Chapter 2
Abigail
Present Day
Abigail’s rental car smelled like stale crisps and old fish.
She was six thousand miles from her brother, who had acute myeloid leukemia, had relapsed in February, and she was about to spend the next six months cataloguing letters written by dead men.
Dr. Elaine Hargreaves, her mentor, the woman who’d supervised her dissertation and written her glowing recommendation letters, had looked her in the eye last Tuesday and said, I think a quiet project would do you good, Dr. Winston.
Which was academic-speak for you embarrassed us, now go away until things quiet down.
She hadn’t told Elaine about Sam. Her boss had the idea of Abigail as a focused academic, not a woman whose brother was waiting on an unmatched donor registry and surfing every morning like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Abigail hadn’t corrected the impression.
Some things weren’t department business.
Separation of work and home life and all that.
The Museum of Scottish Lighthouses sat on a headland in Fraserburgh, which was about as far north as you could get in mainland Scotland without falling into the sea.
She pulled into the car park, killed the engine, and stared at the building through the windscreen. Grey stone. Grey sky, and more grey in the sea beyond the cliffs. Everything was grey and dreary.
Wet leaves had gathered in rust-colored drifts along the gutters beside the car park, plastered flat by rain and sea wind.
Somewhere nearby, peat smoke threaded through the damp air sharp as earth and winter.
Above the harbor, gulls wheeled inland in noisy circles, the sort of frantic movement that usually meant weather was turning again.
“Well,” she said to no one. “This is cheerful.”
Her phone buzzed with a text from Sam.
did u land safe? hows scotland? is there haggis?
Landed. Scotland is grey. No haggis yet. How’s the van?
van is great. caught a sick wave this morning. morro bay is firing
She stared at the surfing emoji for a long moment.
Sam was twenty-five, living in a converted Sprinter van in California, surfing every day, working odd jobs when the swell was flat.
He was in what the oncologist called a bridging phase.
Basically, a careful word for the space between the last round of chemo and the transplant he didn’t yet have a donor for.
His counts were better than they’d been in a year. His hair was growing back. Last week, he’d sent her a photo of himself on a board at Morro Rock with the caption fuzzy head, don’t care.
The doctors hadn’t exactly approved of surfing, but hadn’t exactly forbidden it either, so her brother had taken that as permission.
She’d been tested the week after the diagnosis. Sat on the lab table with her sleeve pushed up and hoped so hard she’d embarrassed herself, and three weeks later the transplant coordinator had called and said, kindly, Unfortunately you’re not a match.
Abigail had stood in the kitchen of her apartment with the phone against her ear and said thank you, as if the woman had handed her a coffee.
She’d stood there for a long time after hanging up. The one biological task she’d had for the only person who shared her blood, and she hadn’t been able to do it.
She typed back.
Eat something that isn’t a burrito
no promises. love u sis
Love you too
She pocketed the phone, grabbed her bag, and headed for the entrance.
The museum was housed in Kinnaird Head Castle, a squat sixteenth-century tower that had been converted into Scotland’s first mainland lighthouse in 1787.
Abigail knew this because she’d read every paper, historical account, and engineering report she could find in the weeks between her mentor’s phone call and her flight.
If she was going to be exiled to the edge of the world, she was at least going to be well-prepared.
The door was heavy oak, and it groaned when she pushed it open. Inside, the air smelled like old stone and furniture polish. A man stood behind the reception desk, wrestling with a cardboard box that appeared to be winning.
“Hang on, just—”
He shoved the box sideways, straightened up, and grinned at her. He was maybe fifty, round-faced, with wire-rimmed glasses and the kind of cheerful energy that suggested he’d never met a stranger. “You must be Dr. Winston. I’m Arthur Campbell.”
“Abigail, please.” She shook his hand. “Dr. Winston makes me sound like I know what I’m doing.”
“Don’t we all fake it?” He came around the desk, grinning.
“Welcome to Kinnaird Head. I’d give you the grand tour, but it’s mostly just this—” he gestured at the castle around them, “—stone walls, steep stairs, and more lighthouse equipment than any reasonable person needs. Come on, I’ll show you the archives.”
He talked as he led her through the building, the kind of man who filled silence the way some people filled bookshelves.
