Shards of orange and yellow fluttered between gaps in the wall of an outbuilding fifty yards away.
He’s okay! He won’t freeze to death!
He hasn’t left me…
I couldn’t say which detail was the bigger relief. Apparently, even a dangerous Scottish Yeti was preferable to being alone in this place. No matter where it was. No matter when…
The thought hadn’t completely developed in my mind before I was shaking my head, trying to keep it from fully forming. But it was already there.
Time travel…
I opened my mouth to laugh, but nothing came out. And I knew in a fraction of a second that I would absolutely lose my mind if I didn’t find proof,immediately, that it wasn’t possible.
First, I lit every candle I could find. Not one of them had a fragrance—at least not a good one. They weren’t just homemade. They were lumpy and inconsistent, like they’d been crafted by a Yeti-man with furry mittens.
The metal candlesticks were well-made and uniform, but they were rough and black, and there was no telling what century they might be from. Same with the pans and tools hanging on the walls. Even the nails and hooks that held them were black and rough.
There were no tags on the blankets or pillows. No signs anyone had broken the law by removing them.
I opened the cabinet and hoped for better luck. A utensil with an engraved logo? A sticker on a vegetable claiming it was organic? A plastic sack from a grocery store?
No, no, and no.
What kind of house didn’t have a little marketing lying around?
The kind of house that didn’t have running water or plumbing of any kind, apparently. The kind of house that was built by a shepherd and maintained by a Bothy Society. Or the kind a hermit-Yeti-type man would inhabit, one who liked his privacy and treated any visitors as suspect, even if they were just trying to survive bad weather.
But that didn’t signify a date.
Just beyond the candlelight, those shelves hung in the shadows.
Books and boxes. If there was any proof that I was still living and breathing in the twenty-first century, it would be there. So, I moved all the candles to the table, pulled down a few books, and sat in the lone chair. My hand dragged along the edge of the table and the texture caught my attention. I brought a candlestick closer to study it.
An intricate, Celtic pattern wove seamlessly all around the edge with no mistakes. No dead ends. The pattern was perfect, and I realized, after staring at the same space for a couple of minutes, that there was a name hidden in the weave.
Hannah.
Because the name was a palindrome, it hid easily inside the pattern. I found it centered on each of the four sides of the table. Hannah’s table. But when did Hannah live here?
Inside the bible, I found the printing date at the bottom of the title page. The name of the printer was faded, but I recognized Edinburgh. The last number of the date was faded too, but the first three were 165. After a page filled with hand-written names in tints of fading ink, I found Hannah’s.
Hannah Oliphant married James MacInnis, Perth, Scotland. The Year of Our Lord, 1684.That entry was followed by a list of their children, first names only, and small scribbles of names surrounding half of those. Grandchildren, maybe?
If Nick and I had a family bible, the list of names would end with Nicholas Gaines, who married Matilda Danner, Sugarbush, Vermont, 2014. Children:The Last Chair on Bridge.
Very sad.
There was a book of poems with a blue silk cover, published in 1716, with hand-drawn pictures in the empty spaces. A puppy, a ragamuffin doll, a little boy with a stick, all drawn in the same style.
I couldn’t read the words since they were written in a language I couldn’t guess, and that I absolutely couldn’t havepronounced if my life depended on it. The only reason I knew it was poetry was because of the layout of titles and stanzas, followed by a name.
There was a dedication, though, just inside the front cover. I could only read the names.
Cian at the top, and after a message, Hannah. Though I searched, there was no date, no name of the printer or the city in which it was printed. And when I looked at the imperfect edges of the pages, I realized the book had been made by hand.
It was crazy to think such antiques would be left for centuries in this house with a shaggy roof.
Crazy…unless they hadn’t been left behind…because Hannah and her husband James still lived here…
