Page 26 of A Scot in the Storm
Three years researching the mysterious Lady Katherine of Clan MacLeod had led to Abigail’s career implosion, all because of that damned brooch.
The journal entry she’d memorized surfaced unbidden. She’d found it on the Isle of Skye at Bronmuir Keep. The journal that had conveniently gone missing after the whole brooch debacle.
December 31, 1699
Ten years in this century. Sometimes I still wake reaching for my phone or craving a hot shower that doesn’t require hauling twenty buckets up from the well. But then Connor’s arms tighten around me, or little Cameron crawls into our bed with his wild dreams and sticky fingers, and I remember why I stayed.
I may have left one time behind, but I have found where I truly belong. The future is not when you are, but who you’re with.
To whoever finds this someday. Time isn’t a straight line. It’s a circle, and love is the compass that guides us home.
Time travel was real. Katherine had proven it. But why had the Cailleach picked her?
Right now, her survival depended on whoever had authority here. The captain with the dark coat and the deep, gravelly voice. She remembered broad shoulders, dark stubble, blue eyes, full lips. His hand under her arm. How easily he’d lifted her.
It was morning which meant she had to decide what to tell him.
The truth wasn’t an option.I think I may have traveled through timewas the kind of statement that got you locked up in the twenty-first century, let alone the eighteenth. She’d seen enough historical case studies about women who made outrageous claims. They were branded mad, dangerous, or both. A cell in the Edinburgh tollbooth until someone forgot you existed.
Amnesia.I don’t remember anything.A woman who’d lost her memory could be forgiven for not knowing her family or her husband’s name. She could ask questions.
It was a lie with an expiration date. In her own time, you could kind of disappear into a city and reinvent yourself. Here, your identity was your parish record, your family name, your physical presence in a community where every face was known. An amnesiac woman was a gap in the social fabric which meant Abigail had days. Weeks, if she was lucky.
Cathcart. The captain had said the name last night, and Ewan had said it back.Magistrate. A magistrate was coming for her. She had maybe a week.
She was just making a list in her head. Talk to the captain, stay inside, figure out the date, keep your mouth shut, when she realized the voices in the corridor had gotten louder.
She swung her feet to the floor and limped to the door, pressing her right ear against the wood.
They were speaking Broad Scots, the rhythm and syntax of Lowland Scottish English with words that weren’t English at all dropped in like stones in a pocket. She’d listened to three hundred hours of oral-history recordings in grad school. She could follow most of it.
“— no business of mine what a captain brings under his roof.” A man’s voice, low and rough.
“I’m telling ye what I saw. The lightning hit the tower. The rain didna fall around the tower. Then she appeared. Ye canna tell me otherwise, I was there.”
“Elrick.” Another voice. Older. Calm. Maybe the big one from last night, Ewan.
“A dry circle, Ewan. Under the tower. In a squall like yon. Ye’re a sensible man, ye ken what that means.”
“I ken ye’ve had too much whisky.”
“Ye’ve had the same as me.”
“Aye, and I’m not making signs at a sleeping lass.”
A pause. Then Elrick again, quieter, and this time he dropped a word she caught instantly.
Cailleach.
The woman she’d researched and was now sure she’d met twice. A keeper of time and doors, who apparently thought it was fun to send women hurtling through time.
“She’s nae sleeping. She’s awake. I heard the bed. Ye mind how I said it, Ewan, if the weather turns again before she’s out of this house, ye’ll mind it. The sea doesna give without taking something back.”
Beyond the tower walls, somewhere farther down the coast, Abigail thought she heard distant shouting and faint bursts of laughter carrying through the wind from the Samhain bonfires Arthur had mentioned. She stepped away from the door.
The sea doesna give without taking something back.
Abigail sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands. Just for a second. She’d written about eighteenth-century folk belief in her dissertation. Used phrases likesubaltern cosmologyandvernacular epistemology. She hadn’t written about what it felt like to be on the other side of the door, listening to a grown man explain that she might need to be returned to the sea.
