A Laird for All Time

by Angeline Fortin

“See, here are the pictures I took today,” she pushed the right arrow again and again scrolling through the day’s photos.

  “It’s amazing!” he murmured in awe taking a turn pushing the button. “Where do the photographs go?”

  “The memory card stores the pictures here,” she popped it out of the compartment to show him and inserted it back in.

  “Remarkable! How do ye have them developed then?”

  “I can take that memory card and put it in my computer at home…remember? I explained the computer?” She had, but the concept was so far beyond Connor’s experience that he still had a difficult time believing what she said was possible. “I can print them on my own printer at home.” She sighed. “I wish I could show you. There are so many things I’d like to show you.”

  “I would like to see them with ye,” Connor admitted. She seemed to have had a never-ending stream of experiences beyond anything he could ever imagine. While he thought he could live forever on the stories of her time, he thought experiencing them with her by his side would be incredible. “Still, I thank God every day that He brought ye to me.” He bent and kissed her lovingly on the lips. “I love ye so dearly.”

  “I love you, too,” she whispered. The words were yet so new. She was always struck with awe when she said them. She wanted to shout them out, but they always came out softly as if they were as uncertain as her desire to remain here. She felt torn, pulled in two directions. On one hand, her life in Baltimore, safe, uncomplicated and certain. On the other, Connor, his love and what might be unimaginable contentment. If only she knew what she really wanted. “Has anyone been able to find Donell?”

  “No, it seems the old man as just disappeared since you saw him at the inn. Jimmy says he hasn’t been in for any ale at all and his cottage is all but deserted.” Connor rested his chin on top of Emmy’s head and held her close. “I still don’t understand it all, how it happened.” He had become content with thinking it God’s power for as superstitious a lot were the Scots, sorcery still seemed too implausible though Emmy blamed him entirely.

  “I know, I don’t get it either. After all he’s just a man” she admitted unconsciously turning back to the castle. “How could he do it? I was just standing here, just like this. The sun was setting and I raised my camera to take a picture…” she lifted the camera in demonstration, “and I felt…”

  A wave of vertigo assailed her and Emmy stumbled to the side holding a hand to her temple as her vision swam. “Connor?”

  “Emmy! Em!” His voice called her name hollow as if through a long tunnel and she turned at the note of panic in his voice. “Emmy, come back! Nooo!”

  Chapter 44

  “Lassie? Are ye ready to be going then?”

  Emmy swayed dizzily. “What?” She raised a hand to her brow as the swell of nausea subsided.

  “I asked if yer ready to be returning to Craignure, lass.” She turned to see Donell leaning against the fender of the shuttle looking at her expectantly. She looked in confusion between him and the shuttle bus. “The ferry will be leaving within the hour and the next isn’t for several hours,” the old man went on. “I don’t think ye’ll be wanting to miss it, if yer done here?”

  “O...kay,” she stuttered moving automatically to the bus and climbing numbly on board. She dropped heavily into the seat and stared at the castle wondering what had happened. What was going on? Why was she back? Emmy shook her head hard. She looked back at Duart and noticed the aged and crumbling exterior. It was not what she had become used to seeing every day.

  “Didn’t even see ye come out of the old keep, lass. I hadn’t even been waiting too long, just reading my paper,” Donell said cheerfully as he took his seat and pulled the lever closing the door.

  “How long was I in there?” she formed the question numbly.

  “’Bout an hour, I’d say?” he answered. “Did ye ha’ a nice time?”

  Why was he acting like he had no clue what had happened, Emmy wondered. “Donell? What have you done?”

  “Lassie?” he questioned. The confusion in his voice seemed genuine but Emmy pressed on.

  “Don’t pull this bullshit with me! Send me back, Donell, right now!”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, lass. Ye want to go home, right?” His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “That is what ye want? Ye have yer new job waiting for ye. Didn’t ye mention that before? And ye said ye didn’t need a second chance. That ye had all ye needed of life? Or perhaps, ye needed something to remind ye that life here isn’t always perfect?””

