than the last, and it was nice to feel that no matter what
happened, it was unlikely I’d have my things stolen by my roommates.

The cattle mooed their agreement through the
wall.

7:30 am, May 2

Nairn, Scotland

Notes to self:

Remember to email Gerald. I feel
like he’s got something going on with that nurse...y’all.

I woke from a deep, dreamless sleep to the
sound of banging in the barn.

Apart from the distinct smell of animal in
the vicinity, I lay there and felt completely, strangely at home. I’d slept as
well as I could remember. The rental bike wasn’t due back until the end of the
day. And for all its remarkable mod-cons, Morag’s barn did not have a computer,
so I couldn’t even go online to be yelled at or frozen out by my sister.

It was the most deliciously freeing feeling.

I rolled over and wrote the reminder to
myself regarding Gerald and then headed for the bathroom. While I was busy
inside, there was a sharp knock at my door. When I emerged, I took two further
steps through the wee flat and stuck my head out into the barn. There was no
sign of Mrs. McGuinty, but on the low table beside my door was a tray groaning
with eggs and ham and toast and sausages and marmalade.

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?”

He looked puzzled, and dropped the broad
accent. “Did you say ‘gnome’…?”

Dammit. How could I bring up the Rabbie
fiasco at a time like this?

I shook my head. “No—no. Never mind.
It was just a very strange person I met from Glasgow. He’s a— a—little
person.”

“Glasgow has more n’ half a million souls
who call it home, aye,” he said, thoughtfully. “I couldnae possibly know all of
’em . Cept you’d think I’d remember a gnome …”

“It’s okay,” I said, hastily. “So, you work
here?”

“Stationed here, aye. About a year now.”

“So … on active duty? What do you do around
here, then?”

He crinkled his eyes at me and Scot-ified
himself again. “Ach, if I tol’ yeh, American ally or no, I’d have tae shoot ye,
lass.”

I think I may have looked a little too eager
at the prospect. Anyway, my expression made him laugh. “Mostly training,
actually,” he said. “Wha’ about you? A bi’ early in the season to be touring
about, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s sort of a long story.”

He got to his feet. “Righ’. Well, I’m off.”

I jumped up, too. “Off? I—I was hoping
you’d be able to—ah—show me around a bit.”

“Sorry, Miss. I’ve duty down in the mess at
fourteen hundred. If ye stop at the front desk, though, we have some seniors
who volunteer their time.”

“Sure—no problem. Thanks so much,” I
babbled.

He turned away, proving the view from the
back was just as impressive as from the front, and then stopped suddenly. “I
should give you this, if you want it,” he said, reaching into his back pocket.

“Sure, oh for sure,” I said, still babbling.
I really needed to practice that talking to nice men thing.

Corporal Morrison pulled a slightly shopworn
pamphlet out of his pocket and handed it to me. The ring on his left hand
glinted briefly in a ray of light coming from the windows. “We’re supposed to
give ’em to the tourists—glad I remembered!”

I thanked him and he left. The light that
had shone so pointedly on his wedding band faded behind a cloud, which made the
pamphlet hard to read, but I could see it held a brief history of the fort. I
tucked it into my pack for future perusal and stood up.

The chat with Corporal Married had been
lovely, at least until I saw the ring. The whole country was lovely. But as the
cold winter light shone through the stained glass, all I could feel was doubt.

What was I doing there? I was like—an
American trout flapping around in a Scottish pond. As soon as I opened my
mouth, my accent told my whole story to every person I met.

Foreigner,
it said.
Visitor. Tourist.

I looked around at the cold, stone walls and
shivered. If Jamie had been here, he would have been shackled and bound,
probably in some part of the fort that the public never got to see.

And who was I kidding, anyway? Jamie had
never been here. Jamie had never been anywhere, except in the imagination of a
vivid storyteller and the pages of her books. Could such a man even exist in
the twenty-first century? Maybe I was on the world’s wildest Scots Gander
chase, following in the footsteps of an ideal man who had never really existed.

Maybe it was time to go home.