Chapter 22
Rory
The glass had been falling since midnight. Years at sea and more on the coast had taught him to feel the weather in his bones. The tower stones held the damp differently. The ropes in the yard settled with a weight. Even the horses below the lodgings stood closer to the lee wall, heads down.
He went to the workshop before anyone else stirred and checked the barometer hanging beside the inner door. The mercury had dropped again. Lower than eight last night. Lower than midnight.
“Southerly,” he muttered. Coming in before the day was out.
The workshop was dark except for the lamp he carried, and the dull red mouth of the banked stove.
Cold brass waited on the bench. Abigail’s chalk marks still ghosted the slate board from late last night, fine white scratches marking tolerances, angles, and clearances no sane person should have been thinking about over a Thanksgiving feast.
But then Abigail had never struck him as particularly sane.
Clever, yes. Brave. Infuriating. Too thin and too beautiful, and there were times he found it difficult to breathe around her.
Rory set the lamp on the bench and unrolled the drawings, comparing them yet again to what they’d made together.
By the time Ewan came in, Rory had already taken down the test lever and the clean linen for the housing.
Ewan glanced at the barometer.
“Glass is falling.”
“Aye, I saw it last.”
“Southerly by midday.”
“Aye.”
Ewan rubbed one hand over his red beard and looked toward the yard. “The gulls were up over the harbor an hour ago. Came in over the headland in three rings before they settled.”
“That’s nae a fair-weather flight.”
“No.” Ewan’s mouth flattened. “Nor is it a fair-weather face ye’re wearing.”
“I didna know ye’d become a scholar of faces.”
“I’ve suffered yours long enough to learn.”
Rory almost smiled. Almost.
The brace beneath his coat pulled tight across his injured shoulder when he reached for the housing diagram.
Janet Cruickshank had wrapped him with the merciless efficiency of a woman binding a dangerous parcel.
She’d also informed him that if he undid it before she allowed it, she would come back with rope and a Bible and make the arrangement permanent.
He believed her.
“Get Tavish,” Rory said. “Tobias too. Duncan if he’s sober enough to tell brass from porridge.”
“He’s always sober in the morning.”
“Aye. But does he know brass from porridge?”
“Fair question.”
“We dry-test the bearing once more.”
Ewan’s expression sharpened.
“Before breakfast?”
“Before the weather.”
That ended the argument. By the time the eastern sky had lightened to the color of dirty pewter, they were all in the lantern room.
The dome above them held the morning dimly. Glass panels, ribs, ironwork, the whole upper chamber breathing cold around them while the sea fretted below the cliffs out of sight. The lamp stood ready but unlit, reservoir cleaned, wick trimmed, its brass body polished.
Tavish came up first, still yawning into his sleeve.
Tobias followed with a roll of tools under one arm and a piece of bread in his mouth.
Duncan arrived last, looking as if he had been carved from sleep and dragged upright by rope.
Abigail came after them wearing the blue-grey shawl Rory had bought her in Fraserburgh, pulled close over her dark dress, her hair tied back with a ribbon. She had a smudge of soot along one wrist and a narrow line between her brows.
Not fear but calculation. Excitement.
That, more than anything, settled him.
She looked at the sky through the eastern panel.
“Barometer?”
“Falling.”
“Fast?”
“Fast enough.”
She nodded once and crossed to the bench without another word.
The bearing had been seated the night before for the flex test. A final test, or what was meant to be final. The sort of test a sensible man did before Commissioners and magistrates and half the parishes within walking distance turned up to watch the official lighting.
The brass was cold beneath Rory’s palm.
“By hand,” he said. “No weight.”
Ewan took the first position at the lever. Duncan braced the far side of the cradle. Abigail stood beside the housing with her eyes fixed not on the lens but on the joint.
Rory gave the nod.
Ewan pushed as the mechanism turned. Slowly, clean, no scrape, no chatter in the teeth, and no hesitation along the lower track.
“Again,” Rory said.
Second rotation. Clean.
Tobias exhaled softly and Tavish grinned.
Rory felt Abigail’s attention sharpen beside him on the third rotation.
The bearing caught. Not hard. Not a stop. Just a grudging give somewhere deep inside the brass, a resistance so small most men would have missed it beneath the weight of the assembly.
Rory felt it through his good hand, so did Abigail.
“Stop,” they said together.
No one moved. The lantern room went so quiet the sea below seemed suddenly louder, the dull boom of water against rock carrying through stone and timber alike.
