A Scot in the Storm (A Scots Through Time Romance #6)

Chapter 1

Rory

The Buchan Coast, Scotland

The sea turned on them at dusk.

One moment the Ardent was cutting clean through a hard westerly swell, her bow rising and falling in the rhythm Rory had known since boyhood. The next, the horizon vanished, and the sky to the north went black.

“All hands!” He bellowed from the quarterdeck. The air tasted of iron, and the wind had shifted three points in as many minutes. “Reef the topsails! Secure the cargo holds!”

Men scrambled. The Ardent was a supply brig, not a warship, but her crew were Navy men, disciplined and competent, most of them veterans of rougher waters than the Moray Firth. The topsails came down clean. The hatches were battened. Within minutes the ship was stripped to fighting canvas.

Rory gripped the taffrail and looked east. Somewhere beyond the wall of dark, the headland at Kinnaird jutted into the sea.

No light marked it. No beacon warned of the reefs spread beneath the surface like broken teeth.

Mariners navigated this stretch by dead reckoning, by prayer, and by luck, and when the luck ran out, the sea took them.

“Rory.”

His brother’s voice cut through the wind.

Murtagh was making his way aft, one hand on the lifeline, his fair hair plastered flat to his skull.

Twenty years old, six months into his first commission.

Until the black clouds had appeared on the horizon, he’d been grinning about it. The grin was gone now.

“Get below,” Rory said.

“I’m fine.”

“That wasna a suggestion.”

Murtagh’s jaw set, the Sinclair jaw their father called it. “I can work a line as well as any man aboard. Ye said so yourself last—”

“Last week in fair weather.” Rory caught his brother’s arm as the ship heeled. “This isna fair weather. Get below and secure the surgeon’s stores. If this gets bad, we’ll need them.”

It was a task to keep him out of the way, and they both knew it. Rory saw the flicker of resentment in his brother’s eyes. But a direct order was a direct order, and Murtagh Sinclair was a midshipman who followed the chain of command.

“Aye.” Murtagh turned to go, then looked back. The rain was coming harder now. “Dinna do anything stupid without me.”

Rory almost smiled. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Now go on with ye.”

He watched his brother disappear down the companionway, and then the storm hit, and there was no time for watching anything at all.

The first wave broke over the starboard bow and swept the foredeck clean. Henderson went down. Two men grabbed him before the sea could take him over the side. The Ardent groaned, a deep sound that came up through the timbers like a living thing. Then the second wave hit.

Rory lashed himself to the helm. The wheel kicked and fought under his hands, the rudder straining against the current. He couldn’t see—rain, spray, dark, all of it a wall—so he sailed by feel. The angle of the deck. The rhythm of the swells. The pitch of the wind in what remained of the rigging.

“We’re too close to shore.” Lachlan, the sailing master, his voice tight beside him. “That last bearing put us a mile off the headland. We need sea room, Captain.”

“Aye.” Rory hauled the wheel to port. The Ardent fought him, sluggish, her hull heavy with the water she’d shipped. “Come on. Turn, damn ye.”

She turned. The bow came around. He felt the moment the wind caught the remaining canvas, and for a handful of seconds he thought they’d make it.

Then the sound came. Not the wind. Not the waves. Something beneath them—a grinding, splintering sound, low and catastrophic. The deck lurched.

The reef.

“We’re aground!” Lachlan was screaming. “Starboard side, she’s tearing—”

The mainmast snapped twelve feet above the deck with a crack like a cannon shot. Rigging fell in a tangle of rope, canvas, and splintered wood. Then the screaming started.

Rory cut himself free of the helm. “Get the wounded clear of the rigging! Cut away the mainmast before the wreckage drags us under! Launch the boats!”

The starboard longboat was gone, staved in by the falling mast. The port boat was jammed in its davits.

Men hacked at the fouled lines with axes while the sea poured over the listing deck.

Rory grabbed an axe from a man whose hands were shaking too badly to swing it and cut the last line himself.

The boat dropped into the black water and held.

“Wounded first! Then the rest, orderly, damn ye, orderly!”

They were good men. Even in the dark, even with the ship coming apart beneath them, they loaded the boat the way they’d been trained. Rory counted them in. Fourteen. Eighteen. Twenty-two. The Ardent carried thirty-six.

The deck tilted further. Twenty-eight in the boat. Six still aboard. Lachlan. Henderson. The cook’s boy. Two marines.

Murtagh.

“Where’s my brother?” Rory seized Lachlan’s shoulder. “Where is he?”

The man’s face was grey. “Below. He went below before—”

Rory was already moving.

