Page 55 of A Scot in the Storm
Rory tied the drawings together at last and rose from the table.
“Ye should get some sleep,” he said softly. “Tomorrow I’ll finish the second cradle. Then we test the burn tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
He left her alone in the kitchen with the lamp flickering against the walls.
She listened to his boots as she sat very still. Abigail had given him knowledge from centuries ahead of his own. Altered a lighthouse mechanism that technically shouldn’t exist yet in precisely this form. The lamp would light sooner now. Ships would see the coast faster. Men who might otherwise vanish beneath the waves might live instead.
Was that changing history?
Or had history already included her, accounted for her knowledge?
The letters already existed. She’d held them in her own hands in 2026 with Arthur’s terrible over-steeped tea cooling beside her elbow. Which meant this had already happened.
Her helping Rory had always been part of the story. It made her head hurt.
“Don’t think about it,” she muttered to herself.
Excellent advice. Completely impossible.
She banked the kitchen fire the way Mrs. Gable had shown her, though still badly enough that Mrs. Gable would probablysigh over it tomorrow morning, then carried a lamp upstairs to her room.
The chamber was cold enough that her breath clouded faintly in the dark.
Abigail slid beneath the blankets and stared upward listening to the creaks of the castle and the sound of the waves.
She thought about the way Rory had saidremarkablein that quiet Scottish voice of his.
The way his hand had lingered near hers. The tiny half-smile he tried not to show. The soft astonishedohwhen the mechanism finally turned cleanly beneath the shaft.
And, because apparently her life hadn’t become complicated enough lately, she thought about how happy she’d been sitting beside him at the kitchen table.
“You’re falling for a lighthouse engineer from 1787,” she informed herself.
The ceiling offered no useful feedback.
“You have to go home. Sam needs you, you’re all he has left.”
That was tomorrow’s crisis. Tonight she let herself lie there smiling in the dark while the storm rolled against the cliffs beyond the castle walls and the clock downstairs ticked steadily onward through the night.
Mrs. Gable did Sundays properly.Abigail had assumed, at first, that this would involve grim Presbyterian suffering in some organized ceremonial form.
Instead it involved Reverend Ogilvie preaching for nearly an hour before the entire household returned to the castle hungry enough to devour furniture, whereupon Mrs. Gable produceda dinner so spectacular Abigail briefly wondered whether the woman had secretly hired additional cooks overnight.
There was mutton stew thick with carrots and neeps. Fresh bread with a crust that cracked loudly beneath her knife. Crowdie cheese from Pittendrum that tasted somewhere between cottage cheese and divine forgiveness. Stewed plums appeared mysteriously beside Abigail’s elbow without explanation. And there was whisky.
Ewan caught her staring at the bottle.
“Have ye had Scotch before, lass?”
“I have.”
“Aye,” he said solemnly. “But likely not ours.”
He poured a careful measure into a small horn cup and handed it across the table.
“Slowly,” he warned. “Unless ye’d enjoy dying.”
