Sands of Time (37 page)

‘How did you find me?’ Slowly she was beginning to remember.

‘Mrs Maclellan took a lift out with the post van to see you.’ The doctor paused, wondering how to describe the woman’s hunches; her second sight. ‘She remembered what you had said about the laddie up at the broch and wanted to warn you about him. Luckily for you, they saw you fall, from the road.’

Caro closed her eyes. She felt sick and disorientated. ‘What did you want to warn me about?’

The two beside her glanced at one another. The doctor shrugged. ‘It’s our belief that you saw a lad called Jamie Macpherson. He lived near the broch some while ago and fell in love, so the story goes, with a young woman he met up there. No one knows what happened but one day the boy disappeared. They found him where we found you, at the foot of the wall. He had a lassie’s silk scarf in his hand.’ He paused, scrutinising her face cautiously. ‘Mrs Foster knew the story. She was quite obsessed about it. She would stay up here when her husband went back to London, making notes to write a book about it.’

Caro lay back against the pillow, her eyes closed.

‘Poor lady. It seems she followed him to the broch one day and climbed the stair just as you did.’

Caro frowned. ‘I don’t understand. You said he was dead?’

He nodded. ‘They should pull that old place down. It’s too dangerous. The steps are broken. She fell. Just as you did. Only in her case, no one came.’

‘She was killed?’ Caro’s eyes flew open.

He nodded gravely.

‘Oh how awful. Poor woman. How sad. No wonder her husband wanted to leave.’

‘Aye.’

‘Did you follow Jamie out there?’ Mrs Maclellan sat forward on her chair.

Caro shrugged. ‘I followed someone. Young. Good-looking. Wearing a highland plaid.’

‘That’s him.’ The woman nodded.

‘And he’s a ghost?’

‘Aye.’ She was matter-of-fact.

Caro shivered.

‘I suppose you’ll leave us now, once you’ve recovered.’ Mrs Maclellan shook her head sadly.

Caro shrugged, trying to make sense of the jumble of words spinning in her head. ‘I don’t want to leave. I love it here.’ She smiled weakly. ‘I’m a writer too, like Mrs Foster.’ Was that a voice she could hear in her head? ‘Go for it, Caro. This is the book!’ She looked up at them. ‘Perhaps I should write the story for her? And for him?’ She hesitated. ‘I wonder, would that help them find peace, do you think?’

‘Aye, I think that would be the right thing to do.’ Mrs Maclellan smiled at her. Was she the only one, she wondered, who could see the handsome clergyman standing next to the bed, nodding in approval.

Sands of Time

1

It had snowed in the night and a skim of white lay across the rough grass, clinging to the banks of rhododendrons, weighing down the leaves into graceful arabesques across the track.

Toby Hayward parked his car near the ruins of the ancient castle which rose from the uneven ground ahead of him. A tall man, in his early forties, he looked the archetypal Scotsman, with sandy hair, high colour and handsome regular features. Dressed in a shabby waxed jacket and old boots he stood for a moment trying to find his bearings. The place was deserted; it was too cold for visitors and the forecast that the weather was going to grow worse would deter any strangers from joining him in this very personal pilgrimage. The ruins were picturesque, huge and gaunt, the high broken walls, the gaping windows, the areas of castellation silhouetted against the snow and the backdrop of stately ancient trees.

The imposing stable block that had once graced this great pile and which had been destroyed by fire in the latter half of the nineteenth century had long ago been pulled down. The castle itself had also been ravaged by fire, this time shortly after the end of the First World War. The ruins had not been rebuilt. Toby grimaced. Two devastating fires. Coincidence? Who would ever know now.

He fished in his pocket for the guidebook his mother had given him before he left London for Scotland a couple of weeks earlier. It traced the history of the castle and of the Carstairs family from the fourteenth century to its heyday under the ninth earl, the infamous Victorian traveller and occultist. On page twelve there was a reproduction of a portrait of the earl. Chewing his lip Toby stood staring down at it. The Roger Carstairs who gazed out at the world also had handsome regular features, offset by dark arrogant eyes. He was dressed in the sort of middle-eastern costume favoured by Lord Byron and T.E. Lawrence.

Turning the page Toby stared down at the entry about Lord Carstairs. It was the final paragraph that intrigued him.

‘The ninth earl maintained his enigmatic reputation to the last. The date and manner of his death are unknown, but rumours abounded as to the full horror of what occurred. It was said that he had perfected a method of transporting himself from place to place and even

from one time zone to another by magical or shamanic techniques which he had learned on his travels in Egypt, India and North America. The methods he used, so it is said, left him vulnerable to the demonic forces which one day overwhelmed him. Maybe the ninth earl did not in fact die at all. As you look around the ruins of the castle which was once his home, be aware that the eyes which scrutinise you from the shadows may not be those of a ghost. They may be those of a man in hell.’ 

Toby shuddered. What rubbish. Who wrote this stuff?

He moved on across the grass leaving transparent ice-sheened footprints in the snow, heading for the main entrance to the castle with its imposing flight of steps. These led up to the rounded arch which had once surrounded the huge oak door and he stood there for a moment looking into the gaping space which had once been the great hall. The echoing cry of a jackdaw broke the intense silence and he watched the black shadow of the bird sweep between windows open to wind and snow.

For four years now Toby had lived within ten miles of this old pile without being aware of its existence.

He wished he still didn’t know.

