Page 44 of A Scot in the Storm
“And every Saturday from now on. I’ll no’ have lice in this house.”
Abigail’s scalp immediately began itching in phantom horror.
When Rory was elsewhere on the headland, Ewan made the days easier. He talked while he worked. About the seals on the rocks below the cliffs. About fishing boats in Peterhead. About his sister’s children. About storms and gulls and one memorable goose that had apparently terrorized half the parish.
He never pressed her. Never circled too close to the gaps in her story.
“The Captain’s a good man,” he said one afternoon while handing her a cup of small beer as they rested against the castle wall out of the wind. She’d never cared for beer, but it helped fill her up so she was forcing herself to drink the stuff.
“Hard as the granite, mind. But good.”
“I know.”
They sat in silence while gulls wheeled overhead and chisels rang faintly from the scaffold around the lantern room.
Above them, somewhere high in the tower, came the soft occasional chime of brass against brass. Rory at work.
Abigail thought suddenly of Sam sprawled upside down across her apartment couch stealing her glasses and wearing them backward while she graded papers, working as a teaching assistant during school. The ache of missing him settled low and heavy beneath her ribs.
After a while Ewan stood and stretched. “Back to the buckets wi’ ye, mistress.”
“I didn’t spill one yesterday.”
“Aye, I ken.” He hesitated. “And lass?”
“Yes?”
“Whatever ye are, or are not, the Captain chose to bring ye in. Ye owe him a careful tongue.”
“I owe him more than that.”
Ewan nodded once.
“Aye. Ye do.”
He walked back toward the yard.
Abigail stood beneath the tower another moment looking up at the scaffold wrapped around the lantern room, at the small high window where candlelight burned late into the night, and at the man working somewhere inside it.
She picked up the bucket and walked back toward the well.
The wind had finally droppedby evening, leaving the harbor wrapped in a strange silver quiet.
Not silence. Fraserburgh was never truly silent. Somewhere farther down the quay a dog barked. Nets knocked softly against wooden pilings. The sea moved steadily beyond the harbor wall with the sound Abigail was beginning to think of as the pulse of the coast itself.
But after three days of relentless rain and gale-force wind, the stillness felt almost holy.
Abigail walked beside Rory along the narrow harbor path with her hands tucked deep into the borrowed wool cloak Mrs. Gable had bullied her into accepting that morning.
“You look smug,” she informed him.
Rory glanced sideways. “Aye.”
“Because the weather finally stopped trying to murder everyone?”
“It’s Scottish weather. It likes to maintain standards.”
She laughed softly.
