Chapter 24
Rory
The sound of Abigail’s laughter reached Rory through the thick oak door before he’d even lifted the latch.
Somewhere over the past weeks he’d begun turning toward that sound without meaning to, the way men along this coast turned instinctively toward a light in the fog.
He pushed into the kitchen carrying an armful of split wood and half the storm with him, while Elrick stumbled in behind under a load twice as large and considerably less stable.
“I maintain,” Elrick announced to the room at large, “that this winter intends murder.”
Mrs. Gable pointed her rolling pin toward the woodbox without looking up from the bread dough. “Less prophecy. More stacking.”
Elrick obeyed immediately.
Heat rolled against Rory’s face as he crossed toward the hearth, thawing the cold from his skin in slow painful increments.
His gloves were soaked through. Duncan had nearly broken his neck sliding into the oil shed half an hour earlier.
The western latch had frozen solid again.
Snow had drifted nearly waist-high against the lower yard wall. A fairly ordinary morning.
Abigail sat at the kitchen table peeling apples with the grave concentration of someone attempting surgery under battlefield conditions.
Mrs. Gable glanced toward the growing pile beside her. “Well now. Look at that.”
Abigail looked up warily. “What?”
“Ye’ve managed without slicing your own hand open.”
“I’m improving.”
“Terrifying thought.”
Rory’s mouth twitched despite himself.
Saints preserve him, she fit here too easily.
The realization unsettled him more each day. When Abigail had first appeared at Kinnaird Head she’d been all sharp intelligence and strange words, her hands too soft.
Now she sat wrapped in wool beside Mrs. Gable’s hearth with flour dusting one sleeve while snow whispered against the shutters and apples waited beside her elbow for baking. As if she’d belonged here all along.
Mrs. Gable shoved a mug of tea into Rory’s hands. “Drink that before ye freeze solid and become decorative.”
“I’d make a handsome ornament.”
“No’ with that beard ye wouldna.”
Tavish folded nearly in half laughing.
Rory accepted the insult with the weary resignation of a man long accustomed to defeat inside this kitchen and settled near the hearth while Abigail watched him quietly over the rim of her cup.
That had started happening lately. He felt it every time now, that strange tightening low beneath his ribs whenever her eyes settled on him.
“You survived the great wood expedition then?” she asked.
“Barely. Tavish attempted diplomacy with a frozen gate.”
“It was stuck,” Tavish protested.
“Ye threatened it.”
“Firmly.”
Abigail laughed softly.
Rory felt the sound of it like warmth after a long day out in the cold.
Outside, wind moved around the tower in long low mournful notes while the lighthouse beam swept pale across the kitchen ceiling at steady intervals.
The Widow’s Light. The name had spread all along the harbor now.
Yesterday a fisherman’s wife had arrived carrying smoked haddock and enough gratitude to make Rory deeply uncomfortable after her husband made it back to the harbor safely through the storm by following the beam through the fog.
Sometimes he still woke before dawn convinced the mechanism had failed in the night. He’d lie there listening for the sea and the distant turning rhythm of the assembly overhead until memory caught up with him again.
The light was still standing. Murtagh hadn’t died for nothing.
The grief never lessened. It simply settled differently now, less like drowning and more like carrying a stone beneath the ribs.
And lately, with Abigail near him, he’d begun noticing moments again. Warm kitchens. Firelight. Laughter drifting through rooms. Hope, dangerous as it was.
Mrs. Gable wiped flour from her hands an hour later and announced, “Come with me.”
Abigail blinked. “Where?”
“The village.”
“Why?”
“Because your boots are surrendering to Scotland.”
Rory’s gaze dropped automatically toward the shoes drying near the hearth.
There was indeed another hole near the toe.
A faint frown touched his face before he could stop it. “That wasna there last week.”
“They’re vintage.”
Mrs. Gable snorted. “The cobbler will weep.”
Within half an hour the two women vanished into the storm wrapped in cloaks and scarves while the kitchen settled quieter without Abigail in it.
Rory sat beside the hearth with his whisky while Duncan and Ewan disappeared to argue over pulley chains in the workshop. Tavish promptly fell asleep upright near the door like a man ambushed by soup and warmth.
Rory tried reading correspondence from Edinburgh and discovered after several minutes he’d absorbed precisely none of it because his thoughts kept drifting stubbornly elsewhere.
Abigail laughing beside the fire, wrapped in his heavier coat last night on the cliffs, staring out toward the sea with homesickness hollowing her eyes.
