Page 15 of A Scot in the Storm
She turned to the next letter. And the next.
That was when the second folded sheet fell out from between two of them, and Abigail’s world tilted.
It was smaller than the others. Different paper, thinner, rougher, the kind of scrap a person might tear from the back of a ledger if they needed to write something in a hurry. The ink was the same brown-warm shade as Rory’s, but the hand wasn’t his.
She picked it up. The letter was a single short note. No salutation to a Commissioner. No return address. No date on the head of the page. Just seven lines, written in the quick, clipped scrawl of a person in a hurry.
Captain —
Third bearing, not brass. Try bronze, silica-dusted, seated in a cradle rather than a sleeve.
I have drawn it below as well as I can from memory. Forgive the hand.
If this fails, the fault is mine, not yours.
Beneath the words was a small, precise sketch—three lines, a curve, a cradle seat with the clearance marked at the margin in a decimal fraction. It was the bearing arrangement Abigail had read about in the engineering reports for Kinnaird Head. The one that had solved the Kinnaird problem in the winter of 1787, the one subsequent keepers had maintained until it was electrified in 1978.
And beneath the sketch, at the very bottom of the page, one word in the same handwriting.
Sam.
Abigail set the note flat on the tissue paper and pressed both palms against the edge of the desk because her hands had started to shake in a way she didn’t quite trust.
The handwriting was hers.
Not similar. Not reminiscent.Hers.The specific downstroke on the lowercaseg—the way she looped it up and around and ended it with a half-hook because her fifth-grade teacher had marked her off for closing loops too tight. The way her lowercasefdropped below the line. The way she wrote the decimal point as a little dash instead of a dot, a habit she’d picked up in a statistics class and never dropped.
No one else wrote like this. She had signed her own dissertation in this hand.
And it was on paper that was, without question, over two hundred years old.
Arthur was saying something. His voice reached her from a long way off.
“— thought you might want to transcribe these yourself. Abigail? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Her mouth was dry. “I’m fine. It’s—it’s a lot to take in. May I have a moment alone with them?”
“Of course. Of course. I’ll be right downstairs if you need anything at all?—”
“Thank you, Arthur.”
He went, talking to himself about stuffed puffins.
Abigail sat down very slowly. She picked up the note again, turned it over. The verso was blank. She held it up to the window and saw the watermark, an eighteenth-century maker’s mark, the kind of hand-pressed wire mold that hadn’t been used since the industrial paper mills. She’d seen that watermark in her dissertation research. She could probably identify the paper-maker if she checked her notes.
She was holding a note she had written. On paper there was no way she could have touched. To a man who had been dead for two centuries.
And she’d written her brother’s name on the edge.
Ye’ve written to him before, lass.
She put the note down, carefully, on a clean sheet of acid-free tissue, and pressed her fingers against her eyes until she saw stars.
She went back to the letters. She had to. There were seven more, and she had to know.
I find myself seeking her counsel on matters beyond engineering. She listens with a quality of attention I have not encountered before, as if she already knows what I am going to say, and is waiting for me to discover it for myself. When I asked where she learned engineering, she laughed, and said she’d picked it up along the way. When I pressed, she said “across the ocean. Across more time than you’d believe.” I must assume she meant it as a jest.
Abigail set the letter down and picked up the next one. The handwriting had changed again. Calmer. Almost resigned.
