Chapter 5
Abigail
It was Thursday morning, and she was crouching beside a tide pool watching a hermit crab navigate around a clump of pink anemones, when the wind stopped.
Not a lull. It just ceased, as if someone had flipped a switch. The gulls went silent. The surf kept its rhythm, but the air above the waterline went dead still, and the haar thickened until she couldn’t see the cliffs above her.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up.
“The ink is dry, but the page is turning.”
Abigail spun around. A woman stood on the rocks ten feet away, rocks that three seconds ago had been empty.
She was old but not frail. Weathered. Silver hair loose around her shoulders, a cloak of dark wool that didn’t move in the stillness.
Her eyes were the color of deep water, and they regarded Abigail with an expression that was patient in a way that had nothing to do with kindness. Patient the way stone is patient.
The same woman she’d seen on the cemetery bench at Bronmuir Keep.
“I’m sorry?” Abigail said. Her voice came out louder than she meant it to.
“Ye’ve come looking for something.” The woman’s accent was Scottish but different, the vowels pulled long, consonants soft.
“Ye dinna ken what it is yet.”
“I’m watching a hermit crab.”
The woman didn’t smile. She looked out at the sea.
“Go back to the castle, lass. Look in the chest they brought up from the cellar. The one with the brass fittings.”
A chill ran down Abigail’s spine that had nothing to do with the weather. “How do you know about—”
“Ye’ve written to him before, lass.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m what stands between the stones.” The woman’s eyes lifted to the sky. “A storm is coming. The storm is the door. Ye need only step through.”
A gust of wind hit Abigail full in the face, sudden and sharp, carrying salt spray that stung her eyes. She flinched, blinked, and when she opened her eyes the woman was gone.
“Wait —” she called out, but the words died on the wind.
Just gone. The fog was thinning. The gulls had started up again. The hermit crab was still making its slow way across the tide pool.
On the rock where the woman had stood, a single black feather lay against the pale stone, just like the one she’d found on Skye.
Abigail picked it up. A raven’s feather, maybe. Glossy and perfect. It felt heavier than it should.
She stood there for a long moment, the feather in her hand, her heart hammering. The same woman. The same disappearance. Not a coincidence.
She’d read the folklore. The old woman at the stones.
The Cailleach who appeared during storms, who seemed to exist at the edges of ordinary time.
A figure who appeared in story after story across the centuries.
The wind shoved at her as she tucked the feather in her jacket pocket, and walked back to the museum.
Ye’ve written to him before, lass.
The phrase kept repeating itself in her head. Abigail didn’t know what it meant. She told herself she didn’t want to know.
Arthur was in the archive room, elbow-deep in a sea chest with brass fittings.
Her stomach dropped.
“Morning!” he said cheerfully.
“Sandra and I pulled this up from the basement store yesterday. It was behind a wall of fishing nets and what I’m fairly certain was another taxidermied puffin, different one from last time, mind you, which raises concerning questions about how many puffins this museum has stuffed over the years.
The fittings are late eighteenth-century. Want to have a look?”
Her hands were shaking as she stepped closer. “Sure.”
The chest was beautiful. Dark oak, salt-weathered, with brass corners gone green with age.
Arthur had laid out the contents on acid-free tissue paper.
A compass with a cracked glass face. A bundle of wax-sealed letters tied with tarred twine.
A leather-bound journal with the spine half gone.
A folded navigation chart so fragile it looked ready to dissolve.
“The letters are the real prize,” Arthur said, handing her a pair of cotton gloves. “I’ve only skimmed the first two, but they’re from Rory Sinclair, the engineer I mentioned on your first day. Written between 1787 and 1788.”
Abigail took the first letter. The paper was heavy, handmade, with rough deckle edges. The ink had faded to warm brown but was still legible, written in a strong, slightly slanted hand. Confident but not showy.
7th October, 1787
To Mr. Thomas Smith, Engineer to the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses —
Sir, I write to report satisfactory progress on the conversion of the Kinnaird Head tower…
She scanned through the technical details — gear ratios, bearing surfaces, the specific gravity of whale oil, and then her breath caught as she picked up the next letter.