He moved forward into the space which had once been the centre of the household’s activity and looked up. Five fireplaces, one above the other, rose up within the floorless keep, each successively smaller. A huge pile of twigs filled the top one, the chosen dwelling place of the jackdaw family, sole occupants now of the building which had seen so much of Scotland’s history. And, so it turned out, that of his own family. He shuddered. The cry of the jackdaw was echoed by the wild mew of a buzzard circling the surrounding hills.

Toby rammed the guidebook into his pocket and moved on. It was cold within the walls of the castle, shadowed from the sun which outside was fast melting the night’s fall of snow. All around him he could hear the sound of water, from the river which ran in full spate round the bottom of the escarpment on which the castle stood, from the sea of rhododendrons and from the dripping icicles and the melting snow.

Slipping on the icy, worn stone steps, he ducked out of the keep and walked into the rectangular area which, according to the guidebook, had formed the north tower, an extra block of living quarters built in the sixteenth century, but which had then been torn down to form the base of the carriage house and stables constructed much later by the seventh earl. It was here that his grandson, Roger Carstairs, had kept his museum, the collection of artefacts which had been destroyed by the catastrophic fire started, so the story went, by a disaffected servant while Roger was away on his travels. Included in this collection, presumably, were all the things he had brought back from his trips to Egypt.

Toby sighed. Egypt. Where only a few brief weeks before he had first met Anna.

He had set out on the visit to Egypt with such optimism. True it was going to be a package tour from Luxor to Aswan, with a boat full of strangers, but that was OK. That was his job. A painter and travel writer, he was going to report the experience for a Sunday paper in full humorous detail – the ups, the downs, the good places, the spoiled places, the nice people, the sad people. He was going to go home with a sketch book full of wonderful ideas and as a bonus he would catch some winter sunshine.

He had met Anna Fox on the flight out. Or at least tried not to meet her. He was well aware that he was being boorish, but he had vowed, if he was stuck next to some gossiping idiot for the five hour flight, that he would not be sucked in. The fact that the woman next to him had been beautiful with her long dark hair and her hazel eyes and in the event, far from being a gossiping idiot, had in fact been extremely interesting, had not penetrated his thick skull. Not then. Not for sometime. Although he had at least become aware that, far from engrossing herself in some trashy airport paperback, she had spent the journey reading an old diary, a Victorian diary, which, from his occasional oblique glance across at where it lay on her lap, seemed very interesting indeed.

The scream of the buzzard was louder now. It was circling closer, scanning the ground. Toby ducked instinctively as the broad-winged shadow flicked over him and disappeared behind the high grey walls.

He moved forward thoughtfully, picking his way over the remains of the more recent walls, which were marked now by no more than a couple of courses of stone. How odd that only the earlier foundations remained. Of the comparatively new Georgian and Victorian grandeur there was nothing to be seen. He moved across what had once been the open courtyard, slipping on the uneven cobbles. It wasn’t so strange to think of Roger Carstairs living here. An urbane, sophisticated world traveller, he had been still, in his blood, the wild border Scot, descendant of caterans and murdering reivers, a man used to getting his way; a man used to taking what he wanted, whether it was an artefact – or a woman. There was one artefact he had failed to obtain, and it had belonged to the one woman whom he had failed to win. There was a paragraph about her in the guidebook. Fishing it out of his pocket, Toby glanced down at the page which opened in front of him. Roger had met the artist Louisa Shelley in Egypt. Their relationship had, according to the author of the guidebook, been nothing short of stormy. Toby grimaced. What an understatement. But then the author hadn’t had the opportunity of reading Louisa’s diary. The diary in which Anna had been so engrossed when he first met her.

Behind him, from the keep, a chorus of angry shrieks and a shower of twigs falling five storeys into the open undercroft beneath the keep signalled a quarrel amongst the avian residents of the castle. Toby glanced up as a ragged black feather drifted down. He bent and picked it up, then straightening abruptly he glanced round, the feather in his hand. He had heard someone laugh. He frowned uneasily. The deep throaty chuckle had seemed to come from immediately behind him. He turned to stare at the shadowed embrasures, the open doorways. There was no one there. The buzzard had headed away now towards the distant hills. The jackdaws had subsided into silence as they preened on the top of the wall in the sunlight. In the shadow of what remained of the tower it was intensely cold. Toby found himself listening carefully. Had some more visitors arrived while he was wandering around lost in thought? Shivering he rammed his hands deep into his pockets. Just for an instant he had imagined that someone, somewhere, had whispered his name.

God! The place was getting to him. The atmosphere was in some way thickening. He stretched out his hand as though he could touch the air around him. There was no one there. No one that he could see. And yet he had the feeling that he was being watched. Watched by whom?

He could guess.

It was his great-great grandfather.

His hand closed around the guidebook. To think that when he had set out on the trip to Egypt he hadn’t believed in ghosts. He hadn’t believed in a lot of things. But then he hadn’t known of his descent from Lord Carstairs. He had vaguely heard of the man – who hadn’t? His sinister reputation was the kind that reverberated down the years, leaving an unpleasant taste in the mouth. As it happened the earldom had died out with the death of the eleventh earl. As far as he knew there were no direct descendants left. Just his mother, Frances. And him.

He smiled grimly. What a cocktail of blood to inherit.

2

Serena Canfield was kneeling before a small ornate altar in the front room of her maisonette in West Hampstead. She was still very aware of the emptiness of her home. It was several years now since her much loved partner and soulmate had died. The aching gap and the silence left by him had been only partially filled by a succession of tenants and Charley, the latest, had just returned to her parents’ home. The ensuing peace had initially been supremely welcome, but lately, perhaps because her next door neighbours on one side were away, on the other side out at work all day, the quietness of the place had begun to worry her.