Page 64 of A Scot in the Storm
His voice broke on the last word and hardened immediately afterward.
“Your sweep, Captain. And the sweep stopped.”
“It was a test, no one was supposed to be out. The bearing bound.”
“The bearing.” Elrick stared at him, rain and seawater shining on his face. “Aye. The bearing.”
Elrick stepped closer. “We ken whose bearing.”
“I made the decision to run the test.”
“Ye brought a woman out of the sea by the cursed tower, and let her put hands on your lamp.”
Elrick’s voice had gone quieter now which made it worse.
“Now my wife’s cousin is dead on the shore. D’ye think men willna mind that?”
“Elrick, enough.”
The command came out harsher than Rory intended even as his own voice roughened at the end of it.
Something in Elrick’s face shut tight. “Aye,” he said quietly. “Enough for tonight.”
He bent and lifted Jamie Hunter into his arms as carefully as if carrying a sleeping child, then he walked back up the path.
Ewan followed with the lantern. Duncan went after them. The others fell in behind.
Rory remained on the shingle with the survivors wrapped in blankets, the wreck breaking apart behind him, and the fixed beam still burning above the reef.
He couldn’t look at it. Instead, he looked down at the stones beneath his boots.
Dawn camewith a painfully clear blue sky. By the time Rory climbed back to the lantern room, the lamp had burned itself out.
The mechanism remained locked where the bearing had seized, the lens still fixed north-northeast toward the reef now lying quiet beneath the morning tide. Fishing boats had already gone out to the wreck, dark shapes moving slowly while men salvaged what they could.
Abigail stood at the threshold. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. Shadows darkened the skin beneath her eyes. A smear of lanolin crossed the bridge of her nose. It looked like she hadn’t slept.
He wanted to tell her to go downstairs. Wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, but he could do neither.
His voice still belonged to the beach below and Elrick’s grief beside the surf.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Nae, it’s not.” Rory ran a hand through his hair.
“The thermal expansion.” She stepped farther into the room, eyes fixed on the frozen mechanism.
“I calculated for two hours. Not four. I told you the clearance would hold, but I didn’t account for the lanolin breaking down under sustained heat.”
Her voice caught as she pressed the heel of her hand hard against her mouth, swallowed once, then forced herself steady again.
“I missed a variable. The grease softened faster than I expected. Once it pulled away from the bearing surface, the margin disappeared.”
Rory crossed to the mechanism. The housing still held heat, but it was faint now, dying.
“We agreed to the four-hour run,” he said. “Ye didna make that choice for me.”
“I didn’t tell you no.”
