Chapter 10
Abigail
More than a week after the storm, Abigail found herself defeated by a spinning wheel. Not symbolically or emotionally. Literally defeated.
Mrs. Gable had set the wheel in the corner of the kitchen near the hearth where the firelight warmed the polished wood to a honey-gold, and Abigail had stared at it with the cautious respect one might give an enemy artillery cannon.
It was beautiful. Also apparently possessed by the devil.
She knew exactly what every part was called. The flyer. The bobbin. The maidens. The drive band. She could have lectured a seminar for three hours on the transition from the great wheel to the Saxony treadle and assigned supplemental reading to those interested.
What she could not do was spin. The treadle wanted one rhythm from her foot while her hands demanded another, and the wool itself seemed personally offended by her existence. The fibers thickened, thinned, twisted, snapped, and wrapped themselves around the spindle in furious little knots.
After twenty minutes she had produced something resembling the nesting material of a deeply distressed seabird.
Mrs. Gable watched from across the kitchen while kneading bread with the expression of a woman approaching the outer boundaries of Christian patience.
“Have ye truly never spun?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Every woman spins. Gentlewoman or fisherwife, it makes nae difference. Ye learn it as a bairn same as knitting. Do ye knit?”
“Nope.”
Mrs. Gable paused mid-knead.
“No?”
“No.”
No one spins where I come from, Abigail thought mournfully. We buy socks in twelve-packs at Target and accept that the dryer always eats one or two.
“I must not have been very good at it,” she offered weakly.
With a snort, Mrs. Gable reclaimed the wheel without comment, though the set of her mouth suggested the amnesia story had just suffered another serious injury.
“Let’s try porridge.”
Abigail would rather have faced the spinning wheel again.
The oat pot hung over the fire on a blackened iron crane, steam curling upward through the peat smoke. Mrs. Gable explained the process carefully. Stir constantly. Watch the heat. Add the oats slow or the whole thing would seize. Simple.
Which, Abigail had learned by now, was usually the last thing said before disaster.
She stirred. The porridge remained cooperative for perhaps thirty seconds before thickening with terrifying speed. Abigail added more water. The porridge took this personally and transformed into a grey substance resembling wet mortar.
“Ye burnt it.”
“I was stirring.”
“Nae kindly.”
Apparently porridge required emotional support.
Mrs. Gable took the spoon from her hands and demonstrated the motion, slow and steady.
“Ye’re fighting it. Porridge doesna like to be bullied.”
Abigail stared into the pot. She had somehow entered into a hostile relationship with breakfast.
The second attempt was worse. The third achieved the remarkable feat of being simultaneously scorched at the bottom and raw in the middle. Mrs. Gable examined the pot in silence while Abigail stood beside her smelling faintly of smoke and humiliation.
“Perhaps,” Abigail said carefully, “I should devote myself to water-hauling instead.”
“Ye’ll try again tomorrow.” The words landed with all the mercy of a prison sentence.
The knock came just before noon.
“That’ll be Mistress Haldane,” Mrs. Gable said, wiping flour from her hands. “Mind yerself.”
“Who—”
The door opened before she finished speaking.
The woman who stepped inside was small and neat, somewhere in her fifties, with a tidy grey braid wrapped twice around her head and a dark cloak pinned precisely at the throat. She carried a stoneware jug in one hand and a linen bundle in the other.
“Margaret,” she said warmly.
Then her gaze settled on Abigail.
“And this’ll be the lass the sea spit out.”
Mrs. Gable’s posture straightened slightly.
“Aye. Abigail, this is Mistress Isobel Haldane from the kirk road. She’s brought ye a loaf.”
“And milk.” Mistress Haldane set the jug down. “Sit, lass. Ye look run half to death already.”
Abigail sat because it felt less dangerous than standing.
Mrs. Gable poured tea while Mistress Haldane settled herself opposite Abigail with the composed warmth of a woman who knew every birth, death, marriage, scandal, and unpaid debt within ten miles of the kirk.
The smile never left her face. Neither did the scrutiny.
“My brother’s the kirk elder,” Mistress Haldane said conversationally. “Ye’ll meet Reverend Ogilvie on Sunday, I’d expect. Long-winded man, but kind-hearted.”
“I look forward to it.”
Which was the sort of thing one apparently said to church elders’ sisters in any century.
“Margaret tells me the Captain believes ye came ashore from a wreck.”
“So he says.”
“And American.”
Abigail wrapped both hands around the warm teacup.
“Yes.”
Mistress Haldane nodded slowly.
“The Captain’s a good ear for a tongue. Sailed abroad during his Navy years. And what’s left to ye, lass, of yer time before the rocks?”
