“We dinnae use this part much,” James said by way of explanation. “To be honest, the place is far too big for two old folks but that’s just the way it is.”
“Why not move somewhere smaller?”
“Because we’re guardians of the place for the next generation. Despite her grump, Sandy feels the same as me. It’s in our bones, this place. We could never leave it.” He stopped by a door and turned the handle. “Here you are.”
Jessica peered inside. It was an empty cupboard, no more than five feet square.
“Can you guess what it was used for?” he asked.
“Linen closet?”
The man’s eyebrows shot up. “Extraordinary. How did you guess that?”
“I must have read it somewhere.” She couldn’t tell him the truth, that she’d somehow known it was a linen closet. As he’d turned the handle she’d already pictured the inside, shelf after shelf of neatly folded cloth.
“The story goes,” James said, pulling the door shut again, “that the Laird heard her in here and came looking but when he opened the door, nothing. She was never seen again.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think there are things in the Highlands that no one will ever be able to explain. I sit on the battlements sometimes at night and I swear I can hear the old guards talking to each other. One time I heard some lass sing a lullaby to her bairn when there was naeone in the place but me. No doubt that all sounds daft to you.”
“Not at all,” she replied.
“This way. This is the Laird’s chamber coming up, where Morag was last seen before she vanished.” He stopped outside another door. “Blast,” he said, rattling the handle. “Locked.” He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and began running his fingers through them. “It should be here somewhere. Can you see a silver one with an M on it anywhere? Where is the blasted thing?”
“James!” Sandy shouted from down in the courtyard. “There’s a man on the telephone for you.”
“Be right down,” he shouted back before turning to Jessica. “It’ll be the papers. They want tae come up and snap a few things on the open day. Bide me a wee while?”
“Of course. Take your time.”
He headed back down the corridor and she listened while his footsteps slowly faded away. Turning back to the door, she tried the handle herself. It rattled in place but the door didn’t open.
She pressed her ear to the door. Someone was singing on the other side, the noise faint. “I left my babby lying here.” The singing dissolved into tears which faded away into nothing, leaving Jessica hearing only her own breathing.
Almost without realizing she was doing it, she brought the key out of her pocket. “It’s not going to fit,” she said out loud. “Of course it’s not going to fit. I’m imagining it, that’s all.”
She slid the key into the door and tried to turn it. She realized she hadn’t breathed only when her lungs began to burn for air. Gasping, she took a breath, looking down at her hand which was trembling. The key was turning slowly in place.
She pulled the key out and looked at it for a moment before pushing the door open. So the key worked? So what? That didn’t mean anything.
So why did the air suddenly feel charged with electricity? And why had she heard someone on the other side?
She stepped through the door and realized at once that her guide had got things wrong. She wasn’t in a bedroom. She was on the battlement walkway that ran around the four sides of the courtyard.
She looked back through the door and stopped dead. It wasn’t the corridor. It was a room lit by flaming torches. She was still trying to work out what was going on when hands fell on her from behind. “Hey,” she said, twisting in place and shocked to find two men in medieval armor grabbing hold of her. “Let me go.”
“She looks like Rachel,” one of them said. “Is that nae strange?”
“Ah thought it was her.”
“Let me go!”
The other knight replied to his colleague, ignoring her efforts to free herself. “You dinnae think it’s Morag come back, dae you?”
“Not our job to think. Let’s take her to Ronald.”
She fought again to get free from their grip but her kicks only hurt her feet, crashing into the solid metal covering their calves. They were much stronger than her, a foot taller, their faces hidden behind the visors of their helmets.
