Some like it scot, p.1
Some Like It Scot, page 1
Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook
Please note that the endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication
Dedication
To Beth Erin
Because of the Beards
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Graeme
Chapter 3: Katie
Chapter 4: Katie
Chapter 5: Graeme
Chapter 6: Katie
Chapter 7: Graeme
Chapter 8: Katie
Chapter 9: Graeme
Chapter 10: Graeme
Chapter 11: Katie
Chapter 12: Katie
Chapter 13: Graeme
Chapter 14: Graeme
Chapter 15: Katie
Chapter 16: Katie
Chapter 17: Graeme
Chapter 18: Katie
Chapter 19: Graeme
Chapter 20: Graeme
Chapter 21: Graeme
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Scottish Terms
About the Author
Acclaim for Pepper Basham
Other Books by Pepper Basham
Copyright
Prologue
I’d love to say I became famous because of my excellent writing skills.
Doesn’t that sound like a superb reason for fame? Or, at the very least, a wonderful way to pay the bills.
“Hi, my name is Katie Campbell, and I actually write well enough to pay my bills.” I know of dozens of excellent authors who’d love to make that claim.
But no, I am not one of the top travel writers for World on a Page’s international magazine because of my captivating prose (which is decent but not Austen) or my insightful descriptions (which I can do, sometimes) or my breathtaking narrative adventures (okay, breathtaking due to laughter). No, I am internationally known as a travel writer because of my misadventures.
These have garnered me the memorable and somewhat embarrassing moniker Miss Adventure and have led to my popular articles, a few documentaries, plus an award-winning podcast titled Where in the World Is Miss Adventure?
What could have initiated such a claim to fame? A series of mishaps crossing three different countries and consecutively involving a one-horned bull (now he has one horn), an engagement ring and a sand trap (the ring wasn’t for me), and a psychotic penguin (you had to be there).
I shouldn’t really be surprised. My grandpa used to say that the only grace I had was the grace of God. If he could see me now, he would proclaim himself a prophet, because who ever gets paid for their clumsiness? Or making mistakes? Or being ridiculous?
Me, y’all. It’s me. I’m the problem.
So here I am. Falling, quite literally most times, into life as a travel writer whose buffoonery makes money. Truth be told, trouble finds me in ways almost mythical. And though I enjoy a good laugh as well as the next person, living a story of successive blunders is starting to get a little old.
For me. Not the readers.
And to be honest, though the attention is nice, I’d really like to be known for more than my ineptitude, poor timing, and . . . bad luck. But traveling doesn’t really equate with staying anywhere long enough to belong, so until I can get my children’s books published, misadventures are my stories to tell.
And Miss Adventure . . . is me.
Chapter 1
“Traveling is what I do, Dave.” I pinched my phone between my shoulder and cheek, freeing my hands to grab my camera, and tapped my long-suffering taxi driver on the shoulder. “It’s why you pay me, remember?”
Archie sent me a good-natured squint over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. The friendly Scot had gotten accustomed to my picture-taking obsession about thirty minutes into our one-hour drive from the ferry drop-off on the Isle of Mull to my final location, Craighill House.
“And you’re great at it.” My boss’s tone clearly hinted at a teeny bit of frustration at my reticence. “But you’re also an excellent writer and encourager. You have a gift, and I’ve worked with you long enough to know you’d make a top-notch editor.”
I gestured toward the window with my camera, where a sliver of aqua river split rows of mossy green hills in a curvy line, all cloaked in a halo of late-morning sunshine and mist. Surely we couldn’t pass by the beauty without trying to capture another photo!
Archie pulled the taxi over to the side of the narrow road and met my gaze in the rearview mirror, a smile crinkling his face.
Well, at least he didn’t mind stopping every five minutes.
“The view,” I whispered. “Those hills, Archie!”
The driver offered an exasperated sigh tempered by the twinkle in his pale eyes. “It’s the same bràigh as before, lass.”
My grin took an upswing at the sound of the moniker. Why had I waited so long to take an assignment in Scotland? Me, of all people. A third-generation Scottish American! I really should be ashamed of myself. Especially when the burr of that word lass brought back all sorts of the best memories of summers with my grandparents. The resident twinkle in Archie’s eyes even looked a little like my grandpa’s.
“But it looks different from this angle,” I shot back, offering him a grin and an apologetic shrug before extracting myself from my seat belt. “Don’t want my faithful followers to miss out on the exquisite beauty of the Highlands now, do we?”
I heard Archie’s low chuckle brew beneath Dave’s response on the phone: “Exactly.”
Archie nodded and tapped his derby. “Dinnae fash yeself.” His smile was edged with mischief. “I got all day as long as you got the money.” He patted his digital meter on the dash and offered an impish wink.
I couldn’t help but laugh. If the rest of the Scots oozed with such welcome, spending three weeks here was sure to be a blast. And why shouldn’t Archie grin? My visceral need to take photos every five minutes earned him a pretty full purse!
