Chapter 7
Abigail
The sound of voices jolted Abigail from sleep.
The bed was too hard and too narrow, the mattress stuffed with something that crinkled when she moved, and the air smelled of wet stone and peat smoke.
This was not her snug little cottage. There was no hum of central heating, no glow of a charging phone on the nightstand.
The low murmur of men’s voices drifted under the door.
It came back all at once as her heart sped up and spots danced in front of her eyes.
The storm. The woman on the rocks. The note in her own handwriting on eighteenth-century paper.
The way her ears had popped and her tooth had chipped. Thank goodness it wasn’t broken like she’d thought at first, but the chip left a sharp edge she’d need to get fixed.
The scorched sleeve. A man with blue eyes kneeling over her in a wool coat who’d spoken to her in English that sounded different, as if it were a second language.
Okay, she thought, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. Ranked most-to-least likely. Go.
One: historical reenactment, maybe a film shoot. She’d heard of remote locations where people lived in character. But Arthur would have been buzzing with the news, and he hadn’t said a word.
Two: she’d hit her head on the rocks and was hallucinating. Possible. Except hallucinations didn’t usually include bruises and a split lip.
Three: a kidnapping of some incredibly elaborate and pointless kind. Even less plausible. Who cared about a dusty old museum? Certainly not that skinny little actor who said nobody cared about the arts anymore.
Four: the one she didn’t want to think about and couldn’t stop coming back to. What the Cailleach had said on the beach. The storm is the door. Ye need only step through.
What she herself had stepped into under the tower while the rain hung in the air and the ground beneath her boots was dry in a two foot circle. Not to mention, the note in her own handwriting, on paper over two hundred years old.
Abigail wasn’t going to call it time travel yet. She was going to call it the problem. Then she’d collect data, and rule things out, one by one, because she sure as hell didn’t like her working theory.
Stop. Think. You’re a researcher. Research your way out of this.
She opened her eyes and took stock.
Her body hurt everywhere. Her left ear rang with a high thin whistle, and when she turned her head, everything from that side sounded underwater. Someone was talking in the corridor. She could hear the voice but not the words.
Her tongue found the chipped molar. Ouch. No dentist until she could get to a city. She filed that under Future Abigail Problems.
The room was small. Stone walls, dressed-granite work like the sixteenth-century Scottish fortifications she’d photographed for her dissertation. There was a single window with wooden shutters, no glass.
Data point. Glass was common by the mid-eighteenth century in gentry houses, but a worker’s lodging would skip it. A tallow candle on a rough shelf, unlit. A washbasin with a ewer of cold water, a chamber pot in the corner.
The tallow candle caught her attention. She reached for it before she thought better of it. The wax was coarse, slightly yellow, and when Abigail lifted it close to her nose, the smell of rendered animal fat was unmistakable.
She’d read about tallow candles, how they guttered and smoked, how the smell hung in a room for hours, and how the wealthy burned beeswax while everyone else put up with this.
She’d never held one in her hands. The weight of it was heavier than she’d expected, and the wick was a twist of cotton that she could see the individual fibers of, hand-spun, uneven at the tip where someone had trimmed it with a knife.
She set it down carefully, hands shaking. She got up, slowly, because every muscle hurt, and crossed to the wall, setting her palm flat against the granite.
Abigail had written a chapter on dressed sixteenth-century Scottish stonework, every word from black-and-white archive photographs taken in 1923 and from two visits to Scotland. Under her palm, the chisel marks were as fresh and clean as the day they’d been struck.
Her own clothes were draped over a wooden stool to dry. Jeans. Waterproof jacket with the scorched sleeve curled black at the cuff. Hiking boots. She was wearing a linen shift that smelled of soap and woodsmoke, which meant someone had changed her out of her wet clothes while she was unconscious.
She’d unpack that particular horror later.
The room was cold enough to see her breath as she pulled the wool blanket tighter around her shoulders and tried to think.
She’d studied this period. Written papers about it. Abigail knew, in the abstract academic way that historians know things, what it meant to be an unprotected woman in eighteenth-century Scotland.
If that’s what this was.
Three years researching the mysterious Lady Katherine of Clan MacLeod had led to Abigail’s career implosion, all because of that damned brooch.
The journal entry she’d memorized surfaced unbidden. She’d found it on the Isle of Skye at Bronmuir Keep. The journal that had conveniently gone missing after the whole brooch debacle.
December 31, 1699
Ten years in this century. Sometimes I still wake reaching for my phone or craving a hot shower that doesn’t require hauling twenty buckets up from the well.
But then Connor’s arms tighten around me, or little Cameron crawls into our bed with his wild dreams and sticky fingers, and I remember why I stayed.
I may have left one time behind, but I have found where I truly belong. The future is not when you are, but who you’re with.
To whoever finds this someday. Time isn’t a straight line. It’s a circle, and love is the compass that guides us home.
Time travel was real. Katherine had proven it. But why had the Cailleach picked her?
Right now, her survival depended on whoever had authority here. The captain with the dark coat and the deep, gravelly voice. She remembered broad shoulders, dark stubble, blue eyes, full lips. His hand under her arm. How easily he’d lifted her.
It was morning which meant she had to decide what to tell him.
The truth wasn’t an option. I think I may have traveled through time was the kind of statement that got you locked up in the twenty-first century, let alone the eighteenth.
She’d seen enough historical case studies about women who made outrageous claims. They were branded mad, dangerous, or both.
A cell in the Edinburgh tollbooth until someone forgot you existed.
Amnesia. I don’t remember anything. A woman who’d lost her memory could be forgiven for not knowing her family or her husband’s name. She could ask questions.