The companionway was halfway underwater. He plunged in. The cold was a fist around his chest, squeezing. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear anything but the water and the terrible creaking of the ship as she broke apart around him. He felt his way along the passage, hands on the bulkhead.

“Murtagh!”

A sound. Faint, muffled—a banging from the surgeon’s stores. Rory surged forward. The door was jammed, the frame warped from the impact. He threw his shoulder against it. Once. Twice. Something gave, and the door burst inward.

Murtagh was chest-deep in the flood, one hand braced against the bulkhead, the other gripping a fallen timber. A gash above his left eye bled freely.

“Rory.” His brother’s voice was steady, which was how Rory knew he was terrified. The Sinclairs went quiet when they were afraid. “Beam came down. I couldna get the door open.”

“I’ve got ye.” Rory grabbed his arm. “The boat’s launched. We need to go. Now.”

They made it to the companionway. The water was higher now, chest-deep and rising, the current pulling at them with a strength that had nothing to do with the tide. Rory went first, hauling himself up the ladder, and reached back for Murtagh’s hand.

Their fingers met.

Rory’s grip closed on his brother’s wrist. For one held breath, he had him.

The ship shuddered. A surge came through the hatch like a thrown punch. Rory’s grip—wet, slipping on wet—slid the length of his brother’s forearm and caught on the cuff of his shirt. Old linen, already rotted by the saltwater.

It tore, the strip coming away in Rory’s fist.

Murtagh was still there. Still standing. His eyes met Rory’s, dark and steady, as he lifted his hand again, and Rory threw himself back down the ladder to meet him.

Their fingers touched.

The ship rolled.

It was a slow, massive thing, the Ardent tilting past the point of return, her keel lifting free of the reef as the sea claimed her. The deck went vertical. Rory’s grip on the ladder held.

Murtagh’s didn’t.

He fell. Not far. Maybe ten feet. But the water was there, black and churning, and it swallowed him.

“Murtagh!”

Rory dropped from the ladder and dove, eyes open in the blind dark. His hands found rope. Timber. He surfaced, gasped, dove again. The cold was in his bones now. The ship was groaning, going down, and he couldn’t find him.

Arms locked around his chest from behind. Someone was dragging him backward. He fought, twisting, clawing. He broke free, doubled back, dove again, deeper this time, fingers scraping the bulkhead, feeling for cloth, for hair, for any part of his brother the sea hadn’t yet taken.

Nothing. Only water. Only cold.

The arms came around him a second time. Two sets now. Lachlan on one side. Henderson on the other.

“Let me go!” He kicked at the ladder. “Another minute—he’s down there, Lachlan, he’s right down there—”

“He’s gone, lad.” Lachlan’s voice was wrecked, an inch from his ear. “He’s gone.”

“No.” Rory had the strip of Murtagh’s cuff still knotted in his left fist. “I had him. I had his wrist. Another second and I’d have had him up—”

“There was nothing ye could have done.”

The Ardent lurched. The remaining deck dropped away. Lachlan and Henderson shoved him bodily over the rail into the black water, and then the sea took them all.

Rory came to on the rocks below Kinnaird Head.

The sea spat him out tumbling through the shallows until his hands found stone, and he dragged himself clear of the surf. He lay on the rocks with the rain hammering his back, the taste of salt and blood in his mouth.

His left hand was still closed in a fist. He didn’t remember closing it. He opened it now, slow and numb, and found the strip of linen wrapped around his fingers. Wet. Darker at one edge with blood that wasn’t his.

He closed his hand around it again. Held it there.

Around him, the survivors were pulling themselves from the water. Shapes in the dark, coughing, calling names. Rory counted them—mechanically, relentlessly, because if he stopped counting he’d start screaming.

Twenty-nine.

Thirty-six crew. Twenty-nine alive on the rocks.

Seven men who would not come home. Including Murtagh.

Rory pushed himself to his knees and looked up. The headland rose above him, a dark mass against the darker sky. No light. No beacon. Nothing but stone and wind and the crash of waves on the reef that had destroyed his ship.

If there had been a light on that headland, he would have seen the reef. He would have turned sooner. The Ardent would have cleared the rocks by a quarter mile, and seven men would be alive, and his brother would be beside him, shivering and swearing because they’d made it through.

But there was no light.

Dinna do anything stupid without me.

He heard it clean as a bell, carried on the wind like Murtagh was still out there somewhere.

Rory knelt on the rocks with the rain running down his face and the torn linen knotted in his fist, and he made a promise to the dead. Not a prayer—he was done with those. A promise.

I will build the light.