Chapter 4
Abigail
Nearly three weeks into her new assignment, and Abigail had catalogued six boxes of correspondence without finding a single interesting thing.
The days had begun slipping together in the peculiar way museum days always did. Dust. Tea gone cold beside her elbow. The soft rasp of old paper beneath her gloves while darkness arrived a little earlier each evening beyond the archive windows.
The Bronmuir Brooch paper had led her here, though.
That was the thing. She’d written about Katherine MacLeod’s brooch, about the mysterious woman in folklore who appeared at the edges of storms, and the archive reference team had flagged a dozen cross-references in the Kinnaird Head collection.
Folk traditions. Lighthouse keeper accounts.
Stories that kept circling around the same figure.
The woman with silver hair. The old woman at the stones. The Cailleach.
Abigail had thought the cross-references might be coincidence. Now she was starting to think otherwise.
“Riveting stuff?” Arthur asked, poking his head into the archive room.
She turned from the narrow archive window where Fraserburgh had begun preparing for Samhain in small quiet ways. Carved turnips glowed in a few shop windows down near the harbor, their strange crooked faces flickering gold against the gathering dark.
“I found a dried daisy in a shipping manifest.”
“Ah. The glamorous life of the historian.”
She smiled. “I didn’t go into this for the glamour.”
“Could be worse,” Arthur said cheerfully. “Tomorrow night half the town’ll be drunk around harbor bonfires pretending they don’t believe ghost stories.”
“Comforting.”
“Aye, well. Samhain brings out everyone’s superstitions,” Arthur added. “Bonfires, whisky, ghost stories, half the fishing fleet refusing to leave harbor till the first of November.”
He set a cup of tea on the desk. “Sandra wants to know if you need more acid-free tissue paper.”
“I always need more acid-free tissue paper. It’s the one constant in my life.”
He laughed and disappeared. Abigail picked up the tea and took a sip. Too hot, too strong, and exactly what she needed.
She’d fallen into a routine already. Up at seven, tea and toast in the cottage, walk to the museum by eight.
Work in the archive until noon, break for lunch at the pub down the road (where the barman had stopped looking at her like she’d landed from Mars and started looking at her like she was simply mildly peculiar), then back to the archive until five.
Walk home along the coast path. Pasta or soup for dinner.
Call Sam if he was awake. Read in bed until she fell asleep.
Quiet. Lonely. Exactly the kind of life she’d always said she wanted. The fact that it made her feel like she was slowly disappearing was a problem she wasn’t ready to examine.
Some mornings she caught herself listening for voices in the stairwell before the museum opened, half-convinced the castle had settled around her so completely it had begun remembering its dead aloud.
By late October the twilight arrived earlier each evening, blue-grey darkness settling over the sea before supper while peat smoke drifted low above the rooftops.
The beach helped. She’d found the path on her second day, a narrow strip of rock and shingle below the cliffs, accessible by a path that was more suggestion than trail.
The North Sea came right up to the stones at high tide, leaving behind tide pools that smelled of brine and kelp.
Some days she bundled up in coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and walked there in the mornings before the museum opened, when the haar was still thick and the sea fog muffled everything but the water and the gulls.
The night before Samhain, Arthur and Sandra refused to let Abigail go back to the cottage with a tin of soup and a stack of papers.
“You’re in Scotland at Samhain,” Arthur said, appearing in the archive doorway with his coat already on and a tartan scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that only his glasses and nose remained fully visible.
“You cannot spend the evening eating lentils alone while reading dead men’s invoices. There are laws against that sort of thing.”
“There are not.”
“There ought to be.” He grinned.
Sandra stood behind him with a patient smile and a paper bag clutched in one hand. She was small and silver-haired, with sharp blue eyes and the brisk manner of a woman who could identify a mislabeled artifact from across a room.
“Come down to the harbor for an hour. There’ll be music. A bonfire if the rain holds. Hot whisky if it doesn’t.”
“I have work.”
“The dead men will wait,” Arthur said. “They’ve been dead hundreds of years. Another evening won’t offend them.”
That, unfortunately, was difficult to argue with.
