Read Chapter 7: A Man of the Earth

The knock came not at the gatehouse door but at the site office window, urgent and repeated. Eilidh looked up from the inventory ledger to find Angus, one of the estate’s two remaining shepherds, his face wind-reddened and grim.

“The east paddock fence is down,” he said through the glass. “The ewes are halfway to the loch, and the laird’s already out with the dogs, but he cannae manage forty head alone.”

Eilidh set down her pen. The morning had been meant for cataloguing timber decay in the turret. “The paddock fence—that’s the old drystone line near the burn?”

“Aye.” Angus shifted his weight. “The laird wouldnae ask, but I’m asking. We need hands.”

She grabbed her waxed jacket from the hook and followed him out into the grey Highland morning. The wind carried the smell of rain and sheep dung, and the hills rolled away from the castle in waves of heather and bracken, bruised purple and green beneath a low sky.

They found Hamish at the breach—a gap of some twelve feet where the ancient stone wall had given way, tumbled inward as if pushed by something larger than weather. He stood with his collie at his heel, muddy to the knee, his breath visible in the cold. When he saw Eilidh, his jaw tightened.

“Angus.” His voice was flat. “I asked you to fetch the spare fencing from the bothy.”

“Aye, and I fetched the laird’s spare hands instead.” Angus gestured at Eilidh. “She’s stronger than she looks, and faster than you on a slope.”

Hamish’s gaze swept over her, quick and assessing. She felt the weight of it—not hostile, exactly, but wary. The same look he’d given her in the east wing stairwell, his torchlight cutting through the dark between them.

“You don’t need to be here,” he said.

“You’re right,” Eilidh replied. “I’ve got three hundred linear feet of roofline to assess. But the sheep don’t care about my schedule, and neither, apparently, does the wall.”

Something flickered in his expression—surprise, perhaps, at her refusal to retreat. Then he nodded once, sharply. “Fine. Angus, take the dogs and circle round the east slope. Drive them back gentle. If you rush, they’ll scatter.”

Angus whistled and set off, the collie bounding ahead. That left Eilidh and Hamish alone at the breach, the wind singing through the gap.

“Can you rebuild drystone?” he asked.

“I can manage.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned and began gathering the fallen stones, sorting them by shape and size with practiced hands.

They worked in silence for a time. Eilidh quickly fell into the rhythm of it—selecting a stone, finding its seat, stacking and wedging until the courses rose steadily. It was honest work, and her hands remembered the motions from summers spent helping her father with similar repairs on lesser buildings. The stones were heavy and cold, and the ache in her shoulders was clean and welcome.

Hamish worked the other section of the gap, faster and more fluidly than she expected. He had the movements of a man who had done this all his life, though she knew from the estate records that he’d spent years away, in Edinburgh and abroad. She watched his hands from the corner of her eye—broad, scarred, sure.

The rain held off but the wind bit. After an hour, Hamish paused, straightening his back and pressing a hand to his ribs. Eilidh noticed the slight wince, the way he favoured his left side.

“Old injury?” she asked.

“Roof beam,” he said shortly. “Came down on me a few winters back. Reminds me of itself when the air’s cold.”

“Were you doing the work yourself, rather than hiring a crew?”

He looked at her oddly. “You wouldn’t be the first to think me a fool for it.”

“I didn’t say fool,” Eilidh said. “I said injured.”

He didn’t answer, but there was a shift in his posture—a fraction of tension released. He crouched and picked up another stone, then paused, holding it in his hands, turning it over.

“My grandfather taught me to build these walls,” he said, more to the stone than to her. “The old way. No mortar, no cement. Just the weight of each stone and the patience of the man placing it.” He set the stone in place, eased it down until it settled with a satisfying thunk. “He said a drystone wall is like trust. Each stone has to find its seat before you put the next one on. Rush it, and the whole thing comes down.”

Eilidh found a flat stone and seated it in her own course. “Sounds like a man who understood people.”

“He understood the land.” Hamish’s voice was rough but not unkind. “He knew that you don’t force a hill to be something it isn’t. You work with its shape, its faults, its weather.” He gestured out across the valley, where the sheep were beginning to mill back toward the gap, driven by Angus and the dogs. “That’s what people don’t understand about this place. It’s not a backdrop. It’s alive. It has moods and needs, and you have to listen or it will break you.”

“Is that why you resist the modernisation?” Eilidh asked. “Because you’re afraid of breaking it?”

The question hung between them. Hamish stared at the wall he was rebuilding, his hands stilled.

“The castle’s been here for six hundred years,” he said. “It’s seen wars and famines and kings come and go. It doesn’t need a heating system to survive. It needs to be left alone.” He looked at her then, and the frost in his eyes had thawed to something rawer. “Everyone who’s ever wanted to ‘improve’ Kintail has left it worse than they found it. I won’t be the laird who finishes the job.”

Eilidh held his gaze. The wind whistled through the half-repaired gap, and she was acutely aware of how close they stood—close enough to see the lines at the corners of his eyes, the grey threaded through his dark hair, the way his breath fogged in the cold.

“I’m not here to improve it,” she said quietly. “I’m here to understand it. They’re not the same thing.”

Hamish’s throat moved. He opened his mouth as if to speak—and then Angus’s shout came down the slope, sharp and urgent.

“Laird! The ewe at the burn—she’s stuck in the mud. Can’t get free.”

Hamish stepped back, the moment broken. He raised a hand in acknowledgment. “I’m coming.” Then he looked at Eilidh, and something older and harder settled back over his features. “Finish the course. I’ll see to her.”

He walked away without another word, his stride long and determined, the collie appearing at his side as if summoned by pure will.

Eilidh watched him go. The wall was nearly rebuilt, her hands were raw, and her heart was beating faster than the work justified. She told herself it was the climb, the cold, the exertion. It wasn’t.

She placed the last stone in her course and worked it until it sat true, then stepped back to inspect the repair. It aligned well with Hamish’s section—two different pairs of hands, but the same rhythm. The same trust in the stone.

She was about to gather her tools when she noticed something gleam amid the rubble just beyond their repair—a small object half-sunk in the mud, as if it had been embedded in the fallen wall’s core and dislodged when the stones gave way. Eilidh knelt and pulled it free. It was a woman’s brooch, tarnished silver, set with a stone that caught the weak light—garnet or deep ruby, dark as dried blood. The design was intricate, thistle and rose intertwined around a small crest.

She turned it over. On the back, scratched into the metal in letters too worn to make out fully, was an inscription. She read what she could: *For A——, who waits beyond the wall.*

The brooch was old. Possibly very old. Possibly from the same era as the Lady’s Keep.

Eilidh pocketed it quickly as Hamish’s figure disappeared over the rise. The scratching from the east wing—she’d heard it again last night. And now this, from the boundary wall, as if the land itself was offering up clues.

They said the castle had secrets. But maybe the secrets weren’t only in the castle.