Page 1 of Here in Your Arms (Far From Home: A Scottish Time-Travel Romance #10)

University of Glasgow, Special Collections Office

1978

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The rain in Glasgow had a way of making everything look older, like the past was still alive and just waiting to be uncovered. Rose Carlisle tilted her umbrella against the wind and hurried up the worn stone steps of the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections Department. The grand Gothic architecture, with its towering spires and endless stone corridors, never failed to stir something deep in her. From the moment she’d first nervously pushed through the door of the building, she’d felt as if she’d belonged.

When she first applied for the Quarter Abroad Program through the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, she never thought she’d actually be accepted, let alone assigned to work in the archives of one of Scotland’s most prestigious universities. But here she was, twenty-one years old, three thousand miles from home, touching history with her own hands.

She paused at the heavy wooden door, giving her coat a sharp shake to rid it of the lingering rain before stepping inside. The smell of old parchment, ink, and dust clung to the air, a scent Rose Carlisle had grown to love.

Moving through the open foyer, her boots tapped softly against the polished hardwood as she followed the long corridor toward the rear of the building, where the interns' offices were tucked away.

She was just returning from a late lunch—an unconscious habit at this point. More often than not, she was too absorbed in her work to think about eating, losing hours at a time sifting through ancient manuscripts. Tea, at least, was a staple in the office, steeped regularly enough that she never went too long without something warm to sustain her.

Lately, she had fallen into a predictable rhythm, ducking out late in the afternoon, grabbing a quick sandwich from the café across the street, and returning well before her official break was up. She rarely used the full hour she was entitled to. And, just as often, like tonight, she had no intention of leaving anytime soon.

There was so much work to be done, but that wasn’t the only reason she stayed. It wasn’t just guilt over the sheer volume of uncatalogued collections or the knowledge that there would never be enough hands to sort through it all. Rose happily and voluntarily put in many extra hours every week because she loved this work. Because every ledger, every brittle parchment, every forgotten artifact felt like a bridge between past and present. She was driven not by obligation, but by curiosity, by the thrill of peeling back layers of time and uncovering voices long since silenced. It was more than a job. And when she was here, surrounded by centuries-old manuscripts and the quiet hum of history, she felt like she was exactly where she was meant to be.

It wasn’t all glamorous, of course. Most of it was tedious, painstaking work—hours spent sifting through barely legible scrawl, cross-referencing documents, or attempting to decipher crumbling pages eaten away by time. Some days were outright boring, filled with nothing but inventory lists and financial ledgers, the kind of records that only mattered to the long-dead men who kept them.

But even then, she loved it. Because every now and then, buried among the dry notations and endless accounts, she would find something—a personal letter, a forgotten name, a glimpse of a life lived centuries ago. Those were the moments that made it all worth it. The thrill of discovery, the quiet magic of uncovering a story that no one had read in hundreds of years.

The office was settling for the evening, the rhythmic tapping of typewriters slowing, the shuffle of papers fading as professors and archivists packed up for the night.

Rose set her crocheted purse down at her desk and flopped into her chair, considering the legal pad of notes she’d left next to her typewriter. There, she’d made herself a list of projects for the week and consulted the next item on her list. She loved crossing things off her list—however, it normally took days to make one simple scratch across the paper, the jobs usually being days and not only hours of work.

Across the room, Dr. Eleanor Fraser, Rose’s mentor and supervisor, sat at her desk, stubbing out a cigarette in an already full ashtray. Dr. Fraser—brilliant, eccentric, and practically married to history—was the center of it all, the queen in a student’s universe. She sat behind a cluttered desk, half-buried in an open manuscript, her hair barely held in place by a pencil. A half-filled cup of tea sat beside her, possibly long forgotten.

It appeared, just at that moment, that she realized Rose’s return of more than a minute ago. She glanced up quickly, her gaze moving from Rose to the large round clock above the door, and then carefully closed the manuscript.