The back door opened again with a burst of wind and snow.
Mrs. Gable entered first carrying a basket beneath one arm, Abigail following behind her wearing new boots.
Good leather. Proper soles. Laced warm against the ankle.
“Happy now?” Abigail asked.
He looked toward the boots again. “Aye.”
“The cobbler crossed himself when he saw the old pair.”
“Reasonable response.”
“I thought they had character.”
Mrs. Gable removed her cloak with the grim satisfaction of a woman who had personally defeated winter through practical planning.
The afternoon passed quietly after that.
Rory worked through the correspondence near the hearth while Abigail helped Mrs. Gable bundle dried herbs and tie winter greenery with bits of wool ribbon scavenged from somewhere upstairs.
Not garlands. Nothing grand. Simply enough pine and holly to soften the stone walls against the dark part of winter.
The kitchen smelled of rosemary drying near the fire, baked apples, bread, and peat smoke curling warm into the rafters.
Rory glanced up from his papers and found Abigail staring into the fire with that faraway expression he recognized too easily now.
America. Whatever she’d left behind.
“What is it?” he asked quietly.
She blinked once before looking toward him. “Nothing.”
“You’ve been quiet half the afternoon.”
For a moment he thought she would refuse the question entirely.
Then she said softly, “My brother.”
Rory set down the papers.
“Sam,” she continued. “I keep thinking about him being sick while I’m sitting here by a fire drinking tea and…” Her mouth tightened faintly. “I feel guilty for being happy.”
The honesty of it struck him harder than expected.
“Aye,” he said quietly. “I know that feeling.”
She studied him carefully across the firelight. “Does it ever stop?”
He thought of Murtagh. Of eating breakfast while his brother lay beneath the sea. Of sunlight on his face, waking each day.
“Nay,” Rory answered at last. “But eventually sorrow stops feeling like the only thing inside ye.” He looked down briefly toward the whisky in his hand before continuing more quietly.
“One day ye realize grief’s sitting beside other things again. Warmth. Hunger. Laughter. Ordinary life.”
Abigail watched him for a long moment after that.
Then she nodded slightly like someone storing the words carefully away.
By late afternoon Mrs. Gable decided the lighthouse required greenery before Christmastide properly arrived.
“Take those upstairs,” she ordered, gesturing toward a pile of pine branches and holly tied with scraps of faded ribbon.
Rory gathered the greenery while Abigail collected the ribbon basket, and together they climbed toward the lantern room while the wind hummed through the tower stone, and snow battered the narrow windows in bursts of white.
The stair smelled faintly of pine resin and lamp oil. Halfway up, Abigail slowed near one of the windows.
“There’s something there.”
Rory turned to see a black feather resting motionless against the outer ledge of stone. The wind should have carried it away. Instead it remained perfectly still.
Old stories stirred uneasily somewhere at the back of Rory’s mind. Things fishermen muttered after funerals. Things seen briefly through fog and never spoken of directly afterward.
Beside him Abigail wrapped her arms tighter around herself.
Rory caught the expression on her face. Not fear exactly. Something closer to grief waiting at the edge of a decision.
“What is it?” he asked softly.
Her eyes stayed on the sea beyond the glass.
“I don’t know what happens next.”
Honesty at last. The words hit him harder than they should have, because suddenly Rory understood with terrible clarity that Abigail no longer wished to leave.
And God forgive him, some selfish aching part of him was glad.
He stepped closer before caution could interfere and reached up carefully to tuck one loose strand of hair back beneath her scarf.
The touch nearly undid him, her skin cold beneath his fingers, so soft and smooth. The tiny catch of her breath.
His hand lingered beside her cheek one ,ment too long while Abigail looked up at him with something so open in her eyes it hollowed him clean through.
What would it be like to kiss her? To feel her lips against his? Involuntarily he leaned forward.
Then from somewhere below came Duncan’s voice echoing violently up the stairwell.
“THE WREATH HAS TAKEN TAVISH HOSTAGE.”
Rory closed his eyes slowly. Beside him Abigail burst out laughing so hard she had to catch the railing to steady herself.
“STOP PULLING IT.”
“IT’S ATTACHED TO THE DOOR.”
“WHY?”
Rory’s lips twitched and before he knew it, he was laughing with her. It felt good to laugh.
The sound warmed the lantern room while outside snow fell softly over Kinnaird Head and the black feather rested motionless against the stone beyond the glass.