Chapter 9
Rory
Rory didna mention the strange clothes he’d found the lass wearing. Not when Abigail sat across from him that morning with bruises darkening beneath her eye and sea salt still caught in the loose strands of her hair.
And not when she laid out her careful lie about shipwrecks and lost papers with shaking hands pressed flat against her skirts.
But when she’d gone, after the study door closed softly behind her, and her footsteps faded down the stair.
Rory sealed the letter for the morning rider and set it aside beneath the paperweight. Then he sat back in his chair and looked out toward the sea while the wind worried at the tower windows.
The law, if it ever came sniffing around Kinnaird Head, would ask about the lass who’d been found on the rocks and no sign of a shipwreck.
And those clothes would cause far too many questions. He was still considering what precisely to do with them when laughter drifted up from the yard below.
Not the rough easy kind that rose from men hauling stone. This was sharper, the sound of too many men entertaining themselves at someone else’s expense.
Rory pushed back his chair. By the time he reached the yard there were eight men gathered near the washing line strung between the lodgings and the hoist post. Steam curled pale from damp cloth in the frigid air.
Jean MacNeill stood laughing beside the line, red-haired and white-faced, her hands clenched in the folds of her apron.
And hanging in plain sight for all the world to gape at were Abigail’s clothes.
The strange blue hose she called jeans. The fitted jacket and the bright blue shirt.
Elrick had already taken the jacket down.
He stood holding it up between both hands while the others crowded close around him like boys at a fair booth. One thick finger worked the metal fastening slowly up and down.
Zip.
Zip.
Zip.
The soft rasping sound carried clearly through the cold morning.
One of the stonemasons crossed himself. The hired carter leaned close over the blue trousers, rubbing a thumb along the stitching with open suspicion.
“Every stitch alike,” he muttered. “Stitched by the faeries.”
“Elrick says it’s witch-work.”
“Aye,” Elrick answered darkly without looking up. “Look at the thing. Teeth like an animal trap.”
Zip.
Zip.
“A fastening that bites shut by itself is nae Christian.”
“Enough.” Ewan’s voice cut quietly across the yard. “Put the lass’s things down.”
Rory stopped at the edge of the gathering. It took perhaps three heartbeats for the mood to shift.
Elrick saw him first. Then the others followed his gaze one by one until silence settled over the yard as suddenly as snowfall.
“Elrick.”
“Captain.”
“Give me the coat.”
The younger man folded the jacket once across his arm instead of surrendering it immediately.
“With respect, sir, the men have a right to ken what’s under the same roof as them.”
“The men have a right to wages and dry beds,” Rory said evenly. “The rest is my concern. Hand it over.”
His voice never rose. It didna need to. The men who knew him best had already taken a careful step backward.
Elrick hesitated another second before surrendering the garment as Rory tucked it beneath his arm.
“Jean.”
The lass jumped visibly.
“Aye, sir.”
“These garments belong to Mistress Abigail.”
“Aye, sir. Mrs. Gable said they were soaked through wi’ salt water and needed washing.”
“She told ye to wash them. She didna tell ye to hang them in the middle of the yard like a traveling show.”
Jean’s eyes filled instantly with mortified tears “No, sir.”
“They’re to be dried indoors. In the drying room. Now.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And Jean.” Rory waited until she met his eyes. “If I hear one whisper of this carried into town by ye, or yer mother, or yer auntie the midwife, it’ll be the last washing ye do beneath this roof. Am I understood?”
The girl went pale as milk.
“Aye, sir.”
“Then take them down.”
She scrambled to obey, nearly tangling herself in the wet hems as she yanked the shirt and trousers from the line with trembling hands.
The poor lass looked near ready to faint from humiliation.
Still, Rory didna soften. A story like this one could spread through Fraserburgh before supper if given half the chance.
When Jean had disappeared indoors with the bundle clutched against her chest, Rory turned back toward the gathered men.
“The woman found on the rocks remains under my protection while she stays here.”
No one interrupted him.
“If any of ye have concerns, ye bring them to me. Not to each other. Not to the town.”
His gaze rested briefly on Elrick.
“Is that understood?”
A low murmur answered him. Rory waited.
“I said, is that understood?”
“Aye, Captain.”
