Page 66 of A Scot in the Storm
He dipped the pen again and wrote:
I made the choice to let Abigail help with the bearing, and now young Jamie is dead.
He stared at the sentence. Then he drew a single line through it. Not because Abigail held no part in it. Not because he understood what she truly was. But because the final choice had belonged to him.
Below the crossed-out line he wrote instead:
I made the choice to extend the test beyond the agreed upon two hours. The bearing failed. The responsibility is mine.
He closed the notebook and sat with both hands flat against the blotter, watching the pale sun climb over the North Sea.
He didn’t cry. Rory hadn’t wept since theArdentwent down, and he wouldn’t begin now.
But he sat there a long while, and did not come down for breakfast, nor did he sleep that night or the next.
Chapter 15
Abigail
The morning after the wreck the kitchen was as quiet as a library.
Abigail came downstairs wrapped in her shawl with her hair still damp from washing it in the basin upstairs. Mrs. Gable had already built up the hearth, and a pot of oats hung over the fire, steam curling thick through the room and filling it with the scent of peat smoke and toasted barley.
The housekeeper didn’t look up when Abigail entered. She set a wooden bowl on the table, followed it with a cup of watered ale, then turned back to stirring the oats as though the motion itself might keep the world steady.
Abigail winced as the wooden bench scraped across the stone. With a sigh, she ate a spoonful of porridge knowing it would be a long day without time for a mid-day break. At least the stuff was hot. As she chewed, the rough edge on her tooth pricked the inside of her cheek sending a jolt of pain through her.
Fantastic.
At some point she was going to have to file her own tooth smooth with a rock or a knife or whatever horrifying eighteenth-century solution existed for dental care, because there wasn’t adentist or antibiotics, and certainly no urgent care facility. Just whisky and herbs which had their uses but right now, Abigail would give almost anything for a bottle of ibuprofen.
“Mrs. Gable.”
The woman turned from the hearth with dark circles under her eyes. “Aye, lass?”
“Where’s Rory?”
“He’s in his study. The captain won’t be down today.”
“Is he all right?”
Mrs. Gable stopped stirring. For a moment the only sound in the room was the crackle of peat and the wind pressing softly against the shutters.
“He’s writing letters to Mary Hunter and to Mrs. Keith.”
Abigail gripped the spoon in her fist.
Jamie Hunter and Gregor Keith’s brother.
Rory had told her once the worst part of being in command wasn’t the storm itself. It wasn’t even the wreck or the bodies. It was afterward. The letters. Trying to fit grief into ink for loved ones waiting at home. Wives, mothers, fathers, siblings. Finding words for something that never should have happened.
After breakfast she went upstairs, but had barely reached her room when the kirk bell began to toll, heavy enough to settle into her bones.
She crossed to the window to see the procession had already started down the road. Four men carried Jamie Hunter in a pine coffin upon their shoulders. Elrick walked front left in his dark coat with every button fastened properly for once, his face hard as carved stone.
Behind the coffin came a woman wrapped in a black shawl holding the hand of a little girl too young to understand why everyone looked stricken.
There wasn’t a second coffin because, as the men said, the sea had taken the lad.