“You’re staying late again, then?” Dr. Fraser asked as she stood from her desk. Her sharp, discerning eyes flicked over Rose with a touch of concern. She gathered her satchel—a battered leather thing, heavy with books and papers—and pulled on her coat, flipping her hair out from the collar.

Rose smiled. “It’s not every day a girl from Wisconsin gets to sift through 700-year-old manuscripts. We don’t have these in America. And haven’t you said, time and again, the best finds happen when no one’s looking?”

Dr. Fraser smirked, her sharp green eyes brightening. "Aye, well, sometimes I mean that figuratively, but in your case, I see you’ve taken it as a challenge."

"I’m just trying to make the most of my time here," Rose said.

“You remind me of myself at your age—young, eager, no sense of time.” Dr. Fraser hesitated, as though weighing whether to say more, then softened, lowering her voice. “You’ve a fine mind for this, Rose. Better than some of the full-fledged scholars who come through here.” She sighed, her gaze briefly distant. “Just remember to live in the present, too. History can be an enticing mistress, but she doesn’t give much back.”

Rose waved off her concern, voiced here not for the first time. “I’ll be fine. Go have a pint for me.”

Dr. Fraser snorted. “Aye, and if I had my way, I’d have three.” She glanced again at Rose’s list on the yellow paper. “What will you work on tonight?”

Rose consulted her list again. “Um, I’ll be cataloguing estate records from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, those ones from the parish of Moy and Dalarossie,” she informed her. “I think you said they were in a cardboard box in the reading room.”

Dr. Fraser nodded. “They are. Mind the ones with the gold-embossed bindings; they’re fragile. And for God’s sake, don’t spill any tea on them. Not that I suspect you of such sacrilege."

Rose held up her hands. "I’d rather burn in hell than stain a medieval manuscript."

Dr. Fraser smirked. "Good girl. Lock up when you’re done. Good night, Rose.”

With that and a final nod of farewell, the professor departed for the day, disappearing down the corridor. Rose leaned back in her chair, rolling her shoulders with a sigh. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly, but her desk was bathed in the soft glow of her green-shaded banker’s lamp.

Her original plan, when applying to the Scottish program almost a year ago, had not exactly been this.

Oh, the work—the hands-on experience, the access to archives brimming with centuries-old manuscripts—that had always been the goal. But she’d imagined herself doing more than just working and studying. She had envisioned immersing herself in Scotland, soaking up the culture, walking the misty Highlands, tracing the very history she loved so much. She had planned to explore the winding streets of Glasgow, to take weekend trips to Edinburgh, to visit ancient castles and crumbling abbeys, to truly live in this place, not just observe it from behind a desk.

She had tried, at first.

When she arrived, she had gone out a few times with the other student archivists, joining them at pubs and cafés, hoping to form the kind of friendships that would make this experience even richer. But she’d quickly discovered that their interests lay less in history and scholarship and more in pints, parties, and local men.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like them—she did, generally. They were fun, easygoing, full of youthful enthusiasm. But Rose had always been a little different. She hadn’t come here just for the experience. She had come here because she wanted to learn, because she loved history with a passion that went beyond lectures and textbooks.

And so, little by little, she had stopped going out. While the others met for drinks after hours, she stayed behind, pouring over ancient texts and half-forgotten ledgers, savoring the quiet, the thrill of uncovering something unseen for centuries. She hadn’t been a complete recluse, however. She had done her fair share of exploring— had joined guided tours through medieval castles, hiked along mist-shrouded cliffs, and had wandered at least one day through the cobbled closes of Edinburgh. She had even seen a few plays at the theatre, sitting alone in the dim glow of the stage lights, letting herself be swept up in the drama of it all.

But most of it had been on her own. And while she didn’t mind her own company, after a while, it had become less and less fun. There was something about experiencing a new place with others, about sharing in the awe of history, the beauty of a landscape, the excitement of a well-told story. And though she had tried—had ventured out, had attempted to be part of it—it had never quite been what she imagined.

