The Highlander's Stronghold (Searching for a Highlander Book 1)

by Bess McBride

  A portable table had been set up under which the students and faculty had set their bags. Given the hungry seagulls, no one left any food lying about. Dylan grabbed his black backpack, and I followed him to a spot of grass overlooking the sea. The exact spot where I had once sat.

  I lowered myself to the ground and accepted a cup of hot tea while Dylan drank directly from his thermos. He unwrapped several sandwiches and handed me one.

  “They eat a lot of oatcakes,” I said without direction.

  “I’m not surprised,” Dylan said. “Most Scots do. Were they tasty?”

  “Very.” My throat tightened, and I struggled to swallow the piece of sandwich I had bit into. I set the food down on my lap and drank my tea, hoping it would relax my throat and stem a newly forming tide of tears.

  “So, you are back on the island. Can you continue your story?”

  I nodded. If I couldn’t be with John, I wanted to talk about him. I turned and looked over my shoulder at the mound that once represented the tall keep.

  “The keep was more than just a lookout tower. You were right. John kept his rooms there.”

  “John Morrison, the laird,” Dylan clarified. “What year did you travel to?”

  “Fifteen ninety.”

  Dylan’s sharp intake of breath was somehow satisfying.

  “Yes, over four hundred years into the past,” I said. I told Dylan about meeting John, his sister, Mary, and the Macleod children, her relationship with the son of the Macleod chieftain, Angus. At the mention of Angus’s name, I shivered.

  “Are you all right? What happened, Ann?”

  I told him about the attacks, Mary’s kidnapping, my own kidnapping, and rescue by John.

  “John’s wounds had reopened, and he was unconscious when we got back. When they lifted him from the boat, I tried to help. In doing so, I wrapped my arm around his back, and I accidentally grabbed the hilt of the dagger. When I awakened, I was on the beach, and I heard someone calling out to me.”

  My heart rolled over in a dull thud, as if it would never beat vibrantly again.

  Dylan was silent for a moment, and that was okay. What was there to say? I didn’t want to answer any questions at that moment. I just wanted to hang on to the memories of John, the sensation of being where he probably was, albeit over four hundred years apart.

  “My aunt used to do genealogy,” Dylan said in a seemingly random comment. He closed his hand over mine. “She told me that we were directly descended from John Morrison.”

  I drew in a sharp breath and turned to look at him, seeing again his resemblance to John.

  “Oh, I thought you looked like him! Then I thought that was just wishful thinking. So he lived? He had children?”

  Dylan nodded.

  “If you are speaking about John Morrison, late fifteen hundreds, then yes, that’s the same one. We believe he had five children—all lived to adulthood, which was unusually rare for that time.”

  “Ohhhh,” I whispered. I imagined John married, a father of five children.

  I looked at Dylan, suddenly a living, breathing link to John, and I threw myself into his arms and hugged him with all my might. Dylan grunted as he caught me, but he responded to my embrace, patting me on the back.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said in a muffle, buried as I was in his neck. “I’m still not making a pass at you. I just want to hug you.”

  “I understand, lass.”

  At that moment, he even sounded like John. I pulled back but kept hold of his hands, unwilling to let go of any descendent of John’s.

  “Don’t tell the others,” Dylan said. “I don’t know if the university would have allowed me to work here given that this was home to my ancestors. I’ve always kept that quiet.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “So you’re John’s descendent.”

  “Aye, so I’ve been told,” he said with a nod.

  “You look like him and you sound like him.”

  Dylan’s cheeks bronzed. “I do?”

  I nodded. “I thought so when I first saw you again this morning.”

  Dylan smiled.

  I took a deep breath and asked a question I really didn’t want the answer to.

  “Whom did he marry, do you know?” A knot in the pit of my stomach tightened.

  Dylan drew his brows together with a shake of his head.

  “I can’t remember. My aunt passed away some years ago and left me her work on the family history, but that’s at home in Glasgow, and I’m sorry to say I really don’t remember.”

  I breathed deeply, restraining myself from asking him to call someone. I supposed I could find a computer somewhere in the nearest town and look the information up...if that were possible. Unless women were particularly notorious—the Salem witch trials came to mind—or rulers, their names were very often forgotten in the historical records.

  “This must be so difficult for you,” Dylan said. “You said you had fallen in love with John Morrison? How long were you there?”

  I sighed heavily. “Only a few days. I know. I know. Can one really fall in love in a few days?” I looked out to sea. “I can’t speak for others, but I know I did. Life and death, love and hatred are all so unambiguous in the sixteenth century, so clear, so immediate. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time to waste.”

  “No, I don’t imagine there is. Life was short then.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t think about it. I hope John lived a long and happy life.”

  “I’m sure that information is available on the Internet,” Dylan said in a kindly voice.

  I turned to look at the descendent of the man I loved.

  “No, I’ve thought about it. I don’t want to know. Just knowing that his line lives on in you, that he lived, married and had children is enough for me.”

  “I, for one, cannot believe that you met my ancestor!”

