Chapter 17
Rory
While Rory loaded the cart, Abigail wandered the last few stalls.
She stopped at the wool merchant’s pitch, stood in front of the hanging cloth the same way she stood before his clock gears in the lantern room. Too still. Head tipped slightly. Hands held carefully at her sides.
The wool merchant was an old fellow missing half the teeth on the right side of his mouth.
Rory saw him glance at Abigail sideways with the cautious hope of a man trying to determine whether the strange foreign woman in the lighthouse captain’s company intended to spend silver or only admire the goods.
Abigail only intended to admire. The colors were finer than most of the market row.
Deep madder reds. Soft saffron golds. Indigos dark enough to pass almost black until the cloth shifted in the wind and the winter sun caught the weave sideways.
There were heathered greys spun through with muted greens and russet browns where different fleeces had been mixed by hand.
Good dye work. Very good dye work.
Rory had known enough wool merchants since boyhood to recognize craftsmanship when he saw it. He watched Abigail pick up a length of indigo twill. She held it toward the light, ran her thumb slowly along the selvedge.
Then, with obvious reluctance, set it back down. A moment later she tucked her hands beneath her arms exactly the way he’d known she would.
Then she turned and started back toward the cart. He left her there a short while later under the pretense of one final errand, then he doubled back through the market.
The shawls hung from a wooden frame, stirring softly in the wind coming off the harbor.
Most were practical pieces. Rough wool in sturdy browns and greys meant for working women, and thick enough to survive the sea wind, kitchen smoke, and years of hard use.
But one stood apart from the others. Blue-grey. The color of the sea in winter just before sunset, when the light drained slowly from the water.
The weave was fine and even beneath his fingers, the fringe carefully knotted, the wool soft without being delicate.
It was costly. Far more expensive than a sensible man ought to spend on a woman that wasna his, no matter how he wished she was.
Rory handed over the silver. A shawl like this, wrapped around the shoulders of the foreign American woman who walked beside the lighthouse captain, said something very clear to a town like Fraserburgh.
She belongs with me.
It was a dangerous thing to say without words, and he knew exactly how it would be talked about in every tavern and kitchen from the harbor to the kirk.
He didn’t care.
The merchant wrapped the shawl carefully in brown paper and tied it with twine. Rory carried it back through the market feeling absurdly conspicuous. Which, he supposed, was the point.
They’d nearly reached the cliffs again before he handed the parcel to her.
“Here. For you.” His voice came out rougher than intended. “Mrs. Gable’s shawl is good enough for the house, but ye’ll need something warmer for when ye go on yer wee walks.”
Abigail took the parcel, unwrapped it slowly. Her fingers lingered over the wool exactly the way they had over his clockwork gears the day they met.
Then she held it up in front of her, the blue-grey wool catching the light. And suddenly she looked like part of the coast itself. Sea and sky and winter.
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly.
“It’s practical. Ye’re always freezing.”
She held the shawl gathered against her chest, and there was something in her expression that made his breath catch.
“Thank you,” she said. “Really. I’ve never…”
Her voice faltered. She pressed the wool briefly against her cheek.
“It’s only a shawl.”
Her gaze lifted back to his.
“No,” she said quietly. “It isn’t.”
She took off the borrowed shawl, folded it neatly and stowed it in the cart. Then she wrapped the new one around her shoulders, tucking one end neatly beneath the other. It settled against her as though it had been made for her.
“Come on, then,” he said. “I want to show ye something.”
They walked farther along the cliffs than the usual path to the castle. The headland stretched out over the sea, all black rock and long grass.
The sun had already begun its slow descent westward. At this latitude afternoon disappeared quickly once it started. Another hour, perhaps less, before the cold rose properly from the ground.
Rory knew a flat stretch of stone near the cliff edge where a man could sit above the water without being seen.
He led her to the stone as she settled beside him. The wind moved softly through her new shawl.
Far overhead a skein of pink-footed geese crossed southward in a ragged V, their cries echoing faintly over the water. The light had shifted into early evening now. Not darkness yet, but that slow winter burning where gold deepened toward amber and the sea turned molten beneath the falling sun.
She sat close enough that he could hear her breathing, feel the warmth of her through the layers of wool between them. And with a sudden terrifying certainty Rory realized how much he had come to care for her.
“Tell me something,” Abigail said quietly.
Rory didn’t talk about himself. For fourteen years he had carried grief the way a man carried a stone inside his chest. Quietly. Without complaint. Without inviting anyone close enough to touch it. But somehow he found himself speaking to her.
“My brother’s name was Murtagh.”
She didn’t interrupt, didn’t say she was sorry or offer comfort too quickly the way people often did when grief made them uncomfortable. She simply listened. And there was something about the way Abigail listened that made a man feel less alone inside his own thoughts.
“He was twenty,” Rory said. He nodded toward the reef below where white water broke over black stone.
“Drowned right there. October of seventy-three. Six months into his first commission aboard the Ardent. I was lieutenant on watch that night.”
The sea rolled endlessly as a gull cried somewhere far below.
“Storm came at dusk.” Rory kept his eyes on the horizon. “We were too close in. Lachlan called for sea room and I hauled the wheel over, thought we’d clear the reef.”