Rory removed the bearing, every movement pulled at his shoulder until pain pricked sweat cold along the back of his neck, but he kept his face steady. Pride was a poor painkiller, but it was readily available and did not require Mrs. Gable’s permission.
He set the bearing under the bench lamp. Abigail was already beside him with the calipers.
The first inspection showed nothing, but the second showed wear, and the third turn beneath the lamp found it. A hair-thin crack along the inner ring so fine it looked almost like a scratch.
Rory stared at it. There, where the brass was thinnest. Where they had shaved the seat by a hundredth of an inch to ease the catch from last week. A hundredth. The sort of measurement men laughed at until it stood between them and disaster.
“Fatigue,” Abigail said quietly.
“Aye.”
“From the flex test.”
“Aye.”
She let out a breath. “I should have taken the load down sooner.”
Rory looked up sharply. “Ye took it down at the bell. I was the one who left it on for the second twenty.”
“It doesn’t matter who should have called it.” Her voice was calm and clipped now, the way it went when she was focused on her task. “It cracked. We recast. We have enough time.”
The room seemed to take a breath around them as Ewan looked from Rory to Abigail.
“How bad?”
Rory held up the bearing. “Bad enough.”
Tavish swallowed as Tobias whispered something that may have been a prayer or a curse. Duncan peered at the crack, frowned, and said, “Tiny little bastard.”
That startled one breath of laughter out of Abigail.
Rory wrapped the cracked bearing in linen and set it aside.
“Ewan, take the gig to Tom McRae. If the wind turns before ye reach the road, go on foot and send the horse back with Tavish.”
Tavish straightened. “Me?”
“No’ if ye look that pleased about it.”
The boy immediately tried to arrange his face into an expression of grim responsibility and failed.
“Tell McRae we need the mould heated by ten,” Rory continued. “Tell him to bring his small furnace if he’ll risk it.”
“McRae won’t risk his furnace in a southerly,” Ewan said.
“He will when ye tell him what cracked.”
“Aye.” Ewan was already moving.
“And find Calum Ross’s brother. The one with bronze stock.”
“The chandler’s brother?”
“Aye.”
“He’ll charge like a highwayman.”
“Then let him wear a mask and bring the bronze.”
Ewan grabbed his coat from the peg.
Rory turned toward Tavish. “Down to Mrs. Gable. Ask her for the second pot to be put on.”
Tavish blinked. “The second pot?”
“She’ll ken what it means.”
“She will?”
“Likely before ye finish saying it.”
Tavish returned ten minutes later with a heel of bread, a red ear, and the message that Mrs. Gable had already set the second pot on and wanted to know whether Captain Sinclair intended to die before dinner because she would prefer advance notice for the seating arrangements.
“Did she say anything else?” Rory asked.
“Aye. She said Mistress Abigail is to eat something before touching any tool sharper than a spoon.”
Abigail looked personally betrayed. “I had bread and butter.”
“When?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
Rory pointed toward the stool near the bench “Sit.”
“I don’t have time today. Neither do you.”
Rory held her gaze a moment.
“No,” he said. “We don’t.”
By ten, Tom McRae came up the kirk road.
McRae himself was built like a gatepost, broad through the shoulders, beard threaded grey, hands scarred from years of hot metal.
His cap sat low against the wind and his expression suggested he had been summoned away from a perfectly good meal.
He climbed down from the cart and spat neatly into the mud.
“This better be worth dragging my furnace through weather that looks like the devil’s laundry.”
Rory handed him the cracked bearing.
McRae held it near his face. Turned it once. Twice as his expression changed.
“Aye,” he said. “That’ll do it.”
By eleven, Calum Ross’s brother arrived with bronze stock wrapped in oilcloth. He named a price that made Tobias choke on his ale.
Rory agreed before the man finished speaking as Abigail blinked at him.
“What?” he said.
“I’m just admiring the financial horror.”
“Admire quietly.”
The wind came in at half past eleven. A southerly push that arrived low and hard across the headland, flattening grass, snapping loose rope ends against scaffold poles, and driving cold damp beneath doors.
Tavish and Tobias hauled canvas tarps over the unfinished masonry.
Duncan lashed the lamp-store door until the hinges stopped creaking.
Mrs. Gable sent up broth, bread, cheese, and a small covered dish of something she claimed was “for strength,” which nobody questioned and everyone feared.
The forge took over the workshop yard. Heat bloomed red against the damp afternoon. Smoke flattened in the wind and crawled sideways across the stones. McRae worked with his coat off and sleeves rolled, forearms corded, face ruddy in the furnace glow.
Rory worked beside him with the shoulder strap loosened just enough to move.