This time the agreement came clearer, though not one of them seemed eager about it.
“Back to work, then.”
They dispersed slowly.
Elrick went last, touching two fingers briefly to his forehead before turning toward the construction yard. Respectful enough in form. Less so in spirit.
Rory watched him go. The man was an excellent mason. Steady hands. Fine eye for stone.
But he was also the sort who saw omens in spilled salt and warnings in storm clouds, and Rory had spent enough years at sea to know men like that could steady a crew in hard weather or unravel it entirely. There was seldom much middle ground.
Ewan came up beside him after the others had gone.
“How long?”
“Only a few minutes,” Ewan said. “I came across them just after Elrick took the coat down.”
Rory exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Aye.”
He glanced once toward the drying room door where Jean had vanished.
“Help me gather everything she arrived in.”
Ewan’s brows lifted.
“Everything?”
“Before the lass has time to tell herself one conversation canna hurt.”
Together they collected the clothes from the drying room away from the eyes of Rory’s men. Jean handed them over without a word, still pink-eyed and miserable.
Mrs. Gable looked up from her pot as the men crossed the kitchen carrying the strange folded garments between them. Her gaze moved once from Rory to the clothes and back again.
She pressed her lips together and went back to her labors. The woman had run this household too long not to recognize when something dangerous needed disappearing quietly.
Upstairs in the study Rory spread the garments across his desk while Ewan shut the door behind them.
The jacket first. Rory turned it carefully in his hands, studying it the way he might examine some unfamiliar piece of machinery washed ashore after a wreck.
Every stitch along the seams lay perfectly even. Identical.
No variation in the tension. No wandering hand or tiny flaws where fatigue or haste might show themselves.
He had sat in sail lofts from Aberdeen to Boston and never once seen workmanship like it.
Then there was the fastening. He ran the metal teeth slowly beneath his thumb again.
They meshed together by pressure and angle. Released by the small metal pull. Elegant in its simplicity. Impossible in its execution. He could imagine the design, but could not imagine any smith alive capable of producing it.
The blue trousers were no less strange. The cloth itself unnaturally regular in weave and color. Metal rivets fixed at stress points with perfect precision.
The shirt stretched softly beneath his hands, finer than silk yet not, yielding in ways no ordinary fabric should. The whole lot of it unsettled him more the longer he studied it.
Not because it frightened him, but because it made him curious. And curiosity, Rory had learned long ago, could wreck a man faster than fear.
At length he drew the small knife he used for rope work and slid the blade carefully beneath the stitching.
“Captain?”
“Aye.”
Ewan shifted by the door. “Ye ken what must be done.”
Rory cut the fastening free in silence. Slowly. Deliberately. When he finished, the strip lay curled upon the desk like some peculiar brass-colored creature, all tiny interlocking teeth and impeccable workmanship.
He set it aside carefully.
“Aye,” he said at last. “I do.”
He didna burn the clothes immediately. Instead he forced himself back down into the yard where the storm damage still demanded his attention.
There were scaffolding poles needing replacement, mortar seams to be repaired along the south face, and a report for the Commissioners half-finished upon his desk.
Work steadied the mind. Usually. From sixty feet above the yard atop the scaffolding, he could see Abigail below near the well behind the lodgings.
Mrs. Gable had apparently decided her first lesson in usefulness would involve hauling water.
Abigail had spent the better part of four days stumbling through similar lessons already, though none of them had yet ended with this much public humiliation.
The lass was making a glorious disaster of it. The rope tangled around her wrists almost immediately. The first full bucket nearly pitched her bodily into the well after it. Water splashed across the stones as she lost hold of the handle altogether.
For one long moment she simply glared at the overturned bucket in outraged disbelief. Then she tried again.
The second attempt ended no better. Water soaked the hem of her borrowed skirt. Damp curls escaped whatever battle she’d fought with her hair that morning.
Even at a distance Rory could see the temper gathering itself inside her, he saw her mouth move, caught the word ‘damn’ on the wind, wondered what other words came flowing out of her. The lass looked furious with herself.
Ewan crossed the yard toward her, said something Rory couldna hear, then demonstrated a different grip on the rope.
Abigail laughed. The sound carried faintly upward on the wind. Quick. Bright. Entirely surprised out of her.