So Abigail locked the archive boxes away, bundled herself into her coat, scarf, gloves, and hat, and followed them down through the damp streets of Fraserburgh while the wind came sliding in off the North Sea.
The town had changed while she’d been buried in paper and dust. Shop windows that had held postcards and fishing tackle now glowed with carved turnips, their faces crooked and strange, little orange mouths gaping around candle flames.
Children ran past in costumes made of old sheets, wool cloaks, paper crowns, and one alarming mask that looked like either a goat or a taxidermist’s regret. Somewhere near the harbor, a fiddle was playing, quick and bright above the deeper thump of a drum.
The fiddle changed tunes, to something slower now. Older. Not dance music.
The sound carried strangely over the harbor, threading through smoke and mist until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Abigail looked instinctively toward the dark outline of the Wine Tower rising above the cliffs. She remembered reading the story during her first week at the museum.
A Fraser daughter locked in the tower. A piper drowned below the rocks during a storm. A girl who threw herself into the sea rather than live without him. Local fishermen still painted the rocks red beneath the tower. Some claimed her ghost appeared before storms.
“Och, no’ that one,” Arthur muttered beside her, hearing the tune. “That song gives half the harbor the shivers.”
Peat smoke threaded through everything. So did salt and the smell of rain waiting just beyond the dark.
“This is more festive and slightly scary than I expected,” Abigail said as they reached the slope leading down toward the water.
Arthur gave her a look over the top of his scarf. “We’re northern folk. We take our entertainment where we can get it before winter locks the door.”
A bonfire burned near the quay, flames snapping and twisting whenever the wind shifted. Sparks rose into the blackening sky and vanished. People stood in clusters around it with cups in their hands, laughing, talking, stamping their feet against the cold.
Children darted between adults, carrying carved turnips by bits of string, the little lantern faces bobbing at their knees like small fiery goblins.
Out beyond the harbor wall, the sea moved dark and restless.
Fishing boats rocked at their moorings, their lines creaking. Abigail noticed there were more boats tied up than she’d seen the day before.
Arthur followed her gaze.
“Most won’t go out.”
“Because of the weather?”
“Because of Samhain.” He handed her a paper cup that smelled strongly of whisky, honey, lemon, and something herbal. “And the weather. The two tend to gossip together.”
Abigail took a cautious sip and immediately felt warmth bloom through her chest.
“Oh, that’s delicious.”
Sandra laughed softly. “Drink slowly. Arthur’s family recipe has felled stronger people than visiting academics.”
“I’m not visiting,” Abigail said before she thought better of it. “I’m exiled.”
Arthur’s expression gentled for a moment in the firelight. Not pity. Worse. Understanding.
“Well then,” he said. “Exiles especially need whisky.”
A group of children shrieked as an older man in a long black coat leapt from behind a stack of lobster creels and waved a carved turnip over his head.
Someone started clapping in time to the fiddle.
A woman with a red wool shawl began singing, her voice rough and strong enough to carry over the wind.
Abigail stood between Arthur and Sandra with her hands wrapped around the cup, watching strangers celebrate an old night in a cold town at the edge of the sea, and felt the ache of loneliness shift inside her.
For the first time since she’d arrived, she didn’t feel entirely like a woman standing outside a window looking in.
Sandra nudged her gently. “Come on. Isobel’s telling stories.”
“Isobel?”
“Local institution,” Arthur said. “Part historian, part menace. Knows every ghost between here and Peterhead, and at least three of them owe her money.”
They crossed toward a cluster gathered near the harbor wall.
An elderly woman sat on an overturned crate with a plaid blanket over her knees and a carved walking stick across her lap.
Her hair was white, braided beneath a knitted cap, and her face had the weathered softness of someone who had spent a lifetime squinting into the wind.
She was already speaking when Abigail arrived.
“—and mind ye, the Cailleach is no’ a ghost, whatever foolishness folk tell bairns. She is older than ghosts. Older than kirk bells. Older than the stones themselves.”
One of the children edged closer to his mother.
“What does she do?” a girl whispered.
The old woman smiled, and the bonfire caught the lines around her eyes.
