“Er, no, I’ve brought some samples of the components that might make yours run on raspberry juice. It sounded like that was what your engineer wanted help with,” George explained.
“Engineer?”
“Um, yes,” said George, fishing the original message out and reading it. “Engineer Dougall.”
“The rascal,” said Hamish. “DOUGALL!”
Dougall crept forward pushing his way through the others gathered on the shore.
“Yes, uncle?”
“Explain!”
“Should we go up to your power plant and he can explain there?” intervened George, who fancied getting indoors out of the cold. “And perhaps someone can bring these boxes up to us?”
Hamish directed people to bring the boxes and Dougall led the way to his experiments.
~~~
“So what’s this?” asked George, extracting Lady Carolyn’s silver necklace from the tray of raspberry juice. He had looked at Dougall’s notes and made approving sounds, praising his inventiveness and method. Dougall was extremely relieved that George had said this in front of Uncle Hamish and the Laird. They had insisted on staying with them to see what happened.
“Um, the silver seems to be one of the best things to use,” Dougall explained. “I just can’t find anything to go with it that keeps the light on.”
“That’s...” started Donal, realising the source of the silver.
“Yes,” interrupted Hamish, “and very noble of your Lady to lend it to solve our power problem, don’t you think?”
Donal turned a funny colour but said nothing.
“Have you any copper?” asked George. Dougall handed him Mhairi’s anklet from the unused pile. George fixed up the connection, and the lamp above shone bright and steady, to the appreciation of the crowd squeezed in around them.
“It works!” Dougall grinned, and then looked mournful. He realised he wouldn’t be able to use Lady Carolyn’s necklace forever.
“My team and I spent a few hours on this last night when we got out of our Solstice dinner,” George explained. “It was really clever of you to think of using raspberry juice. I think it may need to be a different strength to suit your power needs. You should be able to use a combination of silver and copper, or, even better, nickel and copper, to get your power up to the same level as the strawberry juice cells that I use. Have you got any nickel?”
Dougall looked at Hamish, who shook his head.
“Well, keep this,” George said, handing Dougall a small bar of shiny metal, “and these,” pulling four more thin bars of copper out. “I think these will work if you connect them in place of the ones in your fuel cell.”
“You’ve got a really fine engineer there,” George said to Hamish as he turned away from the bench. Dougall got busy making new connections with the precious components. “Very talented. Now if it would be possible to stay the night, I’ll be on my way back in the morning. I have a treasure hunt to run at my own castle tomorrow night.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” said Donal, stepping in to take charge of his important guest. “We’ll find you a room. And perhaps you’ll be our guest tonight as we’ll be able to practice our ceilidh for Green Willow eve after all.”
“What’s a ceilidh?” asked George.
“I’ll show you!” said Dylan, wanting to retain some connection with his rescuer. He led George out of the power plant, only to come face to face with Heath.
They stood looking at each other, Dylan not daring to breathe, and Heath trying to control his rage at Dylan’s escape. Hamish came up behind them.
“Come on, Dylan, stop blocking the way, lad,” said Hamish.
“Yes,” said Heath. “You enjoy yourself, young Dylan, and we’ll say no more about your unauthorised absence from the castle, shall we?”
Dylan shot him a look. His absence was hardly unauthorised. But maybe it would be best to say nothing, as long as Heath said nothing either. After all, Yuletide was back in full swing and he would hate to miss the party.
The End
Christmas 2013 secret code: Jingle Bells
First published online at https://princelings.co.uk 19-23 December 2012
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