Page 69 of A Scot in the Storm
He’d laid them carefully across the stone floor like a man sorting through wreckage. Absorbed in his reading, he didn’t look up immediately when she entered.
When he finally raised his head, his face looked leaner than it had four days ago. Dark shadows rested beneath his eyes and he hadn’t shaved.
Abigail wanted suddenly, painfully, to cross the room and touch his arm. Just briefly, enough to say I’m here.
But she refrained, because Rory didn’t strike her as a man who wanted comfort.
What he wanted was the thing she understood best about herself. Work to occupy the mind.
“Ye’ve been working,” he said.
“I had time.”
“I read all of it twice.”
“Okay.” She resisted the urge to fidget.
“Option three,” he said. “Graphite tallow and wider clearance.” He nodded once toward the papers. “Defend it.”
So she did. For twenty minutes Abigail walked him through the revised margins, the graphite suspension, the grease-feed mechanism, the recalculated thermal expansion.
Rory questioned her like a man who’d watched somebody die because of failed mathematics and intended never to repeat the experience.
She answered every question without flinching. When she finished, Rory sat back slightly and looked from the seized bearing to her grease cup sketch.
“We’ll run this one in daylight,” he said. “Fifteen-minute burns first. Then half-hour. Then one hour. No night burns until I’ve seen four hours hold in daylight.”
“I agree.”
“The harbor’s been warned. No cutter runs by the beam until further notice. Elrick spread the word himself.”
“How is he?”
Rory was quiet a moment.
“He’s working,” he said finally. “He’s speaking only when required and hasn’t punched anyone yet, so I’m counting that as progress.”
Abigail nodded. “He won’t want me here.”
“He’ll dislike it,” Rory said plainly. “But he’ll accept it or leave. I told him this bearing would hold before I lit the lamp again. I also told him ye’re the one helping me build it.”
He folded her journal pages one at a time and slid them carefully into his notebook.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
He exhaled slowly. “Ye’ve said so before.”
“I’ll keep saying it.”
“I’ll likely need to hear it awhile.” His voice roughened faintly. “But once is enough for today.”
“Okay.”
The new bearingheld for fifteen minutes the first day. Half an hour the second, and one hour the third. On the fifth day it held ninety minutes.
Every test happened in full daylight with the harbor warned beforehand and the mechanism watched constantly.
The graphite-and-tallow grease cup fed steadily through the bearing while the shaft turned smooth and cool beneath Rory’s hands.