Truthfully, she had found more fulfillment here, inside the archives' office, surrounded by crumbling pages and ink-stained history. Maybe that made her boring.

She wasn’t lonely, not really, she regularly told herself. She had her work. She had history. That had always been enough.

By the time Rose emptied her cup of tea from earlier in the afternoon, and collected a pair of white cotton gloves, the building had emptied, the usual shuffle of students and staff replaced by absolute silence.

She genuinely enjoyed her colleagues, and she could spend hours listening to Dr. Fraser when she got on one of her tangents, whether recounting the thrill of an unexpected discovery or relaying some spirited debate she’d had with a fellow historian over the finer points of a medieval script. But if she were being honest, this was Rose’s favorite time of day. Aside from the cleaning staff, who came through a few nights a week, she was completely alone in the building. And she liked it that way. There was something sacred about these late hours, something almost reverent in the stillness. It was just her and the past, stretching out before her in ink and parchment, waiting to be uncovered.

Gloves in hand, Rose grabbed her wool peacoat and left the office she shared with her mentor and several others and headed upstairs to the second floor reading room. Her coat was needed since the janitor normally turned down the heat significantly before he left for the day. The reading room itself was temperature-controlled and expected to remain around 18 to 20 degrees Celsius, but Rose was convinced it dropped lower overnight.

Outside the reading room, the back offices and the majority of the building—except for the front lobby—smelled mostly of coffee and cigarettes. Inside the reading room, which was lined with towering shelves filled with medieval manuscripts, charters, and crumbling leather-bound volumes, the air had a staleness to it, but there was no food, drink, or smoking allowed, so after any time at her desk it always seemed fresh in here.

She scanned the labels of several cardboard boxes in a group lined up along one side of the room, reading only the parish names, until she found one marked Moy and Dalarossie. It was too large to lift and carry and Rose was forced to drag and push it across the linoleum floor, halfway around the room to the large oak table at the center of the chamber. The table’s surface was smooth and polished from years of careful use, though it still bore the faintest scratches and indentations. It was sturdy and wide enough to accommodate sprawling manuscripts and delicate ledgers, with ample space for notes, reference books, and some of the tools used for handling aged parchment.

A pair of green-shaded banker’s lamp sat on two pedestals at either end of the table, focusing their glow over the workspace, illuminating the brittle pages without exposing them to the harsh glare of overhead fluorescent lighting. Soft felt pads and archival supports were arranged neatly at one end, ready to cradle fragile books at the proper angle, ensuring their spines wouldn’t crack under their own weight. A magnifying glass and a fine-bristled brush sat nearby, essential tools for deciphering faded script and sweeping away centuries of dust without damaging the ink.

Rose opened the box and then donned the white cotton gloves before she reached for the first of the old ledgers, bringing the book up onto the waist-high table to examine it properly. She expected that most of these would be mundane—grain accounts, livestock records, tedious notations of debts and trade, and the first book did not prove her wrong.

In order to catalog properly, she searched for names and dates, the latter usually written out, such as Anno Domini 1342 . Or she might find the date referenced within an event— in the tenth year of King David’s reign —which would mean she would have to cross-reference historical records to confirm the time period. She made notes of any location references and any clues that might advise if the ledger was for estate management, taxation, trade, or legal matters. She expected to find lists of debts, rent paid by tenants, tithes owed to the church, and maybe transactions between merchants. Estate ledgers would generally be filled with records of grain stores, wool production, sheep, cattle, and even a tally of tools and weapons. Rose particularly liked when the scribe or landowner left annotations in the margins, which might be complaints, corrections, or even doodles. Those were often the most interesting discoveries inside estate ledgers, giving her a glimpse into personal attitudes, humor, and frustrations of the time.

Several weeks ago, Rose had come across a very entertaining marginal note.

“Sir Ewan’s new steward cannot count. He tallies twelve pigs, yet there are but ten. He reckons ten geese, yet I have only seen six. Either he is blind, or he is a liar,” had been scribbled along the outside of the page. Rose had assumed the note to have been made by a scribe, a passive-aggressive jab at an incompetent steward or clerk.

