Chapter 15
Abigail
The morning after the wreck the kitchen was as quiet as a library.
Abigail came downstairs wrapped in her shawl with her hair still damp from washing it in the basin upstairs. Mrs. Gable had already built up the hearth, and a pot of oats hung over the fire, steam curling thick through the room and filling it with the scent of peat smoke and toasted barley.
The housekeeper didn’t look up when Abigail entered. She set a wooden bowl on the table, followed it with a cup of watered ale, then turned back to stirring the oats as though the motion itself might keep the world steady.
Abigail winced as the wooden bench scraped across the stone.
With a sigh, she ate a spoonful of porridge knowing it would be a long day without time for a mid-day break.
At least the stuff was hot. As she chewed, the rough edge on her tooth pricked the inside of her cheek sending a jolt of pain through her.
Fantastic.
At some point she was going to have to file her own tooth smooth with a rock or a knife or whatever horrifying eighteenth-century solution existed for dental care, because there wasn’t a dentist or antibiotics, and certainly no urgent care facility.
Just whisky and herbs which had their uses but right now, Abigail would give almost anything for a bottle of ibuprofen.
“Mrs. Gable.”
The woman turned from the hearth with dark circles under her eyes. “Aye, lass?”
“Where’s Rory?”
“He’s in his study. The captain won’t be down today.”
“Is he all right?”
Mrs. Gable stopped stirring. For a moment the only sound in the room was the crackle of peat and the wind pressing softly against the shutters.
“He’s writing letters to Mary Hunter and to Mrs. Keith.”
Abigail gripped the spoon in her fist.
Jamie Hunter and Gregor Keith’s brother.
Rory had told her once the worst part of being in command wasn’t the storm itself.
It wasn’t even the wreck or the bodies. It was afterward.
The letters. Trying to fit grief into ink for loved ones waiting at home.
Wives, mothers, fathers, siblings. Finding words for something that never should have happened.
After breakfast she went upstairs, but had barely reached her room when the kirk bell began to toll, heavy enough to settle into her bones.
She crossed to the window to see the procession had already started down the road. Four men carried Jamie Hunter in a pine coffin upon their shoulders. Elrick walked front left in his dark coat with every button fastened properly for once, his face hard as carved stone.
Behind the coffin came a woman wrapped in a black shawl holding the hand of a little girl too young to understand why everyone looked stricken.
There wasn’t a second coffin because, as the men said, the sea had taken the lad.
Members of the kirk followed behind them while the bell carried across the grey morning.
Every person along the road stopped when the procession passed.
Men removed their caps. Women lowered their heads, and even the children went quiet.
While she hadn’t known Jamie or the other boy, Abigail stood at the window until the procession disappeared beyond the curve of the lane, then she sat heavily on the edge of the bed and covered her face with both hands.
She still hadn’t cried since she’d arrived in the past. At some point between the lantern room and breakfast she’d apparently decided crying would be a terrible idea, because she strongly suspected once she started she might not be able to stop until spring.
Later that afternoon, a knock sounded at the door. Ewan MacLeod stood outside holding his cap in both huge hands.
Every time Abigail heard his name she thought of that Highlander movie, though this MacLeod was much cheerier than the guy in the movie and had prettier coppery red hair.
“The captain asked me to bring ye something to eat,” he said. “Mrs. Gable’s put it in the small kitchen down the hall where it’s quieter.”
“Is he…”
“He’s writing. Likely will be most of today.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Nay lass.” His voice gentled. “Not today. Tomorrow I’d likely say the same.”
She nodded.
Ewan didn’t leave immediately, instead he slowly turned his cap between his hands, glancing once toward the hall before looking back at her.
“What is it?”
“Ye shouldn’t carry all of it yerself.”
“Two men are dead. They didn’t find Gregor Keith’s brother.”
“Aye.” He leaned one shoulder against the frame. “On a reef that’s been killing men since before my grandfather’s grandfather. The weather and the reef killed him, and the sea took him home. We announced the light was being tested. Ye’ve a hand in that part. I won’t lie to ye.”
Abigail looked away.
“But ye’re carrying more than belongs to ye.”