“You’re great at getting new followers, and I’m not contesting that,” Dave continued as I slipped out of the cute, little blue Volkswagen into the breezy July air. You’re one of the best travel writers I have—probably the best at bringing in new readers for the magazine, both online and in print.”
“And why would you want to go messing with that success, Dave?” I switched the phone to speaker and tucked it into the top of my jeans so my hands were free to take photos, but truly, the pictures couldn’t do this landscape justice. The stark contrast between the foreboding brownish mountains in the distance with the fog-covered, lush emerald hills in the foreground, all topped by molten gold as sunshine squeezed through some remnant clouds? Breathtaking. Otherworldly. My travel blog readers—not to mention the magazine audience—were going to be ecstatic.
I flinched as the teeniest bit of longing hit me square in the chest out of nowhere. With a deep breath, I rubbed my fingers into the spot. Grief often came out of nowhere.
Grandpa and Gran would have loved to see this.
I shook away the unexpected pull to linger in the feelings—maybe even in the view—and redirected my squirrelly brain.
I didn’t linger places.
Never for very long.
Traveling is what I did. Traveling and story catching. Then I brought those adventures to life through words for others to experience. And I sometimes engaged in humorous misadventures along the way, which only increased ratings and readers.
These were only a few of the many reasons why Dave shouldn’t distract me with an editorial position.
Editor?
The word hinged in my brain with cautious—and maybe a little unwanted—curiosity. Like trying food from a jungle tribe in the Amazon. Fifty percent of the time it was going to be tasty. One hundred percent of the time you didn’t want to know what it was made of. But something about the idea of becoming an editor stirred a tiny bit of nervousness in my stomach.
“Because,” came his voice from the phone, “when you see someone with talent in the right places, you want to put them where they’ll make the greatest impact. If you were an editor, you’d improve half a dozen of our other writers within the first six months just because of your skills. That would increase our quality output exponentially.”
I lowered my camera and sighed, loud enough for him to hear.
“This is your boss speaking, Katie.” His tone deepened a little to prove his point. “With Carla retiring next month, I need someone with the skill set to take her place as associate editor for World on a Page. You’re my top choice. I don’t ever plan to ask you to stop traveling, but editing would give you the chance to grow as a writer and a professional. Give you some structure and options. Maybe even allow you to put down some roots.”
Roots? I had roots. Sort of. Back home in Waynesville, North Carolina. In fact, I’d inherited an entire family farm (which I barely saw) from my grandparents—a place that held some of my favorite childhood memories. Those two amazing people had offered a much-needed sanctuary from my childhood home life with a passive-absent dad and a super society-conscious mother. And expectations no one, except she, ever met.
“Whoa there, Dave.” I shook my head and took another photo. “I just turned twenty-eight. I don’t think I’ve met my expiration date just yet.”
“Seriously, Katie.” His voice softened, pricking at my conscience a lot more than the “boss” voice. “I want you to consider this. I really think it would be good for you.”
For some reason, when I thought “editor,” I pictured Dave, who looked like a classic fiftysomething, small-town car salesman, who was one of the best guys in town and lived in a white picket-fenced house with his lovely wife, two and a half kids, and a perfect dog.
Settled.
Older.
Which really was ridiculous because I knew it wasn’t true. So why did the idea stick like a splinter beneath my skin? Well, it was not so much annoying as . . . uncertain.
And this was coming from Dave, who’d basically mentored me from a crummy writer wannabe to now. He was a good-hearted, smart man who cared about me and my professional future. I couldn’t disregard his instincts or faith in me. Gran always said that listening to the people who knew us best was a sign of wisdom.
But . . . editing?
“I’ll think about it.” I pulled the phone close to my mouth. “But you have to promise I’ll still travel.”
“I promise—if that’s what you want.”
If that’s what I wanted? Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be?
“Over the next few weeks, I’m going to send some articles your way to edit.”
“What happened to me thinking about it?”
He didn’t even take the hint. “This assignment in Scotland sounds like you’ll have some free time, so when you’re not rummaging up stories or cosplaying like a Victorian, then you can stretch those editing muscles a little.”
“Dave, it’s the Edwardian time period, not Victorian. I’ve talked to enough historians to know it makes a difference. And it’s not cosplaying. The brochure states—several times—that it’s an Edwardian Experience.” Whatever that meant. “No lightsabers or hobbit cloaks.”
“You still dress in costume for a few weeks and pretend to be in a different era.”
Three weeks, to be exact—a fact that still felt a little weird. Since beginning the whole travel-writing gig, I’d been careful to keep all my assignments to a week, sometimes less. It reduced the mess. No hard goodbyes, no super-deep conversations.
But Mrs. Lennox, the creator of this new specialty holiday house, evidently had not only an extremely rich, overindulgent husband but one who held some surprising connections in the media world. So various available and quality media influencers from across the travel-writing community had received an invitation to join her on the Isle of Mull for a first look on how to “live as an Edwardian.”