One of the first doodles she’d come across was still her favorite. A crudely drawn sketch of a fat cat, sitting smugly near a spilled ink stain had been accompanied by a scribbled note, “The beast of the steward has ruined this page. See how it smirks, whilst I must labor!”

She’d since learned that scribes often drew doodles, especially if they had to rewrite pages due to animal interference—apparently cats were notorious even in the Middle Ages for walking across paper.

By the time she’d thoroughly examined and catalogued three such estate journals, it was well after ten at night. She closed her eyes and rolled her neck, debating if she would tackle one more or call it a day. Tonight, she hadn’t once been amused by any annotations in the margins. There was still, probably, almost a dozen more in the banker’s box.

She glanced down to her right at the box at the same time she reached for the pull chain of one of the lamps with her left hand, having decided that tomorrow was another day. Certainly, as they’d been preserved for centuries, they weren’t going anywhere overnight.

But something in the box caught her attention. The next ledger, on top of the pile in the box, was smaller than the last three, smaller than what Rose was used to. She bent over, frowning a bit at the leather cover, worn to softness, at the impossibly smooth edges, as if it had been handled often, lovingly. As she carefully withdrew it from the box, she realized that a faint imprint of a wax seal still clung to the front cover, half-crumbling from age.

She brought it up on the table and gingerly flipped it open, expecting more of the same—accounts, numbers, tedious tallies—simply in a different book.

Immediately, she recognized that the handwriting was different. Unlike the careful, slanted script of trained scribes and educated monks, this was uneven, hurried in places, delicate in others, as though the writer had paused between thoughts, hesitating, reconsidering.

She leaned closer, carefully pushing the book along the table toward the light. The ink had faded to a faint brown, barely visible under ordinary light. The words were written in Latin. That was expected—most written records of the time were in Latin. The next thing that jarred her was the structure: this was not written as columns and rows; there were no numbers, only words and the occasional date.

This wasn’t a ledger.

She scanned a page in the middle of the book and translated in her head a few lines. "I should be joyful to leave this place, to return to my father’s house. And yet, I do not wish to go.”

Rose’s pulse quickened. This was a journal—a living record!

Her jaw fell, and Rose closed the book slowly, properly, and then opened it again to the beginning. After two blank pages, she found a name neatly written in the top right corner of the page.

Margaret. There was more, a surname perhaps, but the ink had originally been too heavy, and now appeared only as an old stain, a blotch, one letter blending in with the next so that Rose could not decipher Margaret’s full identity.

Turning another page, the next thing Rose read was the date, Anno Domini 1298 .

Delicately, her fingers traced the first few lines. The handwriting inside was uneven, delicate but uncertain, as if the writer had been unused to the pen. The first few lines, though faint with age, were still legible.

Rose murmured the translation aloud.

“The walls of this place are high, and though the sisters call it sanctuary, I do not feel safe within them. The air is thick with candle wax and damp stone, and the silence is heavy, pressing down on me. They say I should be grateful, that many young women would envy the chance to dwell so near to God. But I would rather be near my mother, my father, my brothers who have gone to war. I did not cry when my father left me here, nor when the great oaken doors shut behind me. But now, alone in this small chamber, with only the dim shimmer of tallow light to keep me company, the tears come, and I cannot stop them.”

Rose blew out a puff of breath, her pulse hammering. This was incredible. It was not just any journal—this was a woman’s personal writing from the thirteenth century. That alone was unheard of. Most personal records from medieval Scotland had been lost, burned, or never written at all. Women, especially—sadly—left almost nothing behind.

Holding her breath, Rose turned the page.

