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With Scott’s further directions, Bec drove to the hiding place for the vehicle, while Scott and Caitlin continued to walk the horses. Once they met up with Bec, they hid the car behind the copse of Scots pines next to Scott’s vehicle, and they walked home together. Bec looked appreciatively at the cottage and its out-houses and vegetable patch. Brendan greeted them at the backdoor where a pile of windmill parts and the equipment for its assembly lay against the back wall of the cottage.
“I want to get going on installing this windmill, ye ken,” Scott said. “But we must secure these animals in permanent shelters first.”
They unloaded the horses, rubbed them down and placed them in the yard until dusk, then led them into their cosy lean-to stable. They would house the goat and the chickens in their cages in the laundry until Scott made safe enclosures for them.
“That laundry will stink!” Caitlin commented as she walked past her husband at the backdoor. “No more spontaneous sex against a wall for a while then?” she whispered.
The edges of Scott’s mouth curled as he continued out the backdoor without commenting.
***
AS CAITLIN LOOKED AT her clothes in the 1960s style dresser in Scott’s room, now their room officially, a half smile came to her lips. The furniture was a musty, eclectic collection of mismatched styles. Scott had bought clothing her size and preferred style, enough to last for years. She held a red see-through negligee up to herself and turned to him.
“You prefer me in something like this, do you?” she kept her voice soft, conscious of their new friends in the next room.
“Well, in the future, we don’t have any good clothing, ye ken. So, I thought it would be nice to, for once.” Scott dragged his jumper off over his head, his hair now untidy. His T-shirt followed.
There were two very good dresses, like those in her previous wardrobe. Those clothes were sure to have been stolen with the ransacking of Uncle Kieran’s Country Estate. A knot of warmth lodged in the centre of her chest. When Scott bought these clothes, he had considered her taste for fashion.
“Scott, today you stared down those troublemakers. They could’ve injured or shot you, if they had firearms and were willing to use them. It scared me. They might have killed you.” He moved to stand with her. “Well, I realised if you had died,” Caitlin put her arms around him and tilted her head back to look him in the eye, “I’d have never told you I love you. And I do. Love you, that is.”
“Aye, I ken ye do.” Scott’s expression softened. His warm arms encircled her. “It was inevitable really. Ye fell in love with me in the future, so why would ye no’ fall in love with me in the past? We were made for each other, Caitlin Murray-Campbell, no matter what age we are, or what era we are in, we belong together.” Scott placed his mouth on hers and pressed gently, then pulled back and rubbed her nose with his. “And I love you. Always and forever only yours.” His eyes smiled. “Ye said that to me when we were married, the first time.”
“Did I?” Caitlin liked the sound of it. Maybe it was something she would say. She held his gaze. “Everything you have done shows me how much you love me. And, you know you passed the test?” She fiddled with his chest hair.
“What test?” Scott frowned.
“Doing all you could to legally marry me was like the final test, to see if you were genuine or not.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yes. Then I could be sure you didn’t just want me for sex.”
***
“YE WILL HAVE TO BE a little quieter now we have visitors in the next room, wife of mine,” Scott whispered into her ear after they had made love. Caitlin lay in the crook of his arm, her head on his chest. “The walls are thin. They are only a partition to make this end of the crofter’s cottage into two bedrooms.”
“I’m not loud, am I?” Caitlin put a hand over her mouth.
“Aye, ye are. You probably dinnae realise it when ye are in the throes of ecstasy.” His eyebrows raised as he spoke, and his mouth developed into a grin.
Caitlin’s cheeks heated, and the edges of her mouth turned up slightly. Then she remembered something. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to say this to you. You know when we were sitting around the campfire last night and I spoke about preserving what was good for the future?”
“Aye.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to make it sound like they were all my ideas. We’d spoken about it together and they were as much your thoughts as mine. But I wasn’t quick enough to think of a way to say this without giving you away, so I said nothing, as you know. But I don’t want you to think I meant they’re all my ideas.” She leaned on him, to look directly at him.
“That’s okay Caitlin, for they are all your ideas. You’re the one who instigated the Community set up and influenced other survivors to do the same and ensured the preservation of knowledge and skills. Ye made sure people stayed educated and healthy. It was all you and your team. I heard it all from you.”
“But I’ve heard it all from you!”
