Chapter 10 #2
Still, Mrs. Gable kept teaching her. Days at Kinnaird Head had already begun settling into rough familiar rhythms. Bread before dawn. Water hauled before breakfast. Supper by candlelight while the Atlantic wind battered the tower walls.
How to salt herring. How to mend linen. How to bank a fire properly at night. Abigail memorized every motion with desperate intensity because failure here was not theoretical.
A woman alone in this century without papers, parish, husband, or provable history was vulnerable.
Mistress Haldane had explained that very politely over tea and fish guts.
When the work stopped, panic crept in. So Abigail kept moving. She scrubbed floors. Hauled water. Carried wood. Anything to keep from thinking too hard about what she had lost.
She missed absurd things. Light switches. Endless hot water. Toothpaste. Ibuprofen. Conditioner. The internet. The ability to know the time without locating another human being and asking them.
And Sam. Some nights the missing of him arrived so suddenly it stole the breath from her lungs.
Her brother was probably somewhere in Morro Bay right now waxing a surfboard and avoiding calls from his doctor while pretending everything was fine. He wouldn’t know why she had vanished. Wouldn’t know why the phone had gone silent.
I’ll come back, she thought fiercely while scrubbing soot from a pot. I swear I’ll come back somehow.
But the walls were thin in Kinnaird Head, and tears were dangerous things in houses full of listening ears. So she wiped her nose on her sleeve and kept working.
By the second week Abigail had decided the worst part of the eighteenth century was not the spinning wheel. It was the outhouse.
Not because it was especially terrible. The path to it was short.
The roof didn’t leak, and the door latched properly.
Mrs. Gable kept lime in a bucket nearby.
It was, objectively speaking, a perfectly respectable eighteenth-century outhouse.
And Abigail hated it with the burning intensity of a thousand suns.
Every trip out there became a negotiation with herself.
You are a grown woman.
You have survived dissertation committees.
You can survive going outside in the freezing wind to use the bathroom.
The chamber pot inside her room, however, represented a moral line she had not yet crossed.
“Lass.” Mrs. Gable appeared one Saturday morning carrying steaming buckets. “Bath.”
Abigail nearly wept with gratitude.
The wooden tub off the kitchen was barely large enough to sit in comfortably, but the hot water felt like salvation itself. The soap smelled sharply of lye and ash. Her scalp burned for ten alarming seconds before settling into blissful cleanliness.
She washed every inch of herself twice. Conditioner, she thought mournfully while dragging a wooden comb through wet hair afterward, was one of humanity’s great achievements and nobody appreciated it enough.
When she came back into the kitchen wrapped in clean linen with damp hair hanging down her back, Mrs. Gable handed her a ribbon.
“Plait it wet. It dries cleaner.”
“Thank you.”
“And every Saturday from now on. I’ll no’ have lice in this house.”
Abigail’s scalp immediately began itching in phantom horror.
When Rory was elsewhere on the headland, Ewan made the days easier. He talked while he worked. About the seals on the rocks below the cliffs. About fishing boats in Peterhead. About his sister’s children. About storms and gulls and one memorable goose that had apparently terrorized half the parish.
He never pressed her. Never circled too close to the gaps in her story.
“The Captain’s a good man,” he said one afternoon while handing her a cup of small beer as they rested against the castle wall out of the wind. She’d never cared for beer, but it helped fill her up so she was forcing herself to drink the stuff.
“Hard as the granite, mind. But good.”
“I know.”
They sat in silence while gulls wheeled overhead and chisels rang faintly from the scaffold around the lantern room.
Above them, somewhere high in the tower, came the soft occasional chime of brass against brass. Rory at work.
Abigail thought suddenly of Sam sprawled upside down across her apartment couch stealing her glasses and wearing them backward while she graded papers, working as a teaching assistant during school. The ache of missing him settled low and heavy beneath her ribs.
After a while Ewan stood and stretched. “Back to the buckets wi’ ye, mistress.”
“I didn’t spill one yesterday.”
“Aye, I ken.” He hesitated. “And lass?”
“Yes?”
“Whatever ye are, or are not, the Captain chose to bring ye in. Ye owe him a careful tongue.”
“I owe him more than that.”
Ewan nodded once.
“Aye. Ye do.”
He walked back toward the yard.
Abigail stood beneath the tower another moment looking up at the scaffold wrapped around the lantern room, at the small high window where candlelight burned late into the night, and at the man working somewhere inside it.
