Page 63 of A Scot in the Storm
Rory knew it before anyone spoke, knew it in his gut.
A fishing cutter late in poor weather, picking her way home by the movement of the new light. Counting the arc. Watching for the sweep across the headland. Trusting the beam to move.
Then the light had stopped.
A fixed beam could lie to a sailor better than darkness. They found the cutter thirty yards off the shore side of the reef already coming apart. The mast was gone. The hull had split low along the keelson. Black water moved through the broken body of her, lifting loose boards and coils of rope in the swell before dragging them under again.
Men were in the water. Four. No. Five.
Ewan called them out as the lantern caught faces and hands and one pale flash of terror before the sea swallowed it again.
Rory went forward with the boat hook and a length of rope. They got three aboard alive.
Iain Simpson was first, sixteen years old and shaking so violently his teeth knocked together loud as pebbles in a pail. He’d been bailing when they struck and came up coughing seawater and bile but breathing.
Gregor Keith next, older, one arm bent wrong beneath his coat, asking before they had him fully aboard whether his brother had made it.
Then Aikman, the Boddam man Calum had taken on for the run, a deckhand Rory hardly knew, with blood black against his temple.
The fourth was Jamie Hunter.
Rory knew Jamie. Everyone knew Jamie. Elrick’s wife’s cousin. Married last spring to Mary Hunter with the fair braid and the shy smile. Father to a wee daughter named Beth who once followed Rory’s horse halfway up the lane because she liked the brass buckle on the bridle.
Jamie had come to the castle in September to borrow a grindstone and stayed an hour because Ewan had been telling a story about a puffin that stole tobacco from a customs officer.
A score and four years old. They found him no longer clinging to the shattered section of bulwark drifting beside him. The wound in his chest had stopped bleeding because his heart had stopped.
Rory pressed two fingers against Jamie’s neck while the gig rose and fell beneath him and the fixed beam burned overhead without moving. Nothing. Only cold skin and seawater.
“Bring him in,” Rory said quietly.
They landed below the Wine Tower on the same stretch of shingle where Abigail had washed ashore and where Rory had knelt over a dying midshipman with seawater running from his mouth.
The young sailor sat wrapped in blankets, shaking too hard to speak.
Gregor Keith asked again for his brother.
The deckhand with the head wound kept saying he had seen the light stop and thought he’d gone blind. That was what he said over and over.
Elrick came down the path eight minutes after the gig landed. Everyone on the headland would have heard by now.
He came at a half-run with a lantern in one hand, coat hanging open, boots slipping once on the wet grass before he caught himself and kept going.
Then he saw the shape beneath Ewan’s greatcoat. He stopped as if someone had hit him in the chest.
Rory stood four paces away as Elrick crossed the distance and knelt beside the body.
For a moment he only stared at the coat. Then he pulled it back. Jamie’s face showed pale in the lantern light, younger in death than he had been in life.
Elrick shut his eyes once. When he stood again, he didn’t look first at Rory. He looked up at the tower. At the dark unfinished stone and the lantern room open to the weather. At the lamp still burning above them with the beam fixed and useless over the reef.
“Why,” Elrick said, “did the light stop?”
Rory opened his mouth but nothing came.
Elrick turned toward him.
“Ye told the harbor ye were testing tonight. Ye told Calum Ross at the chandlery. Jamie was running home by your sweep.”
