ONE
There’s nothing quite like a Highland wedding. I say this as if I’ve been to dozens. I’ve gone to two, both times as my grandmother’s plus-one, attending the weddings of happy couples I’d never actually met and had to keep checking a note on my phone to remember who they were.
This time it’s different. Okay, I’m still a plus-one. And I still don’t know the happy couple. But instead of keeping notes on my phone, I have them written on a piece of paper, stuffed deep into the voluminous pockets of my equally voluminous layers of Victorian dress.
The last wedding I went to in the Scottish Highlands was June 2016. This one is also taking place in June… 1870.
There’s a story there. A long one. The short version is that I passed through time at the fickle whim of some unknown cosmic force. My nan named that force Fate and said I am exactly where I was always supposed to be. Which is apparently in the body of a buxom blond twenty-year-old housemaid instead of an athletic brunette thirty-one-year-old police detective.
I have yet to appreciatethatpart of the switch, but I must appreciate where else I landed—in the household of a chemist and her doctor-turned-undertaker brother, who works in early forensic science. Along with their police-detective friend, they know my story, so I’m no longer scrubbing chamber pots. I’m the assistant to that forensic scientist, Dr. Duncan Gray.I’m also, apparently, his plus-one for this wedding, which is for Detective Hugh McCreadie’s younger sister… Iona? Fiona? It’s in my notes.
At the moment, we’re in a coach, heading into the countryside. For propriety’s sake, Gray should sit beside his sister, but since no one can see us in here, we’ve maneuvered McCreadie to sit beside Isla instead. He’s across from me—to make room for both Isla’s skirts and mine—and Gray is beside me, separated by a decorous handspan gap between my skirts and his thighs.
I’m wearing a traveling dress, which means shorter skirts and extra petticoats for warmth. My bustle pad makes the jostling journey more comfortable. I’m warm and snug, and it would be lovely, if not for the atmosphere.
Any other time, we’d be chattering away, excited about a rare country holiday. Instead, it feels as if we’re going to a funeral, everyone somber and staring out windows, with Isla occasionally casting anxious glances at McCreadie.
This is not four friends off to a rousing Highland wedding. It’s three friends going along to support the fourth—McCreadie—who looks like he’d rather be at work.
I don’t know why McCreadie is estranged from his family. Now that we’ve all become friends, I think I could get that information easily, but they seem to have forgotten that I don’t know, and it’s awkward to ask. So I’ve been playing detective, putting together the puzzle pieces.
I know McCreadie’s family is well-to-do. Upper middle class, like the Grays. That’s how the boys became friends—they attended the same school. Despite the estrangement, McCreadie is still well-off for a police detective—criminal officer, as they’re called in Victorian Scotland. I suspect he receives some family money. I know the break happened when he’d been in his early twenties, around the time he became a police officer, which is also around the time he’d broken off an engagement. I don’t know how these three things—the law-enforcement career, the broken engagement, and the familial estrangement—are connected, but I suspect they are.
As for his family, he has one sibling—the sister getting married, who is significantly younger. Like Gray, McCreadie is thirty-one, and his sisterseems to be about twenty-one. In the modern world, we sometimes get the impression that Victorian women were all married off at eighteen. In reality, McCreadie’s sister is marrying at what’s considered the perfect age, as it was for most of the twentieth century.
Any ill blood between McCreadie and his family doesn’t extend to his sister, which is why we’re here. She asked—begged—him to come, and so he has, for her.
Now we’re rumbling along in this coach with our groom, Simon, driving and the thirteen-year-old parlormaid, Alice, riding beside him, having been invited ostensibly as Isla’s lady’s maid, but really to give the girl a holiday in the countryside.
When Isla casts yet another anxious glance McCreadie’s way, I decide it’s up to me to break this ice, which I do in the most time-honored of road-trip ways.
“Are we there yet?” I say, peering through the dusty window. “It’s so much faster with the bridge.”
That gets McCreadie’s attention. There are people who are good at long, morose silences—such as the guy sitting beside me—but McCreadie fairly leaps on this excuse, his handsome face lightening in a smile.
“Bridge?” he says. “Over the Forth?”
“Yep.”
“How is that even possible?”
“I’m not an engineer,” I say. “But there’s also a railroad bridge that I’m pretty sure gets built in this century.”
“They are starting one next year,” rumbles a voice beside me.
I glance over to see Gray, relaxing with his eyes still shut.
I elbow him. “Tell us more.”
He sighs. “I do not know more. I only heard that they are beginning a suspended bridge for trains.”
I frown. “Are you sure? I don’t think they start construction until near the end of this century.” I pause, thinking hard. “No, they did build another one, but it coll—” I snap my mouth shut. “Never mind.”
Isla’s brows rise. “Are you suggesting that if another bridge is built first, we should not use it?”
“Er, probably not.”
“Well, I for one might be willing to play the odds, if such a thing comes about,” McCreadie says. “Taking the ferry really does make this an interminable trip. Dare I ask how long it would take in your day, Mallory?”