It was a lie with an expiration date. In her own time, you could kind of disappear into a city and reinvent yourself.
Here, your identity was your parish record, your family name, your physical presence in a community where every face was known.
An amnesiac woman was a gap in the social fabric which meant Abigail had days. Weeks, if she was lucky.
Cathcart. The captain had said the name last night, and Ewan had said it back. Magistrate. A magistrate was coming for her. She had maybe a week.
She was just making a list in her head. Talk to the captain, stay inside, figure out the date, keep your mouth shut, when she realized the voices in the corridor had gotten louder.
She swung her feet to the floor and limped to the door, pressing her right ear against the wood.
They were speaking Broad Scots, the rhythm and syntax of Lowland Scottish English with words that weren’t English at all dropped in like stones in a pocket. She’d listened to three hundred hours of oral-history recordings in grad school. She could follow most of it.
“— no business of mine what a captain brings under his roof.” A man’s voice, low and rough.
“I’m telling ye what I saw. The lightning hit the tower. The rain didna fall around the tower. Then she appeared. Ye canna tell me otherwise, I was there.”
“Elrick.” Another voice. Older. Calm. Maybe the big one from last night, Ewan.
“A dry circle, Ewan. Under the tower. In a squall like yon. Ye’re a sensible man, ye ken what that means.”
“I ken ye’ve had too much whisky.”
“Ye’ve had the same as me.”
“Aye, and I’m not making signs at a sleeping lass.”
A pause. Then Elrick again, quieter, and this time he dropped a word she caught instantly.
Cailleach.
The woman she’d researched and was now sure she’d met twice. A keeper of time and doors, who apparently thought it was fun to send women hurtling through time.
“She’s nae sleeping. She’s awake. I heard the bed. Ye mind how I said it, Ewan, if the weather turns again before she’s out of this house, ye’ll mind it. The sea doesna give without taking something back.”
Beyond the tower walls, somewhere farther down the coast, Abigail thought she heard distant shouting and faint bursts of laughter carrying through the wind from the Samhain bonfires Arthur had mentioned. She stepped away from the door.
The sea doesna give without taking something back.
Abigail sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands.
Just for a second. She’d written about eighteenth-century folk belief in her dissertation.
Used phrases like subaltern cosmology and vernacular epistemology.
She hadn’t written about what it felt like to be on the other side of the door, listening to a grown man explain that she might need to be returned to the sea.
Mrs. Gable opened the door without knocking. “Yer awake, then.” Not a question. She had a bundle of cloth over one arm and an expression that could curdle milk. “The captain wants a word.”
“I heard. I mean, I was about to come find you. I’ll just—” Abigail gestured at her clothes on the stool.
Mrs. Gable looked at the jeans and jacket with distaste. Her eyes caught on the scorched cuff and her mouth pinched.
“Ye’ll not be wearing those. Here.” She set the bundle on the bed. A clean linen shift. A bodice of dark brown wool. A heavy skirt, knitted stockings, a large piece of tartan. “I’ve not got shoes to fit ye. Those things will have to do. God alone knows what they’re made of.”
“Thank you. That’s really—”
“It’s practical.” Mrs. Gable cut her off. “Ye canna walk about dressed like—”
She paused, apparently unable to find a word.
“Get yerself decent. I’ll be in the kitchens.”
Somewhere below stairs a man laughed too loudly, followed by the faint scrape of fiddle music abruptly cut short.
“Mrs. Gable?”
The older woman turned, hand on the door.“The men.” Abigail kept her voice even. “Elrick, and the others from last night. If any of them ask after me, what do I tell them?”
Something flickered in Mrs. Gable’s face.
“Ye tell them the captain said so, lass. Ye dinna explain yerself to any man in this house but him. And if any of them take a tone wi’ ye, ye come to me.”
“Okay.” The word slipped out before she could catch it.
Mrs. Gable squinted at it like it was a foreign coin she’d just been handed. Then she shook her head once, sharp.
“Aye. Well. Get dressed.”
The door closed.
Abigail looked at the pile of clothing. The shift went on first. She changed out of the one she’d slept in and pulled the new one over her head, grateful Mrs. Gable hadn’t taken her underwear.
She’d never needed a bra, so that was one less thing to explain.
The stockings were coarse wool, held up with ties below the knee.
The skirt was heavy and fell to her ankles.
The bodice was the problem. It laced up the front with hooks and eyelets, and without stays underneath, the fabric bunched and gaped.
She ran her fingers along the weave of the bodice before she laced it.
The wool was coarse, she could feel the individual threads, the slight irregularity where the weaver’s tension had shifted.
Hand-loomed. She’d seen fragments of eighteenth-century Scottish textiles behind glass at the National Museum, labelled and dated and untouchable.
This one was warm from Mrs. Gable’s arm where she’d carried it, and it smelled faintly of lavender and something sharper underneath.
Lye soap, probably. The dye was uneven, darker at the folds where it had set deeper, and there was a small mend near the bottom eyelet where someone had restitched a tear with thread that didn’t quite match.
The skirt weighed enough to make her stand differently. Something she couldn’t have learned from a photograph. She did her best with the lacing.
The hiking boots and dry socks went on under the long skirt, hidden but solid. One concession to the twenty-first century she wasn’t giving up.
She caught her reflection in the water of the ewer. Dark hair plastered to her skull. A purpling bruise under her right eye. The split swollen lip. A thin rust-colored line of dried blood from her left ear down the side of her neck.
“Fine,” she told the water. “We’ve got this.”
Her water-self didn’t look convinced.