Free Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall Page A

man. Antiseizure medicine has in my adult life taken its toll on desire. As Oliver was wont to point out. But the choice was between a conscious wife and a randy one, and in the end, with all the demands of being a wife and mother, the sterile one took hold. But in my dream, with my hands on their way to Fergus’s hair, sterile was the last thing I was feeling. For the first time since Ellie died, I caught a small intimation of hope just below the breastbone.
    Jim Galvin appears in my window, taking with him my medieval scene. I’m sure I look at him a bit impatiently, because, as I say, I do not possess a face for socialgames, a disadvantage for the most part, but I suspect it’s not something Jim cares about.
    “I saw you coming down from the hill last night,” he says. “What were you doing up there so late?”
    I look at him to size up the possibility of his not thinking I am completely out of my mind if I tell him the truth, but decide I don’t want to tempt fate. “Running around in my underwear?”
    He laughs. “Oh, is that all?”
    He stands around creating the kind of pause that makes anyone of British origin need to bring up the topic of tea. “Want a cuppa?”
    He nods. “Would you warm up the milk, though? I like a really hot cup of tea.”
    I laugh. “That’s a new one.”
    Winnie the cat arches her back next to the purple lit kettle, and then sidles over to be stroked.
    “You’ll never get rid of that one now,” Jim says.
    I want to tell him that I don’t want to get rid of her, that I quite enjoy her company, actually, but I can see that I am not fitting in with the country way of looking at cats. I am after all a girl from Glasgow Toun, where cats live in tenement windows among the potted plants.
    “She’s all right,” I say, “keeps me company.”
    Jim gives me a look as if to say he’d be better company, and no doubt he would, but I am quite sure, desire or no desire, I wouldn’t welcome his hand about my crotch.
    I hand him his tea in a white mug with ALBA on it in red lettering. “What do you think they used to drink on the fort when it wasn’t wine?”
    He balances the mug in his palm. “Tea?”
    I throw him a sarcastic smile. “Very funny. Something else alcoholic.”
    When he looks over to the window, I see that he has a good profile. “Oh, you mean fraoch, the heather beer.”
    That would account for the earthy taste. I laugh. “I expected it to be whisky of some sort. Did that not come up with the Scottish hills?”
    Jim shakes his head. “Whisky? No, that came up with the monasteries. They were the ones with the distilleries, you understand.”
    I watch him sip his tea, and then swill it around inside his cup, as though he were reading something in it.
    I say, “I don’t suppose you know if the sea ever came up to Dunadd?”
    He looks at me for a moment. “Have you read that article, then?”
    I shake my head.
    He clears his throat. “One of the lords of the estate, a Colonel Malcolm proposed just such a thing, that the sea used to come up here. It was in The Royal Geographical Journal, I have it back at the house, now that I think of it. He thought that an earthquake some time in the eighth century tilted the land and sent the sea out to Crinan Bay.”
    Jim slips back into his slot. “It was way back at the turn of the century, though, and, by all accounts, the man was a bit of a nutter. Nobody took it seriously.”
    In my dream, the nutter wasn’t so nutty. From what I saw, he was right on the money.
    Jim says, “Why do you ask?”
    I shrug. “An earthquake, though?”
    “Oh, there were earthquakes, all right. At the time, earthquakes were recorded on the island of Islay and several in Ireland, one even causing a kind of tidal wave.”
    I can’t find anything to say as we finish our tea. It’s all too strange, this. After all, I was only in a dream. I suppose the case for the sea at Dunadd is fairly obvious and could have occurred to me anyway.
    “Look,” I