Page 25 of A Scot in the Storm
He walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to his study, and he didn’t sleep for a long time. He sat at his desk in the dark with the lowest drawer open, his palm flat on the lid of the tin, and watched the weather turn.
Chapter 7
Abigail
The sound of voices jolted Abigail from sleep. The bed was too hard and too narrow, the mattress stuffed with something that crinkled when she moved, and the air smelled of wet stone and peat smoke. This was not her snug little cottage. There was no hum of central heating, no glow of a charging phone on the nightstand. The low murmur of men’s voices drifted under the door.
It came back all at once as her heart sped up and spots danced in front of her eyes.
The storm. The woman on the rocks. The note in her own handwriting on eighteenth-century paper.
The way her ears had popped and her tooth had chipped. Thank goodness it wasn’t broken like she’d thought at first, but the chip left a sharp edge she’d need to get fixed.
The scorched sleeve. A man with blue eyes kneeling over her in a wool coat who’d spoken to her in English that sounded different, as if it were a second language.
Okay,she thought, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes.Ranked most-to-least likely. Go.
One: historical reenactment, maybe a film shoot. She’d heard of remote locations where people lived in character. But Arthurwould have been buzzing with the news, and he hadn’t said a word.
Two: she’d hit her head on the rocks and was hallucinating. Possible. Except hallucinations didn’t usually include bruises and a split lip.
Three: a kidnapping of some incredibly elaborate and pointless kind. Even less plausible. Who cared about a dusty old museum? Certainly not that skinny little actor who said nobody cared about the arts anymore.
Four: the one she didn’t want to think about and couldn’t stop coming back to. What the Cailleach had said on the beach.The storm is the door. Ye need only step through.
What she herself had stepped into under the tower while the rain hung in the air and the ground beneath her boots was dry in a two foot circle. Not to mention, the note in her own handwriting, on paper over two hundred years old.
Abigail wasn’t going to call it time travel yet. She was going to call it the problem. Then she’d collect data, and rule things out, one by one, because she sure as hell didn’t like her working theory.
Stop. Think. You’re a researcher. Research your way out of this.
She opened her eyes and took stock.
Her body hurt everywhere. Her left ear rang with a high thin whistle, and when she turned her head, everything from that side sounded underwater. Someone was talking in the corridor. She could hear the voice but not the words.
Her tongue found the chipped molar. Ouch. No dentist until she could get to a city. She filed that under Future Abigail Problems.
The room was small. Stone walls, dressed-granite work like the sixteenth-century Scottish fortifications she’d photographedfor her dissertation. There was a single window with wooden shutters, no glass.
Data point. Glass was common by the mid-eighteenth century in gentry houses, but a worker’s lodging would skip it. A tallow candle on a rough shelf, unlit. A washbasin with a ewer of cold water, a chamber pot in the corner.
The tallow candle caught her attention. She reached for it before she thought better of it. The wax was coarse, slightly yellow, and when Abigail lifted it close to her nose, the smell of rendered animal fat was unmistakable.
She’d read about tallow candles, how they guttered and smoked, how the smell hung in a room for hours, and how the wealthy burned beeswax while everyone else put up with this. She’d never held one in her hands. The weight of it was heavier than she’d expected, and the wick was a twist of cotton that she could see the individual fibers of, hand-spun, uneven at the tip where someone had trimmed it with a knife.
She set it down carefully, hands shaking. She got up, slowly, because every muscle hurt, and crossed to the wall, setting her palm flat against the granite.
Abigail had written a chapter on dressed sixteenth-century Scottish stonework, every word from black-and-white archive photographs taken in 1923 and from two visits to Scotland. Under her palm, the chisel marks were as fresh and clean as the day they’d been struck.
Her own clothes were draped over a wooden stool to dry. Jeans. Waterproof jacket with the scorched sleeve curled black at the cuff. Hiking boots. She was wearing a linen shift that smelled of soap and woodsmoke, which meant someone had changed her out of her wet clothes while she was unconscious.
She’d unpack that particular horror later.
The room was cold enough to see her breath as she pulled the wool blanket tighter around her shoulders and tried to think.
She’d studied this period. Written papers about it. Abigail knew, in the abstract academic way that historians know things, what it meant to be an unprotected woman in eighteenth-century Scotland.
If that’s what this was.