  I gave him a broken smile and turned my face to sea.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “That I did.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I stayed on the island until I couldn’t feasibly stay any longer. I supposed I could have asked Dylan for a blanket, and I could have attempted to sleep out under the stars, but the temperature, already cool, dropped forty degrees at night, and Dylan wasn’t about to allow me to stay on the island through the night.

  I followed Dylan off Dun Eistean late that afternoon and accepted a ride from him back to the MacIvers’. The lovely old couple, thrilled to see me safe, were solicitous and kind, and I showered gratefully and retired to bed early, having folded Dylan’s clothing carefully to return to him the following morning when he picked me up to take me to the airport.

  He had, with my permission, used his mobile phone to book a flight for me back to Virginia.

  I lay awake that night, listening to the sea wind blow through my window, straining to hear John’s voice across time. But nothing came to me. He was gone. I was grateful that his DNA lived on in Dylan, but John was gone to me.

  My heart ached, and I worried that Dylan would have to drag me onto the plane kicking and screaming, or perhaps he would have to just carry my grief-stricken, almost comatose body aboard. Although he had originally booked his own flight to Guatemala via Miami, he had changed his connection to Virginia to accompany me. I appreciated the gesture. I suspected I was going to need the support.

  Dun Eistean was only about three miles from the MacIvers’ house. I rolled on my side and imagined myself trotting back to the island to commune with the ghosts of the Morrisons. Though there was no evidence anyone was buried on Dun Eistean, I thought fancifully that there was no evidence there weren’t ghosts there either.

  Dylan wouldn’t have to know. I could return to the croft by morning. The MacIvers didn’t have to know. They slept soundly. It would only take me about forty-five minutes to reach the island.

  I rose from the bed and crossed to the window. I couldn’t see the sea from the MacIvers’ house, but I could smell the salt air.

  �
��John?” I whispered.

  No answer.

  John was gone. Long gone. Buried somewhere over four hundred years ago. My time in the sixteenth century seemed almost like a dream. With an ache in my heart, I turned from the window and crawled back into bed to pull the covers over my head.

  John was gone.

  Dylan picked me up in the morning. He drove me to the little airport in Stornaway, where we boarded a flight for Glasgow and then on to Richmond, Virginia. We talked about his upcoming work in Guatemala. He wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but he was enthusiastic about archaeology.

  At one point on the flight, Dylan looked at me as if he had something on his mind. I had cautioned him when he picked me up that morning that I didn’t want to talk about Dun Eistean or John, not then. Maybe in time, but not then. Dylan was John’s descendent. He had every right to know as much as I could remember about my time in the sixteenth century, but I simply couldn’t make the journey without screaming if I had to talk about John. I felt like I had left a piece of me behind in Scotland, in the Outer Hebrides. I couldn’t talk about it.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I checked my computer last night.”

  My heart stopped, and I held up a hand.

  “No!” I snapped. “No,” I said more softly. “You promised me. I don’t want to know.”

  “You really don’t want to know?” Dylan asked.

  I held my breath and shook my head slowly.

  “No, please don’t tell me anything.”

  “All right,” he said.

  I turned away and looked out the window down onto blue seas, terrified that Dylan would still say something and fighting a perverse sense of curiosity about what he had discovered. Was it about John? His family? A wife? What?

  My heart raced, and I breathed deeply to try and slow it. Curiosity was such a strange thing. How did one subdue the urge for discovery when those very discoveries might break one’s heart?

  I chewed on my lower lip, I contemplated cloud formations and I looked for cruise ships on the vast sea. I worried about how I would now finish my degree, I wondered if anything had gone bad in the refrigerator in my apartment and I pondered the miracle of time travel as if it had happened to someone else.

  But it hadn’t. It had happened to me. And no amount of distraction could keep me from turning to John’s descendent and asking the questions I had tried to avoid.

  “Okay, what did you find out?” I said with dread.

  Dylan looked up from his paperback novel. He tilted his head and regarded me with a gentle expression.

  “Nothing. There was nothing on the Internet regarding John Morrison’s marriage, just that he’d had five children who all lived to adulthood, as I mentioned before.”

  I let go of the breath I’d been holding and smacked Dylan on the arm.

  “You could have told me that! I was about to pass out from anxiety.”

  “I tried,” Dylan said, his lips curving into a smile.

  “Not hard enough.” I wanted to return his smile, but every mile the airplane put between me and Scotland made me sadder.

  I supposed one day I would get over my grand adventure. One day I would put John in the proper perspective, a historical figure I’d had the thrill of meeting, and not a living, breathing man with whom I’d fallen soundly in love. One day. I didn’t know when.

  Many hours later, I saw Dylan off on his connecting flight to Guatemala City, and I picked up my car and drove the hour to my apartment in Williamsburg.

  I dragged my bags into my apartment and stared at what had once been a refuge for me. I supposed that if I hadn’t been so distanced, so entrenched in the past at that moment, I would realize that my fairly serene and calm apartment would have been a miracle to people in sixteenth-century Scotland.

  But at that moment, I couldn’t see the value in that security. Not without John. Scotland seemed so far away, and I missed it terribly.

  I picked up the cell phone I had left behind and punched in my college advisor’s number. Given that it was Thursday afternoon at 3:00 p.m., she was still in her office.