Scott shrugged. “Dinnae ken how it works, lass. Just telling you how it happened.”
He pressed his lips to hers and eased her on to her back then he moved his lips to her breasts and worked his way along her torso, resting his lips above her pubic hair, where he spent some time kissing her belly.
Caitlin flinched. “Why are you focussing on there!”
Scott raised his head to look her in the eye. “That’s where our bairns will come from.”
“Oh, I am still a bad mother!” she cringed. “Tell me about our children!”
“Ye are not a bad mother, that’s for sure. You have other things on your mind at present.”
“Tell me about Angela. She’s our eldest, right?”
“Aye, and a chip off the old block, she is too! She’s you, with long red hair! A natural leader. Ye groomed her and she’ll have a place in the Chief Council now that you’ve...”
“Now I’m dead?”
“Aye. In the future.” His eyebrows drew together.
They were silent for some moments, Caitlin so conscious of Scott’s pre-knowledge of her future.
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen.” Scott moved back to be face-to-face with her.
“We’ve been married twenty years, and she’s nineteen? We didn’t wait long.”
“We conceived Angela on our wedding night.”
“What about the others? You said we have four boys.” She asked swiftly. She winced at the knot in her stomach. Why was she feeling uncomfortable? Was it because he was quite young when they married? Or was it the idea of parenthood? But that was ages away.
“Aye, the twins are eighteen. Callum and Rory. Big strong boys. Take after me. They’re in the Militia. They’re both musical too. Rory lives up to his name. Ye ken we chose it because it means red king, aye? Well, he’ll probably take over from ...” he trailed off again.
“Take over from whom?” She prodded him with her finger, and he flinched.
“From me eventually, I was going tae say. But now I’m no’ there, and he’s no’ ready yet, I dinnae ken.” Scott absent-mindedly rubbed where she had poked.
“You’re a king?”
“No, I’m the leader of the Militia. Was.” He took a thoughtful breath. “Rory’s a redhead too. Ye have redheads in your family, aye?” Caitlin nodded. “Then we had Ceilidh,” he tilted his head, “who lives up to her name and is the life of the party. Neither of us ken where she came from!” Scott chuckled. “She’s also musical, and she plays with Callum and sings. She has a braw voice, aye. Ye made sure people had music. Got those who could play and had an instrument to teach the children and those who wanted to learn. Ye were most particular that music was nae lost.”
Caitlin silently shook her head with each recollection.
Did she? How did she? She must remember all of this.
“Then we had the other two boys. More twins! First Brendan, named after his Uncle Brendan.” He raised his eyebrows in response to her frown. “Aye, the very same Brendan in the next room to us as we speak. Mind, I told you we got on well with them?” He crossed his feet at the ankles, and he jiggled them as he spoke. “Then Murray, named for obvious reasons. Now, he’s the scholar of the lot o’ them. Our sixteen-year-old is a mathematician. Were ye good at maths? For I was nae,” he continued without giving her time to reply. “He followed what Martin, your cousin and our physicist, was spouting aboot. Did nae understand a word o’ it mysel’. Then our baby, Kelly.” His smile broadened. “She’s a braw lass. I felt the closest to her. Maybe because I spent more time with you and her when ye were sick, aye. We got close, ken?”
The rise and fall of her chest increased its rate as her subconscious spun with concern. It pierced through to her conscious thoughts.
What if they change things and that future never happens? And those children are never born?
No answer came, just the pounding pulse in her temples. She lay silent, not wanting to dispel the happiness his reverie gave him.
Scott paused blinking; his eyes moist.
“You left them, to come to me!” Her throat tightened with a mixture of guilt and sadness for him. He missed them.
“Aye, but they are almost grown. They were okay with it. Or would be once they found out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kelly would’ve explained it to them. You remember I said I went straight from your deathbed to The Time Machine?” Scott paused as he seemed to be inwardly recalling the events of that particular day. “I had nae told a soul what I’d planned. Might’ve hinted at it to Rory. But Kelly knew. She followed me, stopped me in the corridor before I got to the barn where the machine was set up, handed me your ring and said, ‘Give it to Mum when you see her.’” His voice held a note of wonder as he stared at the ceiling. “Aye, Kelly will explain it to them.”
Scott looked at her so abruptly she flinched.
“Ye must have told Kelly. You knew I would go, but ye never said a word to me, lass.”