  It was like he had been able to hear the conflicting thoughts racing through her mind all day. The doubts, the uncertainty. She had been looking forward to her new job, but what of the new patients she had in Duart?

  “Of course, ye miss yer friends…” Donell went on.

  It finally occurred to Emmy that she had gone on vacation alone because she really didn’t have anyone that she had wanted to share it with. Not like she wanted to share the world with Connor.

  What did she really want?

  She hadn’t known an answer, she realized. Her mind had been filled with questions for days. On one hand, her future as she knew it. On the other, Connor.

  “So what did ye think of the castle, lass?” Donell went on in his gravelly brogue as if taunting her with her own doubts. “The castle is a bonny place but I’m sure ye got the sense that life wasn’t so simple as ye had thought, now didn’t ye? Hard to imagine living like that, eh? Hard life to be sure. None of them…what do ye call them? Amenities that you have in the States, eh?”

  “No, none,” she replied tonelessly. “At least the toilet flushed though.” Emmy rode the quick trip in silence as the bus rumbled back to Craignure. She watched the power lines loop along the shore. Up, down, up down. The haze of shock was starting to lift and heartbreak was quickly taking its place. It was over. Gone. Connor was gone. An hour? Had it even been real?

  A flash of panic. What if had been only a dream? A daydream! Fantasy. No, no, no! she thought as she dug out her camera again and powered it on. Pushing the play button, she scrolled through the pictures in the memory. The ferry, Craignure, Donell in front of the bus. “Come on, come on,” she urged as she repeatedly hit the right arrow. Duart, Duart from the north again, again. She sped through them relaxing and finally let out a sigh as she found those of Connor on his horse and then the two of them together.

  “Thank God!” she sighed out loud.

  Emmy rubbed her temples as Donell pulled the shuttle up to the ferry terminus. “There ye go, lass,” he called opening the door. “I hope ye enjoy the rest of yer holiday.”

  “Send me back, Donell,” Emmy stayed in her seat and stared him down.

  “Castle’s closed, lass.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she insisted keeping her eyes locked with his.

  “A person can’t live a life filled wi’ doubts, lass,” he told her dropping all pretense of not knowing what she was talking about. “Yer filled with doubts.”

  “What about second chances?” she asked frantically. “You said we all deserved them!”

  “And ye gave them theirs,” he said firmly. “The younger lad and his wife will have a future now. Ye ha’ given their bairns a chance at life.”

  “What of Connor?” Emmy grasped at reasons. “What of his second chance?”

  “He is free of his anger,” Donell reasoned. “His life will go forward without malice.”

  Emmy looked away at last and stared out the window at the ferry. “But what about love? Will he go forward without love?”

  “He needed love given without regret.” His soft statement drew her gaze back to his.

  “It was,” she responded automatically.

  “Was it?” he taunted and when she still hesitated, said, “A little more time, I think.”

  Scowling fiercely, Emmy dug into her tote and retrieved her return ticket for the ferry, shouldered the bag and departed, stopping by Done
ll as she passed the driver’s seat. “It was a cruel thing you did, Donell. I don’t even care how you did it anymore, but you can’t mess with people’s lives like that!”

  “Let me know when ye figure out what ye really want, lass.”

  The sun was reflecting brightly off the water as Emmy walked up the ramp, through the terminal and out onto the huge ferry which was starting to board. She headed to the glassed-in viewing area on the right side of the ferry so she could watch for Duart on the trip back to Oban. Catching sight of a sign, she stopped at the refreshment kiosk and ordered a Diet Coke. As she sat, she sucked in the soda and savored the burn of the carbonation as it went down. Closing her eyes, she tilted her head back against the seat. The mechanics deep within the ferry churned to life and began to pull itself into the sound.

