Page 53 of Scotlander

Chapter Nineteen

Finn pulled up the zip on his wax jacket, grateful for its warmth. The sun had long since dipped below the horizon giving more room for the autumn chill to set in.

‘So . . .’ Orla drew out the word in a jolly sing-song as she took a big scoop of steaming cottage pie and charged Willa’s plate. ‘How was everyone’s day?’

The response was muted at best, apart from Alastair who shouted, ‘I’m pure done in, lass! Gie’us seconds on that grub, will ya?’

Orla tsked and told him he’d have to wait for all of the guests to be served so he turned his energies to translating what he’d just said to ChiChi.

If anyone had told Finn he’d be spending his October holidays participating in a handfasting ceremony with a lippy entertainment reporter from Los Angeles, he would’ve laughed until he wept.

And yet, here he was, among a crowd of folk in olden days gear, acting as if everything was perfectly normal. He still couldn’t believe they hadn’t figured out it was a set-up. Orla’s ‘genius’ plan to keep the farm ticking over until they got the broken harvester fixed. He was amazed no one had baulked when they found out the castle was a ruin, that they’d be staying in repurposed horse stalls. Not to mention the fact they’d literally been doing farm chores today. Sure, there’d been the handfasting ceremony and Orla had pulled it out of the bag with the AmDram costumes, but when they figured out the reason they were here was because their ‘Jacobean experience’ was paying for replacement parts for a modern day tattie harvester? It wasn’t worth thinking about.

He looked round the courtyard. A couple of folk were washing up at a small hand pump, others were queuing, tin plates in hand, waiting for steaming servings of cottage pie (Orla didn’t do itty-bitty modern-cuisine-type servings), a few more were already parked on stumps pulled up close to the firepit, visibly mustering the energy to offer a few words of thanks before they fell to eating. Even Willa, who’d kept up an impressive stream of sarcastic comments throughout the day, was now silent. She was, he was pleased to see, sitting near Gabe and Lachlan.

He had to hand it to Orla: if this were a painting, it would sing of days gone by. And while they all looked tired, no one looked unhappy. The tableau of weary tourists reminded him of the terrible paintings his mum used to pick up in car boot sales to hang in the barns so ‘the cows had something to look at through the winter’. Duncan had taken them all down when she’d passed. As if his mum’s bin-end purchases had offended him all along.

Finn framed the real life ‘painting’ with his hands. If it had a name, it’d be called Exhausted Workers Returning From the Fields. He cleared his throat. Something like that, anyway.

When he caught Willa looking at him, he turned his hands round and pretended he’d been picking dirt out of his nails.

She gave him a little smile then went back to eating. His focus stayed on his hands. They were not city slicker’s palms. They were work worn. Scarred in places, used to mucking in whenever and wherever they were required. Farming wasn’t for the precious, and, fair play, these folk, they weren’t complaining. Not one of them had asked to change out of their cumbersome, unfamiliar costumes. Or said they were too cold or that the work was too hard. Even Willa who, bless her, was in a permanent state of conflict with her bodice and who he knew for a fact had acquired some new blisters today.

As he ran his thumbs over the calluses on his palms, he caught himself smiling at a long-forgotten memory. He’d been ten, maybe. Eleven? His hands had been covered in blisters after a full day of mucking out the barn. He’d been all begritten, complaining loudly that he should be let off his evening chores because he was walking wounded. Fair enough, son, his dad had said. He’d turned to walk away as if the matter was settled, then turned back and asked him if he wanted happy cows. He’d said aye, ’course he did. The herd was brand new then. A ‘starter pack’ of three cows and calves bought down in Kirkcudbright, the ‘birthplace of the Belted Galloway’.

Next, his dad asked him if he wanted a baked potato for his tea . . . straight from the bonfire he’d just been tasked with putting together. He’d said aye, ’course he did. They were his favourite. And then his father had asked him if he’d wanted to feel the pride of knowing he’d been the one to make all of those good things happen . . . with his hands. Even though they were tired, and sore and the plasters kept coming off.

He’d said nothing then, but had wrapped his hands up with tape, pulled on a pair of oversized gloves and got to work. That evening’s baked potato still ranked up there as one of the best he’d ever had.

That night, as he, his mum and father were eating, his father renamed chores Farm Delights. He said if they were going to be doing something for the rest of their lives, knowing they’d never be able to cross off the final item on a to-do list because there would always be one more thing to do, he wanted it to sound fun.

In a weird way Willa reminded him of his dad. Always able to find the silver lining, even though this trip was clearly not what she’d thought it would be.

If he had the stomach for it, he’d ask her to put a spin on bringing his cattle to market.

Even thinking about loading up the girls knocked the oxygen out of him. Over twenty years of building the herd and in the time it took for a gavel to hit the auctioneer’s desk – poof! – they’d be gone. Then the pigs. Then the sheep. Everything would have to go. Feed prices were through the roof. And the return they got at market wasn’t worth it.

But if selling the animals meant they could get in the all-important harvest, it was a sacrifice he’d have to make.

Finn cleared his throat and, after a want some? glance from Orla, took a plate and joined the group by the fire.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt like such a weakling,’ Jules said with a stretch and a yawn. ‘And I haul twenty-five-kilo sacks of flour around all day.’

‘Dinnae listen to her. She’s absolutely brilliant.’ Blair gave Jules a friendly elbow in the ribs. ‘I’ve not seen someone tackle a bramble pile the size of a caravan with such ferocity before. Belongs on my rugby team, she does.’

They grinned at each other, then began showing off the various injuries they’d received courtesy of the brambles.

‘What about you, ChiChi?’ Rosa asked. ‘How’d you and Alastair get on?’

‘Well . . .’ ChiChi threw her unlawfully wedded husband a playful grin. ‘I think it would be fair to say that he is far better at dealing with dark matter than I am.’

After calls for an explanation, Alastair took over. ‘We needed to change the oil in the tractor and ChiChi here thought it’d be a great idea to step in the grease pan after I was finished.’ Amidst a chorus of Oh no!’s and Are you okay?’s Alastair continued, ‘You cannae see it, but she’s got an egg-sized lump on the back of her head.’ He shook his head, pointed at Gabe with his fork, then Jules, and, in a perfectly amiable voice said, ‘You lot are definitely injury prone.’

‘Hey!’ Lachlan protested. ‘Gabe didn’t knock himself—’

‘I’m fine,’ Gabe cut in.

Out of the corner of his eye, Finn caught Willa stiffen. She focused on her meal, missing Gabe putting his hand on Lachlan’s knee and giving him a small it-wasn’t-her-fault shake of the head.