‘Aye, we could bide …’ Jamie stuck his head out of the door to the empty stairwell where the stone spiral had long ago collapsed, knowing there wasn’t a chance of getting down there. Then he moved to the mullioned window. ‘I wonder though …’ He leaned out, then turned around to look at us. He stood silhouetted against grey sky.
‘Sandy said that he and Davie and Archie had a race once. Before you and I and Grant were born, Julie. Up this tower, along the wall of the keep and down the kitchen chimney. You have to do this first bit like you’re rock climbing, just hanging on with hands and feet. There’s no ledge till you get to the wall of the keep.’
‘We’ve climbed the kitchen chimney,’ said Euan. ‘But it’s not so narrow as this one. You have to climb it the whole way using hands and feet as you said. And it slopes in the way at the top. It’s no’ easy.’ He nodded towards me. ‘She couldnae.’
‘She doesn’t need to,’ Jamie said. ‘If I go, I can put out the fire.’
‘Or we could bide,’ I said.
Jamie said forcefully, ‘I want to catch him at it.’
Euan stood up. ‘I’ll go along wi’ you.’
‘Jamie Stuart,’ Ellen told him, ‘take my knife.’
Euan went first. Ellen and I watched our brothers crawl one at a time through the mullioned window, cling like spiders to the stone wall as they inched their way from our window to the roofless wall of the ruined castle’s central keep, and begin the precarious journey across that wall, five flights up and with a sheer drop on either side.
Then they had to scale the outside of the huge kitchen chimney. First Euan lowered himself inside, long-limbed but lithe and efficient, while Jamie sat perched on the topmost surviving stone of Aberfearn Castle, waiting his turn with his legs dangling down the chimney; then he, too, was gone.
Now there wasn’t anything for me and Ellen to do but wait.
I hugged myself, still reeling with the discovery we’d made. ‘We’re the Aberfearn Castle guardians,’ I said. ‘We’re the guardians of –’
‘Mary Queen o’ Scots’ jewels!’ Ellen finished.
The smoke continued to billow blue and foul across the attic floor. It was coming out here and using the whole dovecote as a chimney because of the broken wall.
Ellen added soberly, ‘Let’s be proper guardians. We’d best get those pearls away.’
In the time it took to scoop the pearls back into the jam jar we were both choking and weeping. The air of the little room was quickly turning poisonous. Ellen tore the black velvet swatch in half; I had to hold the cloth over her face and mine while she stowed the jar in her creel basket. Now my eyes and throat were burning and we were both wheezing, overwhelmed with the acrid smoke. The wood pigeons took off again.
‘Bloody hell,’ I spluttered, as we stuck our heads back out of the window, gulping in fresh air, one of us on each side of the stone mullion.
Smoke wreathed around us as it, too, found its way out of the broken room into the sky, so that there was no way for us to avoid it. My eyes were streaming as if I’d been rubbing them with pepper; I tied the velvet cloth fast over my nose and mouth.
We squinted at the narrow stone parapet that led across the ruin to the kitchen chimney.
‘Could you?’ Ellen suggested dubiously, her voice harsh and grating. Euan said she’d climbed the kitchen chimney before.
But I didn’t think I could. My shoulder wouldn’t support me.
Ellen just seemed like her usual naturally grim self, so I didn’t want to show her that I’d never felt so frightened in my life.
‘We could climb out of this window and sit on the wall, I suppose,’ I choked, although I didn’t really believe I could manage to spider across to the wall of the keep without splattering myself among the stones and nettles five floors beneath us, either.
A cascade of happy barks came pealing up from somewhere far below.
‘Well, they’ve found my dog,’ said Ellen.
‘Nell,’ I said, and took her hand.
‘Don’t fret, lass,’ she told me through her own soft black mask.
‘I’m not fretting. I just want to hold on to you.’
‘You look like a train robber!’
‘So do you.’
Her defiant determination braced me a little.
She sang softly:
‘My castle is aye my ain,
An’ harried it never shall be,
For I’ll fall ere it’s ta’en …’
‘… An’ wha dare meddle wi’ me?’ I joined in.
Our voices nearly twined together once more, but she broke off in a spasm of choking coughs.
‘Don’t sing for me,’ I told her. ‘Just breathe.’
She let go of my hand so she could wreathe her arm around my waist from behind. When I wove my own arm beneath hers, she clasped my hand against her ribs on the other side. We clung to each other as if we were drowning.
We were drowning.
After what seemed like another very long time we heard Euan calling up the chimney to his sister, just as Ellen had called down earlier.
‘Sproul!’
We glanced around quickly, and we couldn’t see a thing through the smoke that was still hanging in the tower room.
It took us a long moment to realise Jamie and Euan must have put the fire out.
I’m sure neither Ellen nor I noticed how tightly we were holding on to each other until we both went limp with relief. Then, after one last tearful hug, we tried to get back to the chimney.
But the smoke hadn’t yet cleared enough for us even to turn around for more than a second or two, let alone cross the room, so we had to wait before we were able to hoarsely answer Euan’s call. Jamie said later that it was the most fearsome part of the whole afternoon, that silent ten minutes before the smoke cleared, when they called and called until their own throats were raw and got no answer from us.
I am very glad that wasn’t something I had to do. If it were the other way around – me wondering if Jamie were alive or dead … Not knowing. At any rate …
At any rate, we weren’t dead.
It seemed ages before the chimney was sufficiently smokeless that we could climb back down. But we managed it at last, Ellen with the pearls stowed safely in her creel basket. The climb itself was easier than going up – gravity helps when you’re on your way down. Pinkie, yapping her encouraging love from below us, helped too.
Jamie caught Ellen, then me, in the hearth of the Earl’s Chamber at the bottom. The entire floor was a mess of damp, half-burned scraps of reed and gorse and heather and birch, slippery and deceptively awash with what must have been a tiny amount of water from the stolen builder’s bucket Jamie had brought with him from the kitchen fireplace.
We three knelt on the old hearth in a clinging, grateful huddle, like a bundle of kittens for a moment, with the frantic dog bouncing around us. Then Jamie untangled himself, stood up and pointed.