Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
I go back to my mincemeat.
The visit is sorted, mostly. They’ll have the cottage’s guest room for Rosey and the foldout in the sitting room for themselves, because the castle—Maddie lobbied hard for the castle, “we’re not flying five thousand miles to NOT stay in the castle, Iris”—is many things, but it is not yet a place you can put a radiator, and I’m not sure they can tend to any of the fires without burning the whole place down. They’ll get the tour instead. The hall, the chapel, the view off the seaward wall.
Not the tower, and definitely nothing below ground.
What the castle becomes is a conversation we keep having in circles and not finishing, which I’ve decided is allowed. I mean, this is all so new to both of us. There’s talk, his talk, mostly, late at night, thinking out loud with my head on his chest, of the heritage people, of letting the historical trusts at it, of Caisteal Eachainn standing open someday with a gravel car park and a wee laminated guide. Built in the thirteenth century. Seat of the MacCoinnichs. Local legend speaks of a water-horse.
He finds the idea funnier than I’d have guessed. “Let them charge four pound fifty to stand in my bedchamber,” he says. “I’ll donate the audio tour. I’ll narrate it myself; I’m a primary source.” But then other nights he goes quiet about it, and I understand that too, for there’s one room in that castle that was never built for the public, at least seventy-two names that aren’t legend, and whatever the castle becomes has to become it around them. So, maybe the trust. Maybe a museum. Maybe just the birds and the weather and the occasional sleepover, the way it’s been for centuries.
We don’t have to decide. That’s the thing I keep arriving at lately, is that we don’t have to decide. We have time. We bought it at a terrible price and it’s ours, an actual future, sprawling out ahead of us in undecided years, and there are days the size of it catches me and I have to stand still and let it pass through me. We could do anything. We can do nothing. The man is going to grow old at the rate I grow old, and the castle can wait, and the road trip can wait until spring (it’s planned now, mapped, argued over a plenty—he maintains Skye will be “crawling with tourists” and I maintain he’s been antisocial since the Plantagenets; in the end, I win) and the only deadline in this whole house is mince-no-meat-pies for the twenty-third.
I pull the first batch out of the oven, and the cottage smells like Christmas, and across the bay the castle stands in the last grey light with the first stars over it, just an old building on an old shore.
Just scenery. Just part of home.
After dinner, with the fire built up and the snow starting again outside the window—fat slow flakes this time, the kind I hope mean to stay awhile—I get out the tarot cards and we settle into the sitting room, sitting around the coffee table.
This is also a thing now. It started as a joke, or I told myself it did, this deck I’ve owned for fifteen years and pulled from lazily, half-believing, the wannabe witch’s deck. Except I’m not a wannabe anymore, not really. I’m a woman who closed a salt circle in the fog and felt it hold, and the deck knows it. The cards come up different now. Or I read them different. Mhairi says there’s no difference between those two things.
Alasdair takes tarot extremely seriously. He sits on the couch with his drink and his sleeves pushed up, elbows on thighs, frowning at the spreads like they’re charts of a coast he intends to sail, demanding rulings.
Tonight he wants to know about the visit.
“The wee one,” he says, “pull for the wee one’s visit,” because he is nervous about Rosey. Which I find absolutely adorable, this man who faced down centuries, terrified of a six-year-old’s verdict. I mean, if she doesn’t get to see a horse, that child is gonna be pissed. And so I shuffle, and the fire roars, and the snow comes down past the black window, and I lay three cards.
The Ten of Cups. The Sun. And the third card sticks.
It genuinely sticks, two cards clinging as one, which I know happens with an old deck, and dry winter air, and static etc. And when I go to slide the doubled card apart, the loose one gets away from me entirely, skates off the table edge on a draft I don’t feel, and lands face-up on the floor by the dresser. By Effie’s dresser, where I’ve arranged a lot of her things to stand watch.