“What needs doing.”
Arthur leaned close to Abigail. “Cheerful, isn’t it?”
“Hush,” Sandra murmured.
“The Cailleach walks when the year turns,” Isobel continued.
“When summer gives up its hold and winter takes the hills in her hands. Some say she washes her plaid in the Corryvreckan. Some say she strikes the ground with her staff and brings frost. But here...” She tapped the end of her walking stick once against the stone quay. “Here we ken her by the sea.”
Abigail went still.
The old woman’s gaze moved over the listeners and paused, just for a breath, on Abigail.
“She stands where the waves take what they’re owed,” Isobel said. “She minds the doors between one world and another. And on Samhain, when the veil wears thin as worn linen, best keep to the roads ye know.”
A boy, maybe twelve, tried to look unimpressed and failed. “My da says that’s old wives’ nonsense.”
“Your da,” Isobel said, “once ran screaming from a goose.”
The crowd erupted in laughter as the boy flushed scarlet.
Arthur coughed into his whisky. “True story.”
Abigail smiled despite herself, though the skin at the back of her neck prickled.
The old woman lifted her cup and took a slow drink. “Mock if ye like. But if ye see an old woman by the stones tonight, silver hair loose and black feathers at her feet, ye do not follow where she points.”
The smile slipped from Abigail’s face.
Sandra glanced at her. “You all right?”
“Yes.” Abigail tightened both hands around the cup. “Fine.”
But across the bonfire, beyond the ring of children and fishermen and laughing women, she saw someone standing near the mouth of the lane that led back toward Kinnaird Head.
An old woman with silver hair loose beneath a dark hood. The woman looked directly at Abigail.
The music, the laughter, the crackle of the bonfire all seemed to thin at once, as though the night had drawn a pane of glass between Abigail and the rest of the world.
Then a child ran between them, trailing a turnip lantern and shouting for his brother.
When Abigail looked again, the lane was empty.
Arthur was saying something about the goose. Sandra was laughing and Isobel had begun another story, this one about a fisherman who’d married a selkie and then complained she never folded the laundry properly.
Abigail barely heard it. She scanned the lane, the harbor wall, the dark line where the sea moved beyond the boats.
Nothing.
Only smoke, rain, music, and the restless black water beyond the harbor mouth.
“You’re pale,” Sandra said.
“The whisky’s stronger than I expected.”
Arthur looked happy. “That is the proudest thing anyone has ever said about my family.”
Abigail forced a laugh and took another sip, though her fingers had gone cold inside her gloves.
The old woman’s voice followed her as they drifted back toward the bonfire.
“Best stay away from the old stones tonight,” Isobel called to no one in particular, or perhaps to everyone. “Doors open easier than they close.”
The wind shifted. For one second, Abigail smelled not smoke or whisky or salt, but something sharp and wild. Wet stone. Black feathers. The cold of deep winter and ice.
Then the fiddle struck up again, bright and quick, and the town surged back around her.
Later, when Arthur walked her halfway to the cottage beneath a sky crowded with fast-moving clouds, he kept up a cheerful commentary about turnip lantern safety, museum insurance, and the deeply suspicious number of ghost stories involving drowned sailors.
At the fork in the lane, he stopped.
“You’ll be all right from here?”
“I can see the cottage.”
“Good. Don’t go wandering down to the beach chasing folklore.”
“I’m a professional historian, Arthur.”
“That means yes, doesn’t it?”
“It means good night.”
He laughed and tipped two fingers from his scarf in salute before turning back toward town.
Abigail stood alone in the lane for a moment after he left.
Behind her, Fraserburgh glowed faintly with bonfire light. Ahead, the museum and Kinnaird Head crouched against the dark. The sea breathed steadily below the cliffs, patient and black.
She told herself she had imagined the woman, likely induced by the whisky and the folklore.
Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly explainable.
A raven called once from somewhere near the rocks as Abigail walked faster.
That night she fell asleep to distant laughter and fiddle music drifting faintly up from the harbor while bonfires burned for Samhain below the cliffs. Somewhere in the dark, the sea kept crashing against the stone.