  Her feelings on what had just happened were chaotic and confused. She was glad she was here, but she wanted to go back. She wanted Connor. Emmy’s chest tightened and ached and she absently rubbed the pain with her palm. Connor, Connor…she would never see him again, she realized and the pain grew. God, it wasn’t right! She had never dreamed of loving someone with this depth of feeling, much less having it happen so quickly. Why him? Why had this happened? What was she going to do? The questions had no answers.

  The urge to open her eyes overwhelmed Emmy at that moment. She opened them to find Duart before her. The sun was setting low behind it leaving it little more than a dark silhouette against the orange skies. “Oh, my God,” she whispered against the ache blossoming in her core. “Connor…” Emmy was so painfully stunned, so deeply heartbroken, in that moment that she could not even cry at what she had found and lost. It wasn’t until she was lying in bed at her hotel that night the anguish came and the tears could not be contained from flowing.

  Chapter 45

  Baltimore, Maryland

  December 2010

  “Dr. MacKenzie?”

  Emmy turned away from the window of her office to find one of the practice’s nurses standing in her doorway. “Yes, Joy?”

  “Dr. Lane would like to see you in her office.”

  The look on the woman’s face said immediately and Emmy nodded. “I will go right away. Thank you.”

  Emmy had been back for almost two months. Fifty-seven days to be exact. Fifty-seven days where she realized that her life was not as perfect as she had thought. Not without someone to share it with. In the three days after leaving Duart, Emmy had rented a car and taken the ferry over to Mull on her own. The first day she had just sat on her rock overlooking the sound trying to answer the question that seemed to mean so much. What did she want? Apparently her confusion had been enough to make it impossible to find Donell for, try as she might, she had been unable to find him in the days that followed.

  The current occupants of the castle had not yet returned to their residence, so there was no one there to let her in not that she would have expected them to. She had sat outside the keep in the car for hours…wishing, hoping. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be with Connor.

  “I figured it out, Donell!” she had shouted over the sound. “I know what I want, so get your ass over here and give it to me!”

  But Donell was nowhere to be found.

  It seemed he doubted her sincerity.

  Finally, her life had invaded. Voicemail reminders from her new boss had compelled Emmy back to London and back on her scheduled flight to BWI. Two days later she had taken her position as the newest OB/GYN at the Harbor Women’s Clinic in Baltimore. She had been given a caseload of patients and had already delivered two babies since starting, both in the shining new maternity ward at Johns Hopkins.

  Her friends had encouraged her to go out with them to their favorite restaurants and even up to a show in New York, but as the weeks had passed, they called less and less. Emmy was very aware that she was not the lighthearted company she once had been and frankly she didn’t blame them for giving her the cold shoulder.

  Why couldn’t she be happy again? She asked herself. Other than Connor and his family she hadn’t liked it there. There were none of the luxuries she wanted...no, needed to live comfortably there! No technology, no movies, no cars! Emmy had spent a whole night recently making a list of everything she had disliked about the past and it had been grievously long. Insanely long. So why did she miss it so much? She had everything here she had ever wanted. The job, the house, the friends. What else could she want? Surely all of this was better than an ancient castle with no toilet paper as she knew it?

  Didn’t she have what she had always wanted?

  Did she know what she really wanted?

  “You asked to see me, Dr. Lane?” Emmy asked as she rapped on the open door frame of the chief practitioner’s office.

  “I believe I have asked many times for you to call me Cathy,” she reminded without looking up from her computer.

  “You have, Cathy. I’m sorry.” Emmy hovered in the doorway.

  “Please close the door and have a seat, Emmy,” the doctor turned away from her computer, pulled off her reading glasses and studied Emmy seriously across the desk for a long moment as Emmy did as she was asked. Emmy fidgeted nervously under the woman’s assessing stare. “You have been doing an excellent job since you started here, Emmy,” Dr. Lane began. “Surveys from your new patients and the staff are highly favorable; you are described as friendly and knowledgeable from both sides.” She slipped the glasses back on briefly and picked up a piece of paper. “This one even wrote in, and I quote ‘Dr. MacKenzie made it almost fun to deliver my baby’.”