“Pieces.” Abigail chose the word carefully. “A ship. Weather. A boat in the dark. Falling into the cold sea. I remember my name. Not much else.” She gave a theatrical shudder. Take that Anne Hathaway. That was as good as your role in Les Misérables.
“Mm.”
The older woman sipped her tea.
“What part of America?”
“That’s one of the pieces I can’t bring back.” Abigail gave a small apologetic shake of her head. “The Captain says Philadelphia or near it.”
“And ye canna say if he’s right.”
“No.”
“I had the name of my own town in my head this morning,” Abigail added softly, “and it vanished somewhere between the spinning wheel and the porridge.”
That earned the faintest twitch at the corner of Mrs. Gable’s mouth.
Mistress Haldane set down her cup.
“Can ye dress a herring?”
The change of subject came so quickly Abigail nearly choked on tea.
“A what?”
“A herring.”
Mistress Haldane unfolded the linen bundle and produced a silver fish, cool and faintly damp, its scales catching the firelight.
“Hands remember things the mind forgets.”
Mrs. Gable, stirring the hearth pot behind them, did not turn around. Which meant she had expected this.
A knife appeared beside Abigail’s cup.
Abigail looked at the fish with growing despair. She had watched documentaries about herring curing. Had once written a conference paper with an entire section devoted to the Moray fish trade.
None of that proved remotely useful while holding an actual slippery fish beneath the attentive gaze of a Scottish church elder’s sister.
Okay, she thought. Vent to gill. Remove guts. Keep backbone intact for salting.
She picked up the knife. The fish immediately became incomprehensible. She turned it over once. Then back again. Somehow the gills appeared to have moved while she was blinking.
Mistress Haldane waited serenely.
Abigail cut. The knife slid at a ridiculous angle, opened the belly unevenly, and promptly sliced her thumb.
A bead of blood welled bright against the pale flesh of the fish. Abigail stared at it. She was a historian with a doctorate from Columbia University and she had just lost a fight with a herring.
“Och,” Mistress Haldane said kindly. “Yer hand.”
“The knife slipped.”
“It’s only a wee cut. Margaret, a cloth.”
Mrs. Gable brought linen.
Abigail wrapped her thumb while trying not to die of embarrassment.
Mistress Haldane took the knife gently from her hand and dressed the fish in six clean practiced motions. Gill. Vent. One neat pull of the wrist. Done.
“There now. Ye’ll learn.”
Abigail nodded weakly.
“Tell me, lass.” Mistress Haldane folded her hands in her lap. “Who was yer minister, in the town ye canna quite remember?”
There it was. Not the fish. The fish had only softened the ground first.
Abigail’s fingers tightened around her teacup.
“I cannot bring his name.” She kept her eyes lowered. “I remember a church. Plain windows. Black coat. Wooden pews. But not the parish.”
Mistress Haldane smiled exactly as before.
“The Lord minds what we forget.”
The kitchen seemed suddenly warmer and colder at the same time.
“Yer mother, then. Where is she laid?”
“America.” Abigail answered plainly, the way Rory had taught her to answer dangerous things. “West of where we sailed from.”
“Nae husband or family. Nae parish. Nae minister.” Mistress Haldane’s voice remained gentle. “And a long road between Scotland and America.”
She wasn’t being cruel. That was the frightening part. She was simply measuring the holes in Abigail’s story one by one.
“Well,” she said finally, “many a woman has started fresh at the kirk door. Ye’ll be welcome there.”
“Thank you.”
“Keep the loaf and milk. Margaret will show ye how to salt the herrings.”
Then she rose and departed with the quiet decisive grace of a woman who never slammed doors because she never needed to.
Silence settled over the kitchen after she left. Mrs. Gable broke it first.
“Ye’ve a day. Maybe two.”
“Until what?”
“Until Isobel’s brother sends letters to every harbor master between Aberdeen and Leith asking after a missing American passenger.”
“Cathcart.”
“Aye.” Mrs. Gable scraped the pot thoughtfully. “And ye’ll want the Captain to hear what was said here before the magistrate hears it elsewhere.”
Abigail looked down at the blood seeping through the linen wrapped around her thumb.
“Mrs. Gable?”
“Aye?”
“I’d like to learn the herring properly.”
At that, Mrs. Gable actually laughed.
“Aye, lass. Come here then.”
The rest of the day continued its personal war against her dignity.
The fish stew burned.
The fire caught the hem of her borrowed skirt.
Her sewing looked like something accomplished by a drunk spider during an earthquake.
Mrs. Gable eventually took the needle back with a sigh. “This seam will nae hold till Tuesday.”
“I’m trying.”
“Aye. Ye are.”
Which somehow sounded worse than criticism.