“The nuns say I must quiet my heart,” Rose read, “that longing for the world will only bring sorrow. But how does one forget home? Each morning, I wake to the bells, the call to prayer, the endless psalms. My hands are chapped from the cold, my knees sore from kneeling. I do not mind the reading—I have always loved the written word, and here, at least, there are books. They say I am fortunate to learn, that many women never will. Perhaps that is true, but I would trade every page for a single night by my father’s hearth, my mother brushing my hair, my brothers teasing me. I have written to my mother thrice. She has not written back. I pray God will bring them safely through this war. I pray He will not let them forget me.”

The ink whispered across the centuries, pulling her in. Rose’s fingers tightened around the edges of the journal, her excitement growing as she turned another page.

“A traveler came today, a merchant seeking the abbess’s blessing. He spoke of battles fought, villages burned, men lost. He did not say their names, but dread coiled in my belly. I wanted to ask if he had passed through my father’s lands, if he had heard word of my family. But I did not. The nuns would not have approved. Instead, I gripped my quill too tightly, ink blotting the page. Each day, my mother’s face fades, my father’s voice grows distant. And I am afraid.”

Rose reread the passage, awe overtaking her. The room was utterly silent, except for the distant tick of the office clock. The building around her was suddenly eerily still, the air thick with something she couldn’t name. She shifted, putting her elbows on the table, pulling the book closer beneath the lamplight.

She turned another page, then another, her heart pounding. The more she read, the more real Margaret became. She could almost hear the woman’s voice whispering from the pages, soft but urgent, trapped in time.

“Anno Domini 1302,” she continued reading, “I have been here so long now that I know the seasons by the way the light falls through the high windows. Winter comes when the sun is pale and weak, its rays barely reaching the stone floors. Spring comes when the mornings are golden, and the air stirs with the scent of damp earth. I should be accustomed to this life. I should be at peace. But I am not. I have not seen my mother’s face in four years. My father’s letters are fewer, and though he writes that they are safe, that the war has not reached them, I wonder if he spares me the truth.”

Rose had translated enough by now to piece together the shape of Margaret’s story, though much of it still remained a mystery. Margaret had been sent to a convent as a young woman, tucked away behind thick stone walls for her own protection. The war raged beyond, though it was a distant thing to her, spoken of only in whispers by those who came and went. She wrote of sorrow, of feeling abandoned. She lamented the loss of the world she had known—the rolling green hills of her home, the warmth of her mother’s hands smoothing back her hair, the booming laugh of her father. But she never named them.

Rose found that peculiar.

The entire journal so far was deeply personal, rich with longing and carefully guarded emotions. And yet, Margaret never mentioned a single name. Not her father’s. Not her mother’s. Not even the names of the nuns who surrounded her every day. Rose frowned, carefully flipping back through the pages, searching for even the most casual reference to a name. There was nothing. Margaret referred to her father only as my father , her mother as my mother , and even the abbess remained only the abbess .

Very odd, Rose decided.

Just as she was considering what that might mean—whether it was deliberate or simply a peculiarity of Margaret’s writing—her eyes caught on a passage further along in the book, one she had not yet read. Carefully, she traced her finger along the faded ink, murmuring the words aloud as she worked through them.

"I was a girl when last I saw him, and he but a boy. The world was different then. Softer. There was laughter in his voice, warmth in his eyes. But that was before the war, before he became something else. He does not write to me. I know not if he remembers me at all."

Rose’s breath stilled.

A name appeared in the next line, stark against the page as though written with a firmer hand.

Tiernan.

A shiver prickled down her spine.

This was the first name Margaret had mentioned in all of her journal entries. Why? Who was he? The way she wrote of him—it wasn’t the way one might mention a father or a brother. There was a wistfulness in her words, a sense of distance, of something lost.

Rose turned the page again and again, scanning the delicate script for another mention of Tiernan. She happened upon the first passage she’d read, toward the last third of the diary.

"I should be joyful to leave this place, to return to my father’s house. And yet, I do not wish to go.”

Rose glanced at the clock, surprised to find that it was almost midnight. But she couldn’t stop now—she had to know more.

