Page 43 of A Scot in the Storm
The fish stew burned.
The fire caught the hem of her borrowed skirt.
Her sewing looked like something accomplished by a drunk spider during an earthquake.
Mrs. Gable eventually took the needle back with a sigh. “This seam will nae hold till Tuesday.”
“I’m trying.”
“Aye. Ye are.”
Which somehow sounded worse than criticism.
Still, Mrs. Gable kept teaching her. Days at Kinnaird Head had already begun settling into rough familiar rhythms. Bread before dawn. Water hauled before breakfast. Supper by candlelight while the Atlantic wind battered the tower walls.
How to salt herring. How to mend linen. How to bank a fire properly at night. Abigail memorized every motion with desperate intensity because failure here was not theoretical.
A woman alone in this century without papers, parish, husband, or provable history was vulnerable.
Mistress Haldane had explained that very politely over tea and fish guts.
When the work stopped, panic crept in. So Abigail kept moving. She scrubbed floors. Hauled water. Carried wood. Anything to keep from thinking too hard about what she had lost.
She missed absurd things. Light switches. Endless hot water. Toothpaste. Ibuprofen. Conditioner. The internet. The ability to know the time without locating another human being and asking them.
And Sam. Some nights the missing of him arrived so suddenly it stole the breath from her lungs.
Her brother was probably somewhere in Morro Bay right now waxing a surfboard and avoiding calls from his doctor while pretending everything was fine. He wouldn’t know why she had vanished. Wouldn’t know why the phone had gone silent.
I’ll come back,she thought fiercely while scrubbing soot from a pot.I swear I’ll come back somehow.
But the walls were thin in Kinnaird Head, and tears were dangerous things in houses full of listening ears. So she wiped her nose on her sleeve and kept working.
By the second week Abigail had decided the worst part of the eighteenth century was not the spinning wheel. It was the outhouse.
Not because it was especially terrible. The path to it was short. The roof didn’t leak, and the door latched properly. Mrs. Gable kept lime in a bucket nearby. It was, objectively speaking, a perfectly respectable eighteenth-century outhouse. And Abigail hated it with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. Every trip out there became a negotiation with herself.
You are a grown woman.
You have survived dissertation committees.
You can survive going outside in the freezing wind to use the bathroom.
The chamber pot inside her room, however, represented a moral line she had not yet crossed.
“Lass.” Mrs. Gable appeared one Saturday morning carrying steaming buckets. “Bath.”
Abigail nearly wept with gratitude.
The wooden tub off the kitchen was barely large enough to sit in comfortably, but the hot water felt like salvation itself. The soap smelled sharply of lye and ash. Her scalp burned for ten alarming seconds before settling into blissful cleanliness.
She washed every inch of herself twice. Conditioner, she thought mournfully while dragging a wooden comb through wethair afterward, was one of humanity’s great achievements and nobody appreciated it enough.
When she came back into the kitchen wrapped in clean linen with damp hair hanging down her back, Mrs. Gable handed her a ribbon.
“Plait it wet. It dries cleaner.”
“Thank you.”
