Page 10 of A Scot in the Storm
He laughed and disappeared. Abigail picked up the tea and took a sip. Too hot, too strong, and exactly what she needed.
She’d fallen into a routine already. Up at seven, tea and toast in the cottage, walk to the museum by eight. Work in the archive until noon, break for lunch at the pub down the road (where the barman had stopped looking at her like she’d landed from Mars and started looking at her like she was simply mildly peculiar), then back to the archive until five. Walk home along the coastpath. Pasta or soup for dinner. Call Sam if he was awake. Read in bed until she fell asleep.
Quiet. Lonely. Exactly the kind of life she’d always said she wanted. The fact that it made her feel like she was slowly disappearing was a problem she wasn’t ready to examine.
Some mornings she caught herself listening for voices in the stairwell before the museum opened, half-convinced the castle had settled around her so completely it had begun remembering its dead aloud.
By late October the twilight arrived earlier each evening, blue-grey darkness settling over the sea before supper while peat smoke drifted low above the rooftops.
The beach helped. She’d found the path on her second day, a narrow strip of rock and shingle below the cliffs, accessible by a path that was more suggestion than trail. The North Sea came right up to the stones at high tide, leaving behind tide pools that smelled of brine and kelp. Some days she bundled up in coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and walked there in the mornings before the museum opened, when the haar was still thick and the sea fog muffled everything but the water and the gulls.
The night before Samhain, Arthur and Sandra refused to let Abigail go back to the cottage with a tin of soup and a stack of papers.
“You’re in Scotland at Samhain,” Arthur said, appearing in the archive doorway with his coat already on and a tartan scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that only his glasses and nose remained fully visible.
“You cannot spend the evening eating lentils alone while reading dead men’s invoices. There are laws against that sort of thing.”
“There are not.”
“There ought to be.” He grinned.
Sandra stood behind him with a patient smile and a paper bag clutched in one hand. She was small and silver-haired, with sharp blue eyes and the brisk manner of a woman who could identify a mislabeled artifact from across a room.
“Come down to the harbor for an hour. There’ll be music. A bonfire if the rain holds. Hot whisky if it doesn’t.”
“I have work.”
“The dead men will wait,” Arthur said. “They’ve been dead hundreds of years. Another evening won’t offend them.”
That, unfortunately, was difficult to argue with.
So Abigail locked the archive boxes away, bundled herself into her coat, scarf, gloves, and hat, and followed them down through the damp streets of Fraserburgh while the wind came sliding in off the North Sea.
The town had changed while she’d been buried in paper and dust. Shop windows that had held postcards and fishing tackle now glowed with carved turnips, their faces crooked and strange, little orange mouths gaping around candle flames.
Children ran past in costumes made of old sheets, wool cloaks, paper crowns, and one alarming mask that looked like either a goat or a taxidermist’s regret. Somewhere near the harbor, a fiddle was playing, quick and bright above the deeper thump of a drum.
The fiddle changed tunes, to something slower now. Older. Not dance music.
The sound carried strangely over the harbor, threading through smoke and mist until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Abigail looked instinctively toward the dark outline of the Wine Tower rising above the cliffs. She remembered reading the story during her first week at the museum.
A Fraser daughter locked in the tower. A piper drowned below the rocks during a storm. A girl who threw herself intothe sea rather than live without him. Local fishermen still painted the rocks red beneath the tower. Some claimed her ghost appeared before storms.
“Och, no’ that one,” Arthur muttered beside her, hearing the tune. “That song gives half the harbor the shivers.”
Peat smoke threaded through everything. So did salt and the smell of rain waiting just beyond the dark.
“This is more festive and slightly scary than I expected,” Abigail said as they reached the slope leading down toward the water.
Arthur gave her a look over the top of his scarf. “We’re northern folk. We take our entertainment where we can get it before winter locks the door.”
A bonfire burned near the quay, flames snapping and twisting whenever the wind shifted. Sparks rose into the blackening sky and vanished. People stood in clusters around it with cups in their hands, laughing, talking, stamping their feet against the cold.
Children darted between adults, carrying carved turnips by bits of string, the little lantern faces bobbing at their knees like small fiery goblins.
Out beyond the harbor wall, the sea moved dark and restless.
