Page 56 of A Scot in the Storm
Abigail took a cautious sip.
Smoke. Heat. Peat. Then warmth spreading steadily downward into her chest.
“Oh,” she managed.
Ewan grinned broadly. “Aye.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Eighteen-year barrel from Banff.”
“The lighthouse celebration whisky,” Tobias added.
“Though at this rate,” Ewan said, “Mrs. Gable plans to finish it before the lighting occurs.”
Across the table Mrs. Gable made a dismissive sound that strongly suggested she considered this excellent contingency planning.
The men sang after dinner. Abigail hadn’t expected that either. Elrick possessed a voice large enough to shake the window glass. Tobias carried a small wooden whistle in his coat pocket apparently for precisely these occasions. One song was in Gaelic, mournful and beautiful enough to raise the goosefleshalong her arms despite understanding only fragments of it. Another told the story of a fisherman lost off Buchan and the wife who watched the cliffs for him every winter afterward.
It should’ve been unbearably sad, instead it felt strangely tender.
Firelight warmed the stone walls gold and amber. Wet wool steamed gently beside the hearth. Whisky and peat smoke curled richly through the room while rough-handed men sang together after supper, everyone warm and enjoying each other’s company.
This was the history Abigail had always loved most. Not kings or battles, this. The living texture of ordinary people gathered around warmth and music while winter pressed dark against the windows outside.
The sort of thing historians spent their entire careers trying unsuccessfully to reconstruct from scraps, letters, and inventories.
She sat very still and let herself memorize everything. Across the table Rory looked toward her over the rim of his whisky cup.
Their eyes met and he lifted the cup slightly in a small private salute before lowering it again.
Something warm unfolded low in her chest.
And for the first time since arriving in the past, Abigail realized with sudden dangerous clarity that a part of her no longer wanted to leave.
Chapter 13
Rory
The prototype worked.
Rory stood alone in the lantern room at half past seven in the morning. The gear train turned with a slow, steady pulse, brass finding bronze without scrape or catch.
Three months of frustration. Two failed redesigns. A dozen careful letters to the Commissioners written politely enough to hide the fact that he’d come close to throwing the whole mechanism into the sea.
And now this. The solution had come from a woman who wouldn’t say where she’d learned it, who’d watched the bearing for less than an hour, seen what he had missed, and drawn a cradle on the back of a torn ledger page as if such things were perfectly ordinary.
“It works,” he said.
A boot scraped at the threshold behind him.
“Did ye say something?” Ewan asked.
Rory didn’t look away from the mechanism. “It works. The bearing. It works.”
Ewan stepped farther into the room, his cap pushed back, cheeks red from the climb. He bent and watched the shaft turn through three full rotations, then he grinned.
“The woman’s idea?”