“I pushed the four-hour run.”
“The captain made the decision.”
“I didn’t say no.”
“Aye.” Ewan studied her with the tired patience of a man who’d buried enough people to stop expecting grief to make sense.
“But a captain doesn’t wait for permission from a lass he only recently allowed near his light. He chose.”
“He doesn’t seem to think so.” Abigail gripped the soft gray wool of her skirts.
“The captain’s blamed himself for storms, reefs, fog, bad luck, and likely poor fish harvests these last fourteen years. He wasna about to stop yesterday.”
Ewan settled the cap back onto his head.
“Eat the bread and broth. Sleep if ye can. Tomorrow’s another day, and ye both need to get the light working for the next poor souls crossing those waters.”
“We will,” she said softly.
“Good lass.”
After he left, Abigail sat staring out of the small window, then with a shake of her head, she shoved on her boots, wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders, and left the castle without speaking to anyone.
The wind hit, making her shiver the moment she cleared the yard. She walked past the tower and scaffolding, then farther out along the cliffs where the path narrowed to little more than a sheep track above the sea.
The North Sea crashed below in violent white bursts against the rocks.
“If you brought me here for this,” she said aloud into the wind, feeling ridiculous, “the least you could do is show up.”
Nothing answered. No silver-haired woman, no raven, no ancient goddess emerging dramatically from Scottish folklore to explain what exactly had gone wrong with her life.
Only gulls wheeling overhead and the endless roar of the Buchan coast.
She hadn’t truly expected an answer. The Cailleach didn’t strike Abigail as a supernatural entity particularly interested in customer service.
Still. It would’ve been nice.
You’re here for a reason. You’re not here for a reason. Go home. Stay. None of this was your fault. All of this was your fault.
Anything.
Eventually she turned back toward the castle, half-frozen from the cold and the wind.
The small kitchen stood empty when she returned. Bread waited beside a bowl of hearty stew gone lukewarm. Abigail ate standing at the table because sitting felt like more of an emotional commitment than she could currently manage.
Mrs. Gable hadn’t looked at her that morning, but she’d still made certain there was food waiting with Abigail’s name on it.
Back upstairs she opened the journal Rory had given her.
The man who brought me into this house is writing to a mother who lost a son, and to a woman whose husband drowned on a reef my calculations couldn’t save.
She stopped, thinking, then put quill to paper again.
He’ll blame himself either way because he’s built his whole life around keeping a promise to his dead brother.
The words sat quietly upon the page.
I contributed to tonight’s failure. I didn’t cause the deaths that followed from it, the ship chose to follow the light knowing it was a test.
Sam would say, “Abs, did you personally steer the boat onto the rocks? No? Then stop spiraling and help fix the thing.”
Despite herself she smiled faintly, hearing his voice in her head, the ocean in the background, someone’s radio playing. He was probably eating something profoundly inadvisable for an immunocompromised person.
The Cailleach hadn’t answered her out on the cliffs, but somehow Sam had found his way onto the page. She supposed that would have to be enough.
Rory didn’t come downstairs the next day either. Mrs. Gable moved through the house with the brisk efficiency of a battlefield nurse. Meals went upstairs. Plates came back mostly untouched.
Abigail hauled water from the well, scrubbed kitchen floors, and helped beat dust from blankets and rugs that smelled faintly of damp wool and smoke, anything to occupy herself.
At night she worked. Thermal calculations, bearing redesigns, grease cup sketches, and margin tolerances. She recalculated bronze expansion at four separate temperatures, redesigned the lubrication system twice, and didn’t sleep well at all, the dreams waking her several times during the night.
Elrick returned to work on the second day and refused to look directly at her when she crossed the yard. On the third day he crossed himself when she entered the kitchen, subtle enough he probably thought she hadn’t noticed.
On the fourth morning Ewan found her elbow-deep in linens in the wash house.
“Lass, the captain wants ye in the lantern room.”
She dried her hands quickly and followed him upstairs where Rory sat on the floor beside the seized bearing with her journal pages spread around him.
He’d laid them carefully across the stone floor like a man sorting through wreckage. Absorbed in his reading, he didn’t look up immediately when she entered.
