Page 27 of A Scot in the Storm
Mrs. Gable opened the door without knocking. “Yer awake, then.” Not a question. She had a bundle of cloth over one arm and an expression that could curdle milk. “The captain wants a word.”
“I heard. I mean, I was about to come find you. I’ll just—” Abigail gestured at her clothes on the stool.
Mrs. Gable looked at the jeans and jacket with distaste. Her eyes caught on the scorched cuff and her mouth pinched.
“Ye’ll not be wearing those. Here.” She set the bundle on the bed. A clean linen shift. A bodice of dark brown wool. A heavy skirt, knitted stockings, a large piece of tartan. “I’ve not got shoes to fit ye. Those things will have to do. God alone knows what they’re made of.”
“Thank you. That’s really?—”
“It’s practical.” Mrs. Gable cut her off. “Ye canna walk about dressed like?—”
She paused, apparently unable to find a word.
“Get yerself decent. I’ll be in the kitchens.”
Somewhere below stairs a man laughed too loudly, followed by the faint scrape of fiddle music abruptly cut short.
“Mrs. Gable?”
The older woman turned, hand on the door.“The men.” Abigail kept her voice even. “Elrick, and the others from last night. If any of them ask after me, what do I tell them?”
Something flickered in Mrs. Gable’s face.
“Ye tell them the captain said so, lass. Ye dinna explain yerself to any man in this house but him. And if any of them take a tone wi’ ye, ye come to me.”
“Okay.” The word slipped out before she could catch it.
Mrs. Gable squinted at it like it was a foreign coin she’d just been handed. Then she shook her head once, sharp.
“Aye. Well. Get dressed.”
The door closed.
Abigail looked at the pile of clothing. The shift went on first. She changed out of the one she’d slept in and pulled the new one over her head, grateful Mrs. Gable hadn’t taken her underwear. She’d never needed a bra, so that was one less thing to explain. The stockings were coarse wool, held up with ties below the knee. The skirt was heavy and fell to her ankles.
The bodice was the problem. It laced up the front with hooks and eyelets, and without stays underneath, the fabric bunched and gaped.
She ran her fingers along the weave of the bodice before she laced it. The wool was coarse, she could feel the individual threads, the slight irregularity where the weaver’s tension had shifted. Hand-loomed. She’d seen fragments of eighteenth-century Scottish textiles behind glass at the National Museum, labelled and dated and untouchable.
This one was warm from Mrs. Gable’s arm where she’d carried it, and it smelled faintly of lavender and something sharper underneath. Lye soap, probably. The dye was uneven, darker at the folds where it had set deeper, and there was a small mend near the bottom eyelet where someone had restitched a tear with thread that didn’t quite match.
The skirt weighed enough to make her stand differently. Something she couldn’t have learned from a photograph. She did her best with the lacing.
The hiking boots and dry socks went on under the long skirt, hidden but solid. One concession to the twenty-first century she wasn’t giving up.
She caught her reflection in the water of the ewer. Dark hair plastered to her skull. A purpling bruise under her right eye. The split swollen lip. A thin rust-colored line of dried blood from her left ear down the side of her neck.
“Fine,” she told the water. “We’ve got this.”
Her water-self didn’t look convinced.
Chapter 8
Abigail
Conversation in the kitchen stopped when Abigail walked in.
Two men she hadn’t seen last night, sat at the long table. Both looked up at once, stared at her for one stretched heartbeat, then bent their attention back to their porridge with suspicious haste. The older man flexed his hand around his spoon in a movement she recognized unpleasantly from the night before. Not quite the sign Elrick had made at her, but close enough to make her flinch.