…I should note an unusual occurrence. During the storm of the 1st, a woman was found on the rocks below the Wine Tower.
She gave no account of any vessel. No ship had been reported in distress.
She was dressed in garments I cannot account for and spoke in a manner I have not encountered in any port or country.
She claims to remember nothing. I have given her shelter, as honor demands, though I confess the circumstances trouble me greatly.
She came from the storm, Thomas. And I cannot shake the conviction that the storm sent her.
Abigail set the letter down. Her pulse was loud in her ears.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Arthur said. “A castaway at the lighthouse. Must have been quite the event.”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
There were eleven letters in the bundle, spanning four months. She read them all. Rory Sinclair’s handwriting grew more familiar with each one, the decisive t-crossings, the way he wrote ye instead of you when the tone got personal. The woman appeared in five of the letters. He never named her.
She has an understanding of mechanics that I cannot explain. She examined the lens assembly yesterday and identified the bearing fault within minutes. I have been working on this problem for three months.
Abigail’s hands were shaking as she turned to the next letter. The writing was less controlled, the letters pressed hard into the paper, the margins closer, as if Rory had been rushing or agitated. Or both.
I have not slept well since the night she arrived. Is it possible for a person to carry a kind of strangeness the way others carry a familiar scent? She is familiar to me in a way that cannot be explained by the time we have spent together.
She turned to the next letter. And the next.
That was when the second folded sheet fell out from between two of them, and Abigail’s world tilted.
It was smaller than the others. Different paper, thinner, rougher, the kind of scrap a person might tear from the back of a ledger if they needed to write something in a hurry. The ink was the same brown-warm shade as Rory’s, but the hand wasn’t his.
She picked it up. The letter was a single short note. No salutation to a Commissioner. No return address. No date on the head of the page. Just seven lines, written in the quick, clipped scrawl of a person in a hurry.
Captain —
Third bearing, not brass. Try bronze, silica-dusted, seated in a cradle rather than a sleeve.
I have drawn it below as well as I can from memory. Forgive the hand.
If this fails, the fault is mine, not yours.
Beneath the words was a small, precise sketch—three lines, a curve, a cradle seat with the clearance marked at the margin in a decimal fraction.
It was the bearing arrangement Abigail had read about in the engineering reports for Kinnaird Head.
The one that had solved the Kinnaird problem in the winter of 1787, the one subsequent keepers had maintained until it was electrified in 1978.
And beneath the sketch, at the very bottom of the page, one word in the same handwriting.
Sam.
Abigail set the note flat on the tissue paper and pressed both palms against the edge of the desk because her hands had started to shake in a way she didn’t quite trust.
The handwriting was hers.
Not similar. Not reminiscent. Hers. The specific downstroke on the lowercase g—the way she looped it up and around and ended it with a half-hook because her fifth-grade teacher had marked her off for closing loops too tight.
The way her lowercase f dropped below the line.
The way she wrote the decimal point as a little dash instead of a dot, a habit she’d picked up in a statistics class and never dropped.
No one else wrote like this. She had signed her own dissertation in this hand.
And it was on paper that was, without question, over two hundred years old.
Arthur was saying something. His voice reached her from a long way off.
“— thought you might want to transcribe these yourself. Abigail? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Her mouth was dry. “I’m fine. It’s—it’s a lot to take in. May I have a moment alone with them?”
“Of course. Of course. I’ll be right downstairs if you need anything at all—”
“Thank you, Arthur.”
He went, talking to himself about stuffed puffins.
Abigail sat down very slowly. She picked up the note again, turned it over.
The verso was blank. She held it up to the window and saw the watermark, an eighteenth-century maker’s mark, the kind of hand-pressed wire mold that hadn’t been used since the industrial paper mills.
She’d seen that watermark in her dissertation research.
She could probably identify the paper-maker if she checked her notes.
She was holding a note she had written. On paper there was no way she could have touched. To a man who had been dead for two centuries.
And she’d written her brother’s name on the edge.
Ye’ve written to him before, lass.
She put the note down, carefully, on a clean sheet of acid-free tissue, and pressed her fingers against her eyes until she saw stars.
She went back to the letters. She had to. There were seven more, and she had to know.