She picked up the bucket and walked back toward the well.
The wind had finally dropped by evening, leaving the harbor wrapped in a strange silver quiet.
Not silence. Fraserburgh was never truly silent. Somewhere farther down the quay a dog barked. Nets knocked softly against wooden pilings. The sea moved steadily beyond the harbor wall with the sound Abigail was beginning to think of as the pulse of the coast itself.
But after three days of relentless rain and gale-force wind, the stillness felt almost holy.
Abigail walked beside Rory along the narrow harbor path with her hands tucked deep into the borrowed wool cloak Mrs. Gable had bullied her into accepting that morning.
“You look smug,” she informed him.
Rory glanced sideways. “Aye.”
“Because the weather finally stopped trying to murder everyone?”
“It’s Scottish weather. It likes to maintain standards.”
She laughed softly.
Lantern light spilled gold across the wet stones ahead of them. Somewhere near the harbor tavern voices rose and fell beneath the scrape of chairs and the occasional burst of laughter.
Then the fiddle began. Abigail slowed instinctively. The melody drifted down toward the water, thin at first beneath the wind, then clearer as the fiddler found the tune properly. Slow. Haunting. Nothing like the bright dancing reels she’d heard during Samhain.
Beside her, Rory went completely still. Not enough that anyone else might notice, but she noticed.
The change moved through him like a shadow crossing water.
“What?” she asked quietly.
Rory kept looking toward the harbor tavern below the cliffs.
“That song,” he said after a moment. “I havena heard it played in years.”
The fiddle carried across the dark water again, low and mournful enough to tighten something unexpectedly deep in Abigail’s chest.
She looked toward the distant lantern glow near the tavern windows. “Tell me about it?”
Rory rested his forearms against the damp stone wall overlooking the harbor.
“It’s an old tune.” His voice had gone quieter. “The Piper’s Lament, some call it now.”
Abigail felt the small hairs rise along her arms beneath the cloak.
“The Wine Tower story,” she said carefully.
He glanced at her, faint surprise crossing his face.
“So they’ve told ye that one already.”
“One of the laundry girls did. About the Fraser girl and the piper.” She thought about the pamphlet at the museum, hearing it at the Samhain celebration.
“Aye.” Rory looked back toward the sea. “Isobel Fraser. Fell in love with a fisherman’s son, depending who tells it. Or a stable hand. Or a wandering piper.”
His mouth curved slightly. “The details improve considerably after enough whisky.”
“The storm part stays the same.”
“It does.”
The fiddle continued somewhere below them. Abigail could almost imagine it echoing up from another century entirely.
“They say her father locked her in the tower,” Rory said. “And had the lad shut inside the cave beneath it until she came to her senses.”
Abigail looked automatically toward the dark outline of the Wine Tower rising against the night sky above Kinnaird Head.
“And then the storm came,” she said softly.
“Aye.”
His expression shifted.
“The sea flooded the cave before morning.” He folded his arms loosely against the stone. “By the time they reached him, the lad had drowned.”
The fiddle dipped lower, the melody winding itself through the dark harbor like smoke.
“And Isobel?” Abigail asked, though she already knew.
“They say she climbed the tower roof and threw herself onto the rocks below.”
The sea moved steadily against the harbor wall beneath them.
Abigail thought suddenly of Sam surfing enormous California waves with IV scars hidden beneath his wetsuit sleeves. She thought of storms, of people being taken by the water. Of Rory standing on a ship years ago, watching the sea swallow his brother.
“Cheerful place,” she murmured.
That startled a laugh out of him.
“There’s a reason Scots drink heavily through the winter.”
The tune drifted across the harbor once more as Rory’s smile faded slightly.
“Old fishermen dislike hearing it played near the water.”
“Why?”
He looked toward the sea again before answering.
“They say Isobel walks before big storms.”
A chill moved down Abigail’s spine.
“The ghost story again.”
“Aye.” His tone suggested he did not entirely disbelieve it. “Sailors are a superstitious breed.”
“And you?”
His gaze shifted toward her then. The lantern light caught the sharp line of his cheekbone and the dark gold threaded through his hair.
“I believe,” Rory said carefully, “that there are more things in this world than we properly understand.”
He held her gaze a moment too long as the words rose in her throat.
I’m not from here. Not from this century. From the future.
The confession sat there between one heartbeat and the next while the fiddle played below the harbor and the tide crashed against the stones.
“Cold?” Rory asked quietly.
Abigail managed a small smile. “Freezing.”