Cauldstane by Linda Gillard Read Free Book Online Page A

asleep.
     
    ~
     
    I woke an hour later, feeling refreshed, but it took me a moment to realise where I was. When I remembered, I felt ridiculously happy. My mind was buzzing with more questions I wanted to ask about the MacNabs, so I got off the bed, opened the curtains and sat down at the writing table. I opened up my laptop and gazed out the window, suppressing a desire to wave at passing crows. My happiness was slightly diminished when I glanced up at the mirror above me and saw the river tearing past, in the wrong direction.
    Poor Coral.
    Poor Alec.
    The thing was, not to get involved. That’s where I’d gone wrong in the past. I’d got too involved with the stories I was telling. You have to maintain a distance, a certain professional objectivity, otherwise you’d go mad trying to get into someone else’s mind, trying to think like them, live their life. This was just a job. It wasn’t my life, or anyone’s life. It was just a book.
    I clicked on the document in which I’d made my earlier notes. When it opened, the screen was blank. Puzzled, I clicked back to check I’d opened the right one. I had. I clicked back to the empty screen. Surely I’d saved what I’d written? After all these years, I saved automatically. Perplexed by what looked like uncharacteristic inefficiency, I scrolled down, hoping to see my notes eventually.
    I found only one line. Everything else had gone. It wasn’t even a complete line. Just five words.
     
    leave Cauldstane to its ghosts

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
     
    I left Cauldstane before breakfast the next morning. Mrs Guthrie was struggling visibly with the affront of someone embarking on a long train journey on an empty stomach, but I told her I wasn’t hungry. As she said goodbye, she handed me a small package wrapped in tin foil. When I opened it on the train a few hours later, I discovered it was two pieces of sticky gingerbread. Interleaved with the foil was a paper napkin on which she’d written Haste ye back . As I sped south towards the border, I wolfed down both pieces with a cup of coffee.
    No one else had been up when I left and the silence had been eerie. The night before, Fergus had offered to take me back to the station, but as it was Saturday I thought he might appreciate a lie-in. I said I was happy to travel back to Inverness by taxi and he’d looked relieved. So it was just Mrs Guthrie who waved me off from the castle’s back door.
    I’d heard about autumn in the Highlands. That morning the sky was a cloudless Mediterranean blue and the bright northern light seemed to shift everything into sharp focus. A big bird of prey hovered above the castle, apparently defying all physical laws by maintaining complete stillness in the air. Then with a casual flick of its forked tail, it would change its position, but hover still, watching and waiting. I watched too, hypnotized by the bird’s apparent immobility.
    It was only September , but there was a freshness to the air, almost a chill. When I looked up at the trees beyond the courtyard walls, I could see some leaves had already turned. Their warm, vivid colours stood out against the fresh green, like blemishes. The short Highland summer was over.
     
    ~
     
    As I sat on the train I had leisure to examine the subject that had preoccupied my thoughts since yesterday afternoon, all through a rather stilted dinner and for some of a restless night. ( Scotch Deerhounds and their Masters had failed to do the trick.)
    Who had wiped my notes? And why?
    My bedroom door had not been locked. Fergus, Alec and Mrs Guthrie all knew which room I was in. Probably Sholto and Zelda did too. I didn’t think I’d shut my laptop down completely. An inquisitive person could have lifted the lid and the laptop would have woken up. They’d have been able to see what I’d written.
    And what exactly had I written? Was there anything that would upset or offend a family member, to the extent that they’d delete my notes? I simply couldn’t