“Word has reached me that my father is preparing my dowry. The convent walls, once a prison, now feel like shelter, and I fear what awaits me outside them. Tiernan is home. My father says he is a man of great renown now, feared and respected. But I do not wish to fear the man I must wed. I should pray for courage. I do pray. But there is a voice within me that whispers, what if I do not wish to marry him at all? What if I would rather remain here, among my books and prayers?"

She read on, finding Tiernan’s name littered multiple times across the next few entries.

“Anno Domini 1304, The First Days of Winter. I have returned to the world at last, though I find I am no longer certain it is the world I left behind. I stepped through the gates of Druimlach today, and the cold met me like an old enemy, creeping through the seams of my cloak, biting at my skin. It is colder here than I remember. Or perhaps I have forgotten what it is to feel the wind against my face after so many years behind convent walls. The keep is grander than I had imagined it, taller, darker. The stones are black with age, the walls thick and silent. It does not feel welcoming, not yet. Nor does Tiernan. He stood at the gates when I arrived, standing tall amidst his men. They call him mormaer , and he bears the title well, his shoulders broad beneath his great cloak, his stance one of quiet command. I knew it was him before he spoke, but it took my breath away all the same. Tiernan. The boy I had known is gone. He was always taller than me, always strong, but there was a lightness in him once, a wildness, a laughter that belonged to the hills and sky. That laughter is gone. He did not smile when he greeted me. His voice was low, rough as the wind over the sea. He bid me welcome to Druimlach, and for a moment, I thought he would say more. But he did not.”

The next entry on the page was brief: “He does not seek my company, nor avoid it. When we sit at the high table, he acknowledges me only when necessary. His manner is not unkind, but it is distant, as though I am already his wife in name alone. I thought we would have spoken by now. That he might wish to hear of my years in the convent, to know something of the woman I have become. But he has not asked, and we are strangers now.”

At the top of the next page, the entry continued, "I should not long for softness. It is unbecoming. But some part of me grieves for the boy who smiled so easily. If he is gone, what is left for me?"

Rose was frustrated on Margaret’s behalf for this Tiernan guy’s indifference to his soon-to-be wife. Margaret was sounding more and more despondent, as she had when first she’d been sent to the convent.

The next entry was prefaced by a note that it was “a fortnight before our nuptials” . Rose hoped for Margaret’s sake that something was about to change.

“I dreamed of him last night. Not as he is now, but as he was when we were children. I dreamed of the boy who stole apples from the kitchen, the boy who used to chase me through the fields, who laughed so hard he could not breathe. I woke with tears on my cheeks, though I do not know why. Tis the fever, perhaps. I am not myself.”

Poor Margaret!

Rose rubbed her tired eyes, the burn of exhaustion settling deep. She had been reading for too long and her eyes were suffering for it. The desk lamp cast long shadows across the open book, the ink faded and uneven from the passage of centuries. She blinked down at the next entry, her brow knitting as the letters seemed to shimmer, the ancient script shifting before her eyes.

Yep, she thought, I’ve overdone it.

Still, she couldn’t help it, and she turned the page. Just then, the air in the room thickened, suddenly heavy, pressing against her ears like a distant roar. The fluorescent lights high above flickered once, twice, then dimmed, their soft hum vanishing into eerie silence. The edges of the book grew warm beneath her fingertips, the worn leather heating unnaturally against her skin.

A whisper curled at the nape of her neck—faint, distant, like a breath from another world. Rose froze, waiting for the strangeness to pass. Then the light flared, searing and all-consuming, swallowing the office in a blaze of white. The solid ground dissolved beneath her feet.

Rose barely had time to gasp before she was falling. The air around her howled, rushing past her ears like a storm. Her pulse pounded, a frantic drumbeat in a suddenly suffocating void. She reached out, grasping at nothing, the book sliding out of her hands as the world twisted.

And just before darkness claimed her, the last thing she saw was the ink on the page beneath her fingertips, glowing as if newly written:

“I am afraid of him.”