  “Ann! How’s it going there?”

  “I’m back in Williamsburg, Dr. Crandall. They cancelled the dig for this season.”

  “What? I’m sorry to hear that! What happened? No funding?”

  “No, it’s complicated,” I said. “I still need something, or I’m not graduating.”

  “Yes, you do. As it happens, I’ve got something coming up on an emergent basis. The Department of Transportation discovered some pottery and other artifacts while they were digging up a road, probably from a Colonial farm, and we need to get up to Parnassus and excavate the site. They want it done by the end of summer. We start next Monday. It’s about three hours away, so we’ll plan on camping up there for the summer. Do you want me to register you for that?”

  “Yes, please,” I said without thinking. Anything but stay home in my apartment, anything but imagining myself in the arms of a tall sixteenth-century Highlander. Leaving Scotland hadn’t put the memory of John behind me. Arriving home to my apartment in Williamsburg, a place he had never been and where I had never imagined the handsome laird, hadn’t kept me from dreaming about him. Maybe some shards of Colonial-era pottery would stop my obsessive thoughts about the man I loved and had lost.

  I resisted searching the computer for information about John, and I spent the weekend washing clothes and repacking. I removed the shift from my suitcase and washed it by hand, certain that it would never survive the rotations of the washing machine. I hung it up in the bathroom to dry. I hadn’t offered it to Dylan as an artifact, and he hadn’t asked. To give it to the University of Glasgow would have raised too many questions. It was unlikely that a woven shift could have survived over four hundred years, not unless it was buried in a peat bog.

  I met Dr. Crandall and the other students at the college Monday morning, and we set off in the archaeology department’s van. Upon reaching the site, we pitched tents and went immediately to work. The Department of Transportation had removed their bulldozers from the site, and we followed Dr. Crandall’s direction as she outlined the dig.

  I was glad of the work, glad of the distraction. I worked long and hard that day and in the days that followed.

  One day, a week into the dig, Dr. Crandall stopped by where I meticulously brushed dirt from some shards of pottery.

  “You seem possessed, Ann! This isn’t the great American discovery, you know.”

  A lean outdoorsy woman in a brown plaid shirt and forest-green cargo pants, she wore her graying brunette hair tied back at the nape of her neck. A nondescript gray baseball cap sheltered her face from the sun. She kneeled down beside me and studied the shards.

  “Is everything all right? You seem different.”

  “Different?” I asked.

  “You were more lighthearted before you went to Scotland. Did something happen there?”

  I shrugged.

  “No, nothing in particular.”

  “I know you weren’t there for long, but how did you like it? I got a chance to do a dig in England once. Loved it!”

  “Very nice,” I murmured, leaning back and staring at the dirt on my hands. Since I had started working the soil again, I had struggled to keep thoughts and memories of Dun Eistean and John at bay. How could they possibly intrude in the middle of Colonial Virginia? And yet they did.

  I had negotiated with myself, had promised myself that if I could concentrate on the current dig and get my degree, then at some point in the future, maybe in a couple of years, I might even return to Scotland. Maybe not to Dun Eistean—I didn’t think I could ever go back there—but to Edinburgh, Inverness or Glasgow.

  A hand touched my shoulder, and I jumped and looked up. It was only Dr. Crandall.

  “If you need to talk about anything, Ann, I’m always here.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Crandall.” I gave her a polite smile and returned to cleaning off the pottery.

&nbs
p; She rose and moved away, and I sat back on my legs and lifted my face to the sun to breathe in the muggy smell of the Virginia countryside in summer. The smell was so unlike the salty air of Dun Eistean.

  I turned and watched the middle-aged woman walk away, wishing I could tell her what happened to me, about John and the grief that continued to grip me.

  Dylan was well and truly out of cell phone range, and he had told me his Internet coverage would be sparse. I hadn’t heard from him since we’d parted in Richmond, and I felt alone with my secret. Time travel was possible. I wasn’t sure if the exact circumstances of my particular travel could be replicated—perhaps the dagger was the only catalyst—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with that knowledge.

  Dr. Crandall bent down to talk to some other students, and I returned to my work again with a sigh.

  Six weeks passed, sometimes quickly, sometimes inexorably slow, but at last we had dug up as many artifacts as possible and released the site to the Department of Transportation. Dr. Crandall prepared to return to school for the fall semester. I had an offer from her to return as a teaching assistant. I had earned the credits for my degree, and I had only to accept her offer or apply for other archaeological or anthropological positions throughout the nation. I had tried to give the matter some thought during the warm Virginia nights as I slept on a cot in my tent, but had come up with no concrete plans.

  I didn’t know where I wanted to go, so how could I possibly apply for jobs? I wasn’t the same person that I had been before I traveled back in time. I had lost focus. The future seemed vague, the present something to be tolerated. Only the past seemed real to me.

  On the final afternoon of the dig, I joined other students as we finished categorizing and labeling our finds. Dr. Crandall stopped by and asked me to walk with her. I assumed she wanted a response to her job offer, and I fretted about what to say. I hadn’t made a decision.