He returned his attention to the mortar at once. Below, Abigail tried again. By the sixth attempt she managed a full bucket with most of the water still inside it.
She carried it carefully across the yard with both hands white-knuckled around the handle, skirts gathered awkwardly out of the mud. The dress was ill-fitting, too large through the bodice and too long in the hem, but she moved with stubborn concentration all the same.
The same expression she’d worn upstairs while negotiating for herself.
Rory frowned down at the stonework before him. He was staring. And worse, he knew perfectly well he was staring.
Mrs. Gable stood in the kitchen doorway watching the entire performance with folded arms and a face that slowly shifted from irritation to reluctant approval.
At least the lass was trying. That counted for something in this household.
That evening Rory wrote to Magistrate Cathcart beside the fire while wind rattled faintly against the shutters.
Sir,
I write to inform ye that a woman was recovered from the rocks beneath Kinnaird Head during the storm of the fourteenth instant. She gives her Christian name as Abigail yet appears unable to account fully for her circumstances or origins.
I suspect she may be connected to a vessel lost during the storm, though no wreck has yet come ashore along this stretch of coast.
Her speech suggests American birth, perhaps Philadelphia. She is presently housed under the supervision of Mrs. Gable within the workers’ lodgings.
Any enquiries regarding missing vessels or passengers along the Buchan coast would be received with gratitude.
He sanded the letter slowly. Every line omitted something.
It was well past midnight before Rory carried the clothes downstairs bundled beneath his arm.
The kitchen lay dark except for the red glow of banked peat beneath the ash. Warmth lingered heavily in the stones and beams overhead, carrying the familiar scents of smoke and oats and old iron.
He knelt before the hearth. The shirt burned first. It curled inward almost immediately, flaring bright before collapsing into blackened edges.
The strange blue trousers lasted longer. Metal rivets pinged softly against the coals while the fabric darkened and shrank inward upon itself.
Last came the jacket. Without the fastening it looked harmless.
Merely strange cloth and stitches. As the flames climbed through it, Rory understood with uncomfortable clarity that he was destroying evidence with his eyes fully open.
He stirred the ashes afterward until no recognizable trace remained.
Only then did he rise. The fastening remained in his pocket.
He had known from the moment he cut it free that he was never truly going to burn it.
Back upstairs he wrapped the small strip carefully inside a square of oilcloth from the drawer where he kept his survey instruments.
The parcel settled into the back corner beside the coffee tin and the folded scrap of linen that had once belonged to Murtagh.
Rory looked at the drawer for a very long time before closing it.
Later Ewan wandered into the study carrying two mugs of small beer, his large hands dwarfing the mugs.
“It’s done?”
“Aye.”
“And the fastening?”
Rory looked up.
Ewan’s broad cheerful face had gone unusually serious.
“The fastening’s safe.”
“Captain.”
“Say it.”
“You’re protecting her.”
Rory leaned back in his chair.
“Aye.”
Silence stretched between them for several heartbeats.
Then Ewan’s grin returned slightly around the edges.
“She finally managed the well bucket, in case ye missed it.” He grinned, rocking back on his heels. “Though only after threatening the rope in language that would’ve shocked the minister.”
“I didna miss it.”
“She’s got a nice laugh.”
Rory rolled his eyes.
“The kind that escapes before a person remembers not to.”
“That enough from ye?”
“Not quite.” Ewan paused near the door. “She’s bonnie too, by the way.”
“I hadna noticed.”
“Liar.”
The door shut behind him amid low laughter.
Rory sat alone with the small beer warming untouched beside his elbow. He had lied to a magistrate by omission, burned evidence no rational man could explain, and hidden a strange metal fastening in the same drawer as relics belonging to his dead brother.
And through it all he kept seeing Abigail pressing her shaking hands flat against her skirts that morning while she stubbornly tried not to let him see her fear.
He remembered the startled sound of her laughter in the yard. The bruise beneath her eye. Rory exhaled sharply into the darkened room.
He was going soft.
Murtagh would have mocked him mercilessly for it. With a low grunt Rory poured himself another dram of whisky and drank it beside the dying fire while Atlantic wind battered the tower walls beyond the glass.