Finding Fraser Page 18

  The farmer paused again, and then barked so loudly that I jumped a full foot backwards. He slapped his knee furiously and I realized he was laughing.

  “Well, Missy, yer lookin’ at ‘er. I’m Morag McGuinty. Come inside—we’ll have a cuppa tea and discuss terms, shall we?”

  And that’s how I found myself living in a converted cow barn in Nairn, Scotland.

  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.”<
br />
  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.

  Feeble Finish…

  4:00 pm, May 2

  Nairn, Scotland

  After today, I believe it is time to bid adieu to Nairn. This is a country of strong weather and rare beauty. I may not have found my Fraser, but I have found something of my soul here, and it was worth finding. It is a feeble finish to my grand plan, but my next step must take me away from my beloved Highlands and back down to Edinburgh. I hope my luck will be better there than it was in Glasgow, as I need to make enough money to pay for my ticket home.

  - ES

  Comments: 5

  Gerald Abernathy, Fort William, Scotland:

  Hey girl, if you do head south this week and pass through Ft. W, come see me. I’m feeling a mite tetchy still, and have decided to accept medical advice and take up residence in a rest home here until I am well again. Love to see you if you are passing through…

  HiHoKitty, Sapporo, Japan:

  Sad to see journey come to end.

  がんばって

  (Read 3 more comments here…)

  Clearly the bloom was off the rose. I sat by the monitor for nearly an hour, but to no avail. My comments had fallen almost to zero, with my loyal HiHoKitty one of the last remaining. The rest—apart from Gerald—had returned to selling me erectile dysfunction medication.

  I signed off with a sigh, and waved to Katy behind her monitor at the front desk as I headed out the door. The next bus south was not until midnight, so I decided to wait and go the following morning.

  The evening was clear and cold, and as I pushed my bike down the walk, I thought about Gerald. A rest home—what the heck was that? The words conjured up images of stately Edwardian manors and starched aprons. It seemed odd that he hadn’t wanted to return to the warmer climes of his southern home. Presumably, though, he had to take the medical advice he was given. I felt badly for him, being so sick, so far from home. If there was any way for me to stop and visit him on my journey south, I vowed to try and do it.

  I shivered a little with the cold, and walked my bike across the street to the garage to ask about the cost of keeping it until the following day. In the back I could hear pounding and clanking, accompanied by someone singing.

  “Bar-bar-bar-bar-barbara-ann … ”

  I leaned across the grease-covered table that stood in for a desk and tried not to touch anything.

  “Come take my ha-ha-hand,” crooned the voice.

  “Hello?” I called, hoping to save myself another verse.

  Sure enough, the door to the back swung open and man I had met the day before came out, wiping his hands.

  Unfortunately, the singing continued from the back.

  I tried to ignore it, and pitching my voice over top, asked the garage owner if he would mind if I kept the bike another day. He waved a hand at me, told me I could keep the thing for a week and shooed me out into the street.

  “Ye look fair frozen, Miss,” he said, kindly. “They’ll give ye a spot of tea at the cafe to warm ye up before ye head back to Morag’s place.”

  I was feeling more like a cup of hot chocolate than tea, but his advice seemed sound, and I was starving, besides. Perhaps a Nairn scone would solve at least that problem, for the moment.

  By the time I had walked my bike across the street, the sky had a lowering look I didn’t like at all, and I decided to make it a quick drink and maybe a sandwich to take away with me. I stepped inside and the wind caught the door, so I needed both hands to pull it closed. As I turned back into the cafe, the warmth of the place enclosed me for a single, welcome moment.

  Then I got hit by what felt like a freight train, in the form of a young, blonde woman.

  Screaming.

  “Ay-ay-ay-ayiiiiiiiiiii,” she yelled, as we hit the ground. I say “we” loosely, since it was I who hit the ground first. She literally bounced off me onto her knees. I ended up flat on my back on the rain-soaked mat by the door, the wind entirely knock
ed out of me. But instead of helping me to my feet or apologizing—all the things one would expect to happen after being suddenly and unceremoniously bowled off one’s feet, instead she grabbed my arm and wailed again.

  I took a whistling gasp to try to suck air back into my lungs, and the woman continued to clutch my arm with what felt like a death grip.

  I sat up and managed an “Ooof,” not really having enough oxygen left to express the true nature of my shock and outrage. Her fingers squeezed like a vise on the flesh of my upper arm.

  It was then I realized she was pregnant.

  And not just pregnant.

  “Oiiiiiii … ,” she cried, neatly ripping the collar off my jacket with her death grip. “It’s COMING.”

  I looked around wildly. It was not yet five, but if this place had a late-afternoon rush, it hadn’t materialized. The cafe was deserted.

  By this time, we were both on our knees and I realized the mat might not be just rain-soaked after all. The woman had my jacket collar bunched up in one hand, and the other hand still clenched around my arm.

  “Uh—hello?” I called, now that the breath had been shocked back into my lungs. “Anyone? We need some help out here!”

  “Unnnngggghhhhh … ,” the woman groaned. “Don’t leave me. The bairn …”

  “I—I won’t leave,” I said, trying not to freak out. I wasn’t even an auntie yet, and I‘d had zero experience with birthin’ babies.

  The woman let go of my torn collar and clutched her midsection, groaning. I noticed with some shock that, though she was clearly well along in the pregnancy, she wore a waitress uniform. It was buttoned to the waist and she’d unbuttoned the lower half, covering the baby bump with a voluminous white apron.

  “Is there anyone in the kitchen who can help?” I asked her, but she was beyond answering for the moment. Her head was down, and she was panting urgently.