Page 13 of Some Like It Scot
My attention snapped back to his eyes as sweltering heat coursed up my neck into my face and nearly evaporated through my eyeballs. “Um... you’redressedlike a servant.”
“I’m a tradesman.” One of his dark brows needled northward. “BBC doesn’t teach you everythin’, Duchess.” He ground out the last word like an oath and dipped his head, as if that made his behavior all better.
I stood up to my full height, which usually gave me more confidence than it currently did. “I’m... a writer.” But with a baseball cap, jeans, and sneakers, the argument didn’t quite sting. “Not a duchess.”
Which fell flat, even to my ears.
He enacted the most impressive eye roll I’d ever witnessed, then released a growl—or that’s what it sounded like—along with a grumbled string of words I couldn’t understand. Giving me as wide a berth as a massive man and a stair railing could, he walked toward the ballroom.
I glared at the back of his head. “If you’re going to insult me, at least do it in English.”
And with a little twinge in my chest of something I couldn’t quite identify and a glance back toward the disappearing giant, I marched directly out the back door toward Glenkirk and far away from grumpy Scots, arrogant sportswriters, and the promise of another embarrassing experience.
The fresh air slowed my pulse and pace as I stepped over the threshold from the house on the walking path through Craighill’s back garden. Seven years as a travel writer taught me to heed that inner navigator and breathe in the day. Most of my best stories happened in the unplanned moments, and I tried to keep an eye out for the untold tales and less-trodden trails.
So I took a fistful of that experience to heart and pushed away my worries about Mark and the unsettling leftovers from Brett’s call and stepped forward. A motto for life.Move forward.
Too many things in the past only slowed me down anyway.
So I embraced the moment. The early July breeze against my cheeks. The glints of sun through a veil of intermittent clouds. A slight mist sprinkling my face and the sweet scent of—what was it? Almonds and honey? A burst of white flowers clung to the rock garden wall lining the path toward a grassy field. In fact, though part of the wall disappeared beneath an overgrowth of vines and a few wild roses, my gaze trailed the length of the expanse, and the breadth of the garden took full shape.
What must it have once looked like? Because, from a little Google searching, it had been built in 1800 as the pride and joy of some great Scottish military guy named Duncan MacKerrow. I’d always bragged that the house I’d inherited from my grandparents was pretty old as a 1915 two-story brick farmhouse, but Europeredefinedoldfor me. In fact, Craighill stood as a relatively young structure in the UK.
The garden path spilled out into a vast glen, the beauty of which caused me to pause my steps. My breath caught. A lush hillside slanted down to Loch na Keal, and hugging the edge of the water stood a line of brightly colored buildings, just like photos I’d seen of other Scottish places like Tobermory or Portree. Quaint, colorful, and waiting for a visit.
The path wove through a glorious field that looked like a carpet of gold. What a combination. Blue loch, green hillsides, azure sky, and a field of... I drew closer.
Buttercups.
Thousands of them blanketed the way toward Glenkirk, and the picture settled somewhere deep in my heart. With sloped mountains in the distance and a wide, blue sky paired with the golden field and colorful buildings, I thought for a moment that I’d stepped into a childhood story.
Grandpa had often commented on how the Blue Ridge Mountains reminded him of his childhood home in the Scottish Highlands. There was a similarity to the sloping backdrop of valleys, hills, and occasional rocky edges, but this landscape held an even more ruggedly beautiful aspect. And vastness with an ancientness I could feel almost bone deep.
I took some photos and short videos to use for later, then jotted down a few notes in my notebook before taking the path down the hill. A quiet surrounded the view unfolding before me, and I could even hear the wind move through the grass. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d experienced such stillness. The world slowed down. I felt it in some strange way, like I felt the sluggishness of sleep start to take hold while sitting by the fire during an evening rain. And underneath the quiet, a strange sort of calm soothed me like nothing I’d ever known. Not exactly like sleep, but more like... well... like a loving caress over my soul.
Almost as if I knew this place. Like I’d breathed the air before.
But that was ridiculous. I’d seen hundreds of breathtaking views, some even more so than this one, but here in this place I felt an inexplicable tug toward memory and life and... what else?
I paused on the trail, wrangling a sudden rush of emotion under control. Grandpa’s memory always hovered close, but ever since I’d stepped into his ancestral country, thoughts of him seemed nearer. I wrapped my arms around myself in a hug, bracing my heart for the squeeze of pain. The thinnest tether binding me to those Blue Ridge Mountains had snapped when my grandparents died. The sense of belonging to a place and people where I could just be myself had dissolved with each passing year that separated me from their hugs.
My sister’s face rushed to my mind, unbidden, and my whole body tensed against the onslaught of failures. Of lostness. Of unspoken words and impossible expectations.
I shook away the thoughts and raised my camera for another photo or two, capturing the present. The moment. The beauty right in front of me.
As an adult, I rarely gave much credit to what Mom said, but in one thing she was absolutely right.
“You can’t change the past, so just leave it be.”
The village looked much closer than the half hour it took me to get to the first building on the main street. I traversed over damp ground and a bog that soaked my tennis shoes to such an extent that water squished out of the sides of them with each step I took along the pavement.
The effect of the rainbow buildings separated by a cobblestone street from the dark waters of Loch na Keal proved a striking example of nature and humans meeting in the middle to create a beautiful combination. The buildings of Glenkirk poised along the right side, and on the left a small man-made rock ledge lined with flowers buffered the street from a drop into the loch.
In America there probably would have been a guardrail to block folks from taking a fun tumble into the water, or if legend held, from being pulled under by a murderous mermaid or kelpie. But here it seemed the folks favored more natural beauty and less intrusion—either that or not enough people had fallen into the loch to cause a problem.
The shops looked even cuter close up, and a few small boats wobbled in the gentle waves of the loch. As my next step squished and my cold toes begged for relief, I scanned the nearest buildings for evidence of the shops’ contents. Only nine or ten shops lined the road with a few more scattered along the hillside behind. They were different heights and widths, but all the same general boxy shape with white-framed windows surrounded by colors of teal, red, or yellow. I figured that since it rained so much in Scotland, the natives tried whatever they could to brighten up the atmosphere. Which made me like them even more. I was a sucker for dedicated optimists.
The Glenkirk Inn stood as one of the tallest buildings at the edge of the street, each of the windows on its three stories curtained with a patchwork of different patterns. A post office came next, followed by Lochside Café and then some sort of all-purpose shop called The Scot. Shona’s Bakehouse and Sweeties was squeezed in between a charity shop called Second Go ’Round and The Haverin’ Magpie, which didn’t open until later in the day.