With a media preview, especially if the reviews were good, Mrs. Lennox could start her new business on a successful trajectory. Word of mouth mattered. And influencers, bloggers, online personalities, and magazines had a way of making a big difference in spreading the news far and wide.
“Besides, you’re a big fan of all things quirky, and I think this place might be right up your alley.”
Quirky? To be fair, anyone who decided to re-create an entire era for tourists possessed a unique passion and determination that wasn’t exactly normal, but the way he said quirky raised my internal alarm.
I looked down at the phone in my hand, trying to decipher Dave’s comment. “How quirky?”
“I guess you’ll just have to find out.” Dave’s voice took on a chipper ring. “You live for the adventure, so I couldn’t think of a better person to represent World on a Page.”
“Dave?” My voice cracked slightly, even as my boss exuded confidence.
“I look forward to seeing your articles on this assignment, Katie. And those edits!”
Dave’s avoiding explanation did not bode well for my misadventuring future. “Do you know something about this place that I don’t?”
“Gotta run, Katie! Talk to you soon.”
“Dave!” I frowned down at the blank phone screen.
Not cool! Especially after I’d just been mentally praising his good-hearted attributes.
I raised my chin and stared back at the horizon.
I could handle quirky.
How bad could it really be? I’d been plenty of places, quirky and all, so a Downton Abbey cosplay didn’t sound all that bad. The dresses, the hats, the handsome men in eye-catching suits.
I shrugged away the doubt and took a few more photos before climbing back in the car. Archie greeted me with “Just let me know if ya need another snap or two. I got all day.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, fighting a smile. “I bet you do.”
He laughed before steering the car down the hill.
I avoided asking him to stop yet another time within five minutes, although the views kept captivating me. Something inexpressible wove among the forests and mountains of this place. A strange sort of magic. It had gripped me as soon as I’d stepped off the plane in Inverness and breathed the crisp, Scottish morning air for the first time. Kind of like that feeling I had right before a good cry when I wasn’t at liberty to let the tears free yet. Not bad necessarily. Not good either. From the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my grandpa (a proud Scots-Irish Presbyterian who owned a kilt, collected historic Scottish weapons, and played a bagpipe poorly) raved about this country of his kindred, so maybe a little bit of preconditioned déjà vu inspired the strange feelings coursing through me as we drove through the diverse countryside. But I couldn’t shake it.
I’d traveled to dozens of countries, stepped off even more airplanes, but had never felt as if I’d walked into a scene of my own life that had been waiting for me to live it.
Is it possible to feel a genetic link to a place you’ve never visited?
Whatever it was, some strange swoosh of welcome blasted through me as if every one of my grandfather’s ancestors had risen from their battlefield deaths and shouted a hearty and ironic, “Lang may yer lum reek!” a phrase Grandpa translated as “May you live long and prosper!”—a Scottish version of Star Trek’s Spock’s famous salutation.
Maybe “quirky” just went hand in hand with Scotland, which, for some reason, helped me feel even more prepared for the adventure ahead.
“You’ll have to visit Tobermory once you get tucked in, Ms. Campbell.”
I looked up from scanning over my photos and registered the village name in my mind from research. Aha! The capital of the small island.
“It’s the place with all the colorful houses along the coastline, isn’t it?”
“Aye,” came Archie’s warm reply. “But there are quite a few villages with the same. Glenkirk is no far from Craighill and is one of the few villages along Loch na Keal.”
With the island being so small, I didn’t imagine a massive number of villages, but as the hills grew in size and breadth, the wide-open emptiness of the vista resurrected the unsettling feeling I kept trying to ignore.
“There’s Briggs Mussel Farm,” Archie announced. “We’re close now.” He slowed the car’s speed for my ogling pleasure—and likely a few extra coins in his purse.
Another mussel farm. Probably the fourth one I’d seen since disembarking the ferry at Craignure. Yep, this island maintained its fishing town persona. Maybe that’s what gave it an untouched, old feeling.
The green hillsides framed the loch on two sides with taller, more barren mountains rising behind those in imposing hues of gray and olive. And yet, the desolation created its own sort of mesmerizing beauty.
I bit back another request to stop. Craighill House’s website mentioned that Glenkirk was only a mile away, and Salen another five after that, but more populous villages like Calgary and Tobermory were over fifteen and Dervaig was upward of twenty, so I’d have to hire a car to visit places like the capital of the isle and perhaps Iona.
Besides, within a couple of weeks, Tobermory would be hosting the Mull Highland Games, and my readers/followers would love an inside look at something as classically Scottish as the games. But for now it was time to settle into my temporary home and—I braced my shoulders—the early twentieth century.
We followed Loch na Keal for another mile, and then we turned toward a forest, slipping into the shadows of trees. For some reason, the sudden darkness of the forest closing in on all sides caused my spine to tingle. Anticipation? Warning? Something else?