Compulsively, cheerfully, and without any rhyme or reason.
The castle was a warren of narrow corridors and low doorways.
She ducked under a lintel and followed him up a spiral staircase so tight her shoulders brushed both walls.
“The collection’s a bit of a mess, I won’t lie,” Arthur said over his shoulder.
“Sandra, she’s our curator, you’ll meet her tomorrow, has been trying to catalogue the whole lot for years, but we keep finding more boxes in the cellars.
Last month we pulled out a crate that hadn’t been opened since the 1920s. Had a taxidermied puffin in it.”
“A puffin?”
“Aye. Looked quite offended about the whole thing.”
Arthur led her farther up the spiral stairs, talking steadily while the wind rattled faintly against the narrow windows.
“Ye picked a proper northern month to arrive, by the way. October up here’s half weather and half haunting.”
He grinned over his shoulder. “Wait until the end of the month and Fraserburgh’ll turn itself inside out for Samhain.”
“Halloween?”
“Aye, that’s what you Yanks call it.” He waved a hand.
“Though the Scots were doing it long before Americans started buying pumpkin-spice everything.”
Abigail laughed.
“The locals still go in for it properly,” Arthur continued. “Bonfires down by the harbor if the wind behaves itself. Turnip lanterns. Storytelling. Children running wild hopped up on sugar and poor decisions. Sandra insists the veil’s thinner this time of year.”
“The veil?”
“Between worlds.” He said it cheerfully, like a man discussing rainfall totals.
“Old Scottish superstition. Samhain was when the dead wandered and strange things crossed over.”
He glanced back at her with a teasing look. “Good time to avoid standing stones and mysterious spirits.”
“Noted.”
“Mind you,” Arthur added, pushing open the archive door, “with the haar rolling in off the North Sea half the month, Fraserburgh looks haunted regardless.”
He pushed open a door at the top of the stairs. The archive room was small, lined with metal shelving units crammed with boxes, folders, and loose stacks of paper. A single window looked out over the North Sea. The light was flat and grey, the glass streaked with salt spray.
Beyond the cliffs, two fishing boats were already turning hard toward harbor, engines growling low against the wind as though racing the weather home before dark.
“This is you,” Arthur said. “The Commissioners’ correspondence is in those boxes along the far wall — that’s what Edinburgh wants catalogued.
Letters, supply records, construction reports, anything related to the original lighthouse conversion in 1787.
” He paused. “They said you’ve done work in eighteenth-century engineering history? ”
“My dissertation was on structural adaptation in Scottish coastal architecture.”
She set her bag down and looked around. Dust motes hung in the grey light. The boxes were old, some of them visibly water-damaged. “This is a lot of material.”
“Aye, well. That’s why they sent for reinforcements.” He smiled. “Sandra and I are glad to have you. Cup of tea?”
“Gracious, yes.”
He disappeared down the stairs, and Abigail stood alone in the archive room with her hands in her pockets and looked out the window.
The sea was the color of slate. Waves broke against the rocks below with a muffled, rhythmic thud.
In the distance, fishing boats headed out, tiny dark shapes against the water.
She should feel grateful. That’s what Elaine had implied. It’s a prestigious collection. Other researchers would jump at this.
But other researchers hadn’t published a paper arguing that a Bronze Age brooch in the National Museum’s collection had been misattributed by over a hundred years, and then watched the department close ranks around the senior curator she’d contradicted.
A few days ago, she’d been politely informed her contract wouldn’t be renewed.
The job had gone, and with it, the health insurance.
Without a job she couldn’t help cover the outrageous consult fees Sam’s trial had just quoted her.
She hadn’t told him that part. He’d have told her not to worry about it, and he’d have meant it, and that would have been unbearable.
So when the temporary job here in Scotland had appeared, she’d taken it.
She needed the money to help him, and had arranged for the bulk of her paycheck to be deposited into an account Sam could access.
The job here provided room and board, so it wasn’t like she’d have many expenses during her time here.
Abigail turned back to the boxes.
Whatever she felt about exile and her brother and the wreck of her career, the rest of her was leaning forward. Late-eighteenth-century rag paper had a particular smell, vegetal and faintly tannic, with the dry-leather note that meant linen sizing.