When he finally raised his head, his face looked leaner than it had four days ago. Dark shadows rested beneath his eyes and he hadn’t shaved.
Abigail wanted suddenly, painfully, to cross the room and touch his arm. Just briefly, enough to say I’m here.
But she refrained, because Rory didn’t strike her as a man who wanted comfort.
What he wanted was the thing she understood best about herself. Work to occupy the mind.
“Ye’ve been working,” he said.
“I had time.”
“I read all of it twice.”
“Okay.” She resisted the urge to fidget.
“Option three,” he said. “Graphite tallow and wider clearance.” He nodded once toward the papers. “Defend it.”
So she did. For twenty minutes Abigail walked him through the revised margins, the graphite suspension, the grease-feed mechanism, the recalculated thermal expansion.
Rory questioned her like a man who’d watched somebody die because of failed mathematics and intended never to repeat the experience.
She answered every question without flinching. When she finished, Rory sat back slightly and looked from the seized bearing to her grease cup sketch.
“We’ll run this one in daylight,” he said. “Fifteen-minute burns first. Then half-hour. Then one hour. No night burns until I’ve seen four hours hold in daylight.”
“I agree.”
“The harbor’s been warned. No cutter runs by the beam until further notice. Elrick spread the word himself.”
“How is he?”
Rory was quiet a moment.
“He’s working,” he said finally. “He’s speaking only when required and hasn’t punched anyone yet, so I’m counting that as progress.”
Abigail nodded. “He won’t want me here.”
“He’ll dislike it,” Rory said plainly. “But he’ll accept it or leave. I told him this bearing would hold before I lit the lamp again. I also told him ye’re the one helping me build it.”
He folded her journal pages one at a time and slid them carefully into his notebook.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
He exhaled slowly. “Ye’ve said so before.”
“I’ll keep saying it.”
“I’ll likely need to hear it awhile.” His voice roughened faintly. “But once is enough for today.”
“Okay.”
The new bearing held for fifteen minutes the first day. Half an hour the second, and one hour the third. On the fifth day it held ninety minutes.
Every test happened in full daylight with the harbor warned beforehand and the mechanism watched constantly.
The graphite-and-tallow grease cup fed steadily through the bearing while the shaft turned smooth and cool beneath Rory’s hands.
At the end of the ninety-minute test Rory touched the outer housing and nodded once.
“No’ hot.”
“No’ hot,” Abigail repeated automatically in the Scots cadence she’d begun picking up without realizing it.
He glanced sideways at her with the faintest almost-smile.
They still didn’t light the lamp after dark. Not yet. Rory had become a man unwilling to gamble with the beam, and Abigail couldn’t blame him. The thought of another failed test tightened her chest hard enough she sometimes struggled to breathe.
Slowly, though, the house eased.
Elrick spoke to her for the first time five days after the funeral when he asked flatly for the mallet beside her elbow.
When she handed it over, he muttered, “Thank ye, mistress,” without meeting her eyes.
Tavish stopped crossing himself when she passed through the yard.
Duncan removed his cap one morning while she hauled water from the well.
Not exactly friendly, but no longer suspicious either.
Mrs. Gable thawed first.
Abigail burned her hand on a bread pot lid when she grabbed the bare iron without thinking, hissed sharply, and dropped the lid hard enough to rattle the hearthstones.
Mrs. Gable descended upon her immediately with a poultice, linen strips and the kind of terrifying competence suggesting she’d spent half her life tending burns, cuts, and deeply foolish men.
“Sit,” she ordered. “Let me see it.”
Abigail obeyed.
Mrs. Gable wrapped the burn briskly. “Ye need more sense around hot iron,” she muttered. “The captain’s light won’t build itself if ye ruin yer hand.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Mrs. Gable snorted. “Ye apologize too much, lass.”
She tied off the bandage with a brisk nod “Ye’re a fool around cookware, but ye’re our fool now, more’s the pity.”
She returned to the hearth before Abigail could answer.
Abigail sat staring at the bandage wrapped around her palm while warmth spread unexpectedly through her chest.