Page 12 of A Scot in the Storm
A boy, maybe twelve, tried to look unimpressed and failed. “My da says that’s old wives’ nonsense.”
“Your da,” Isobel said, “once ran screaming from a goose.”
The crowd erupted in laughter as the boy flushed scarlet.
Arthur coughed into his whisky. “True story.”
Abigail smiled despite herself, though the skin at the back of her neck prickled.
The old woman lifted her cup and took a slow drink. “Mock if ye like. But if ye see an old woman by the stones tonight, silverhair loose and black feathers at her feet, ye do not follow where she points.”
The smile slipped from Abigail’s face.
Sandra glanced at her. “You all right?”
“Yes.” Abigail tightened both hands around the cup. “Fine.”
But across the bonfire, beyond the ring of children and fishermen and laughing women, she saw someone standing near the mouth of the lane that led back toward Kinnaird Head.
An old woman with silver hair loose beneath a dark hood. The woman looked directly at Abigail.
The music, the laughter, the crackle of the bonfire all seemed to thin at once, as though the night had drawn a pane of glass between Abigail and the rest of the world.
Then a child ran between them, trailing a turnip lantern and shouting for his brother.
When Abigail looked again, the lane was empty.
Arthur was saying something about the goose. Sandra was laughing and Isobel had begun another story, this one about a fisherman who’d married a selkie and then complained she never folded the laundry properly.
Abigail barely heard it. She scanned the lane, the harbor wall, the dark line where the sea moved beyond the boats.
Nothing.
Only smoke, rain, music, and the restless black water beyond the harbor mouth.
“You’re pale,” Sandra said.
“The whisky’s stronger than I expected.”
Arthur looked happy. “That is the proudest thing anyone has ever said about my family.”
Abigail forced a laugh and took another sip, though her fingers had gone cold inside her gloves.
The old woman’s voice followed her as they drifted back toward the bonfire.
“Best stay away from the old stones tonight,” Isobel called to no one in particular, or perhaps to everyone. “Doors open easier than they close.”
The wind shifted. For one second, Abigail smelled not smoke or whisky or salt, but something sharp and wild. Wet stone. Black feathers. The cold of deep winter and ice.
Then the fiddle struck up again, bright and quick, and the town surged back around her.
Later, when Arthur walked her halfway to the cottage beneath a sky crowded with fast-moving clouds, he kept up a cheerful commentary about turnip lantern safety, museum insurance, and the deeply suspicious number of ghost stories involving drowned sailors.
At the fork in the lane, he stopped.
“You’ll be all right from here?”
“I can see the cottage.”