  Emmy smiled slightly. “Maggie Ross. She was fun, too.”

  Cathy dropped the glasses back on the desk and regarded Emmy thoughtfully. “You do an excellent job here, just as I expected when I hired you. You work hard and even volunteer to be on call on the weekends, never say ‘no’ to anyone who asks you to take their turn. The other doctors will take advantage of you if you keep this up.”

  “I don’t mind,” Emmy shrugged. “I like to be busy.” She did. The busier she was, the less chance she had to sit alone in her house thinking of the ‘could’ve beens’ of Connor. The times she was alone were the hardest to bear, when she would bring the pictures of him up on her computer screen and just stare at them for hours.

  “Still,” the doctor said with authority. “You will burn out quickly if you keep it up. Don’t you have some friends or maybe a boyfriend who are rattling the cage for your attention?”

  Emmy just shook her head and bit her lip.

  Cathy Lane stared hard at her newest doctor for several moments. She hated to get involved in her associate’s personal lives. She didn’t want them to feel as if she was mothering them or pestering them to death. As a general policy, she refrained from offering comments of a personal nature on their lives, but with Emmy she felt as if she didn’t have a choice. Something had to be done. “What is it, Emmy, that seems to haunt you so badly?”

  Emmy was startled by the question. “What do you mean? Didn’t you just say that everyone thinks I’ve been doing a good job?”

  “I’m not talking about the job,” the doctor sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “When you are talking to someone, I mean actively talking, you are involved, interested and, I would say, almost…perky.”

  Emmy cringed. Who wanted to be described as perky?

  “But,” Cathy continued, “when no one is looking, when you are alone in your office, you seem incredibly, I don’t know, sad? I used the word haunted, but it more like something is missing not lingering about you.”

  “How?”

  “These offices do have glass walls, you know?” she said drily.

  Emmy sat in stunned silence for a moment. Did it show so badly? She tried hard to keep her woes and pains to herself, especially since her friends had begun avoiding her and her morose behavior. She tried to be happy and, ugh, even perky. Had she failed so badly? But Dr. Lane had been more correct in her first descriptor. Emmy did feel haunted. Haunted
by the memories of Duart and of Connor.

  “See there it is again,” Cathy pointed out. “That look...I don’t know how to describe it. Incredibly sad. So!” she sat forward again and crossed her arms on the desk. “This is what I want you to do. Christmas is next week and other than those who are due in the next week, we have no appointments scheduled. Doctors Hamilton and Johnson will be taking the on call rotations…yes, I know you already volunteered, but that’s not going to happen…and you are taking the week off. If this is a guy-thing, then figure it out. If it’s something else, well, figure it out. I want you to be happy here, Dr. MacKenzie, and right now you just are not.”

  Emmy started to protest that, of course she was happy but her boss halted her with an upheld hand. “Take the time. Figure out what it is you really want.”

  “What I really want?” Emmy repeated as her most burning question again raised its head.

  “That’s right.”

  Emmy drove home that night with the words pounding in her head. ‘What I really want, what I really want…’ She had always wanted to be a doctor, always. And, after a long moment of examination, yes, she still did, she knew. It was her vocation, her calling. When she had been at Duart, though, it had been even more rewarding because the woman were so appreciative of her. Here it felt like the women considered good prenatal care their due and the doctor merely a tool to achieve what they wanted.

  The only other thing she really wanted…was Connor. “I want Connor,” she said aloud straightening in her seat. “I want Connor, I want Duart and if I have to take every nineteenth century passé piece of ancient technology that goes with it to have them, then that’s what I want too! I want gas lighting!” She pounded her fist against the steering wheel. “I want way too much food!” she pounded again. “I want nagging relatives, that stupid carriage and a sister who’s not really my sister!” She pounded the steering wheel again and again. “I even want my corset!” she yelled into the silence of her car.