Page 70 of A Scot in the Storm
At the end of the ninety-minute test Rory touched the outer housing and nodded once.
“No’ hot.”
“No’ hot,” Abigail repeated automatically in the Scots cadence she’d begun picking up without realizing it.
He glanced sideways at her with the faintest almost-smile.
They still didn’t light the lamp after dark. Not yet. Rory had become a man unwilling to gamble with the beam, and Abigail couldn’t blame him. The thought of another failed test tightened her chest hard enough she sometimes struggled to breathe.
Slowly, though, the house eased.
Elrick spoke to her for the first time five days after the funeral when he asked flatly for the mallet beside her elbow.
When she handed it over, he muttered, “Thank ye, mistress,” without meeting her eyes.
Tavish stopped crossing himself when she passed through the yard.
Duncan removed his cap one morning while she hauled water from the well.
Not exactly friendly, but no longer suspicious either.
Mrs. Gable thawed first.
Abigail burned her hand on a bread pot lid when she grabbed the bare iron without thinking, hissed sharply, and dropped the lid hard enough to rattle the hearthstones.
Mrs. Gable descended upon her immediately with a poultice, linen strips and the kind of terrifying competence suggesting she’d spent half her life tending burns, cuts, and deeply foolish men.
“Sit,” she ordered. “Let me see it.”
Abigail obeyed.
Mrs. Gable wrapped the burn briskly. “Ye need more sense around hot iron,” she muttered. “The captain’s light won’t build itself if ye ruin yer hand.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Mrs. Gable snorted. “Ye apologize too much, lass.”
She tied off the bandage with a brisk nod “Ye’re a fool around cookware, but ye’re our fool now, more’s the pity.”
She returned to the hearth before Abigail could answer.
Abigail sat staring at the bandage wrapped around her palm while warmth spread unexpectedly through her chest.
Chapter 16
Rory
Rory had a list of things he needed from the market in Fraserburgh. Everything from nails, to lamp oil to new files for the metalwork, because Elrick had somehow managed to break three in a single week, which was impressive even for him.
He also wanted, for reasons he was choosing not to examine too closely, to bring Abigail with him.
It’d been days of daylight-only burns, testing and recalculating, refusing to allow himself even the smallest shred of hope until the mechanism proved itself one careful hour at a time.
The daylight had grown short now.
By midafternoon the shadows stretched long over the cliffs, and the sea turned iron-grey beneath the winter sky. Yesterday the bearing had held six full hours at running temperature.
Rory had rested his hand against the metal and closed his eyes for one brief moment before stepping away.