His jaw tightened. “We didn’t. I sent Murtagh below when the storm first broke. Wanted him out of the worst of it. After we struck the reef I went after him.”
The words lodged hard in his throat. “We reached the companionway ladder. Water rising everywhere. The ship rolling under us.”
His left hand tightened unconsciously against his knee. “I reached down. He reached up.”
Rory stared at his hand.
“I had him by the wrist.” His voice roughened.
“I had him.”
The cliffs below blurred slightly in his vision. “The ship took another wave. His shirt cuff tore off in my hand.”
He swallowed once. “And then he was gone.”
Abigail simply listened, waiting. Her silence was kinder than sympathy.
“I dove after him three times. Lachlan and Henderson had to drag me back before the ship rolled completely.”
The sea below them darkened toward iron.
“When I woke on the rocks there were twenty-nine survivors.”
He looked out toward the reef.
“Seven men gone. Including him.” The wind carried the scent of salt and cold stone.
“There was no light here then,” Rory said quietly. “No beacon. No warning. If there had been…”
His mouth tightened.
“The Ardent would’ve cleared the reef by a quarter mile.”
He looked down at his hands. “And my brother would’ve lived.”
Abigail’s hand settled lightly on his arm, and her gentle touch nearly undid him.
“That night,” Rory said after a moment, “I made him a promise. I would build the light.”
The horizon burned deep gold now.
“It’s taken fourteen years.”
He told her about leaving the Navy, apprenticing himself to Thomas Smith, learning optics, masonry, engineering, and damned politics.
About fighting for the commission at Kinnaird Head because nowhere else would ever have satisfied him.
“I came back here,” he said finally, “to put a light on the rocks that took him.”
His voice had gone quiet. “So that the next ship coming through a storm would see the reef in time.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Twenty.”
“So young.”
He shrugged. “Old enough to be responsible.”
The sea below them flashed gold beneath the lowering sun.
“Every lighthouse on every coast means one less dark shore,” Rory said quietly. “One less ship running blind. One less family waiting for men who’ll never come home.”
He stopped there, because he could not finish the thought.
The wind moved gently through the long grass.
“He would’ve liked you,” Rory said after a while.
“Murtagh?”
“Aye. He was curious the way ye are. Always wanting to know how things worked. It’s one of the things I like about ye.”
A smile touched Abigail’s mouth. “Would he have become an engineer?”
“Perhaps though he loved the sea. He was clever with tools. Had the mind for it.” Rory looked at her fully then. “Like you.”
“I’m not sure anyone’s ever said that to me before.”
“That ye’re clever?”
“No.” She looked down at her gloved hands. “That they liked the way my mind works.”
“Well,” Rory said roughly, “they should’ve.”
She turned away quickly then, staring toward the horizon. After a while she said softly, “My brother taught me to skip stones.”
Rory glanced sideways at her face, the sadness there.
“When I was little. On a beach.” A smile ghosted briefly across her face.
“He kept making me try until I got one to skip three times. Said you couldn’t quit a thing until you’d done it once properly. He’s the only person who ever really thought I’d be okay after our parents died.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sam. He’s twenty-five. Lives far away from here.”
There was something in her voice. The same carefulness she used when speaking of things too close to the bone.
“He’s been ill for a long while,” she continued. “And I’m waiting to hear whether the news is finally good.”
“Is he going to heal?” Rory watched the wind pull a bit of her hair loose.
Abigail was quiet a long moment.
“I don’t know.”
The honesty of it settled heavily in the cold air.
“Ye miss him.”
“Every day.”
Rory looked back out at the sea.
One brother lost beneath black water. Another brother far beyond Abigail’s reach.
He bent and picked up a flat stone from the path.
“Show me,” he said.
She laughed, then they walked down the path to the still water.
Rory missed twice. The stones struck the water and vanished.
“I’m a captain,” he muttered. “Not a small boy on a beach.”
“That’s your problem. You’re overthinking it.”
Her own stone skipped four times.
Rory counted aloud as it bounced over the water.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Abigail laughed, bright, startled, and completely unguarded.
Rory found himself watching her instead of the sea. The wind had loosened more strands of hair around her face. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the cold. The blue-grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders made the gold in her eyes look brighter somehow.
Alive.
She looked alive in a way that caught painfully somewhere beneath his ribs. For one reckless moment he had the strange thought that he might have known her in another life, that they were meant for each other. The idea passed as quickly as it came. But the ache of it lingered.
By the time they rose to leave, the sun had nearly reached the horizon. They walked back toward the castle while the last light burned across the sea in bands of gold and deep violet.
The cold crept upward through the ground, a hard winter cold that settled inside their boots.
Smoke rose from the castle chimney in a thin white line against the darkening sky.
Snow soon. Tomorrow perhaps.
Abigail walked beside him with the shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Every so often her hand brushed his arm when the path narrowed.
He didn’t move away. The thought came unbidden and settled warmly somewhere deep in his chest.
If Abigail truly was one of the fae folk the old stories warned against, then perhaps he was a fool already lost beyond saving.
But standing there with winter gathering around them and her shoulder brushing his beneath the darkening sky, Rory thought he might go willingly enough into the snare if it meant walking beside her a little longer.