Page 3 of A Scot in the Storm
“Let me go!” He kicked at the ladder. “Another minute—he’s down there, Lachlan, he’s right down there?—”
“He’s gone, lad.” Lachlan’s voice was wrecked, an inch from his ear. “He’s gone.”
“No.” Rory had the strip of Murtagh’s cuff still knotted in his left fist. “I had him. I had his wrist. Another second and I’d have had him up?—”
“There was nothing ye could have done.”
TheArdentlurched. The remaining deck dropped away. Lachlan and Henderson shoved him bodily over the rail into the black water, and then the sea took them all.
Rory cameto on the rocks below Kinnaird Head.
The sea spat him out tumbling through the shallows until his hands found stone, and he dragged himself clear of the surf. He lay on the rocks with the rain hammering his back, the taste of salt and blood in his mouth.
His left hand was still closed in a fist. He didn’t remember closing it. He opened it now, slow and numb, and found the strip of linen wrapped around his fingers. Wet. Darker at one edge with blood that wasn’t his.
He closed his hand around it again. Held it there.
Around him, the survivors were pulling themselves from the water. Shapes in the dark, coughing, calling names. Rorycounted them—mechanically, relentlessly, because if he stopped counting he’d start screaming.
Twenty-nine.
Thirty-six crew. Twenty-nine alive on the rocks.
Seven men who would not come home. Including Murtagh.
Rory pushed himself to his knees and looked up. The headland rose above him, a dark mass against the darker sky. No light. No beacon. Nothing but stone and wind and the crash of waves on the reef that had destroyed his ship.
If there had been a light on that headland, he would have seen the reef. He would have turned sooner. TheArdentwould have cleared the rocks by a quarter mile, and seven men would be alive, and his brother would be beside him, shivering and swearing because they’d made it through.
But there was no light.
Dinna do anything stupid without me.
He heard it clean as a bell, carried on the wind like Murtagh was still out there somewhere.
Rory knelt on the rocks with the rain running down his face and the torn linen knotted in his fist, and he made a promise to the dead. Not a prayer—he was done with those. A promise.
I will build the light.
Chapter 2
Abigail
Present Day
Abigail’srental car smelled like stale crisps and old fish.
She’d picked it up at Aberdeen Airport three hours ago, and somewhere between the roundabout she’d nearly died on (driving on the left was going to kill her before Scotland did) and the A90 heading north, the reality of her situation had settled in like a toothache.
She was six thousand miles from her brother, who had acute myeloid leukemia, had relapsed in February, and she was about to spend the next six months cataloguing letters written by dead men.
Dr. Elaine Hargreaves, her mentor, the woman who’d supervised her dissertation and written her glowing recommendation letters, had looked her in the eye last Tuesday and said,I think a quiet project would do you good, Dr. Winston.
Which was academic-speak foryou embarrassed us, now go away until things quiet down.
She hadn’t told Elaine about Sam. Her boss had the idea of Abigail as a focused academic, not a woman whose brother was waiting on an unmatched donor registry and surfing every morning like he didn’t have a care in the world. Abigail hadn’t corrected the impression. Some things weren’t department business. Separation of work and home life and all that.
The Museum of Scottish Lighthouses sat on a headland in Fraserburgh, which was about as far north as you could get in mainland Scotland without falling into the sea.
