Page 36 of A Scot in the Storm
Ewan came up beside him after the others had gone.
“How long?”
“Only a few minutes,” Ewan said. “I came across them just after Elrick took the coat down.”
Rory exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Aye.”
He glanced once toward the drying room door where Jean had vanished.
“Help me gather everything she arrived in.”
Ewan’s brows lifted.
“Everything?”
“Before the lass has time to tell herself one conversation canna hurt.”
Together they collected the clothes from the drying room away from the eyes of Rory’s men. Jean handed them over without a word, still pink-eyed and miserable.
Mrs. Gable looked up from her pot as the men crossed the kitchen carrying the strange folded garments between them. Her gaze moved once from Rory to the clothes and back again.
She pressed her lips together and went back to her labors. The woman had run this household too long not to recognize when something dangerous needed disappearing quietly.
Upstairs in the study Rory spread the garments across his desk while Ewan shut the door behind them.
The jacket first. Rory turned it carefully in his hands, studying it the way he might examine some unfamiliar piece of machinery washed ashore after a wreck.
Every stitch along the seams lay perfectly even. Identical.
No variation in the tension. No wandering hand or tiny flaws where fatigue or haste might show themselves.
He had sat in sail lofts from Aberdeen to Boston and never once seen workmanship like it.
Then there was the fastening. He ran the metal teeth slowly beneath his thumb again.
They meshed together by pressure and angle. Released by the small metal pull. Elegant in its simplicity. Impossible in its execution. He could imagine the design, but could not imagine any smith alive capable of producing it.
The blue trousers were no less strange. The cloth itself unnaturally regular in weave and color. Metal rivets fixed at stress points with perfect precision.
The shirt stretched softly beneath his hands, finer than silk yet not, yielding in ways no ordinary fabric should. The whole lot of it unsettled him more the longer he studied it.
Not because it frightened him, but because it made him curious. And curiosity, Rory had learned long ago, could wreck a man faster than fear.
At length he drew the small knife he used for rope work and slid the blade carefully beneath the stitching.
“Captain?”
“Aye.”
Ewan shifted by the door. “Ye ken what must be done.”
Rory cut the fastening free in silence. Slowly. Deliberately. When he finished, the strip lay curled upon the desk like some peculiar brass-colored creature, all tiny interlocking teeth and impeccable workmanship.
He set it aside carefully.
“Aye,” he said at last. “I do.”
