Page 9 of A Scot in the Storm
“Aye, that’s what I thought.” Ewan paused at the door. “Captain?”
“What?”
“Murtagh wouldna want ye working yourself into the ground.”
The name hit him like a fist. Rory’s hand tightened on the quill.
“Dinna,” he said quietly.
“I’m just saying?—”
“I ken what ye’re saying. Leave it.”
Ewan left, leaving Rory in the silence of his small room, listening to the wind, the sea, and the distant ring of chisels, as he let the grief wash through him the way he always did, quickly, completely, and then locked back down where it belonged.
He pulled the lowest drawer of the desk open. Beneath the ledger and the sheaf of stone-supplier receipts, tucked into the corner where no one else would look, was a small tin that had once held coffee. He lifted it out, flicked the lid with his thumbnail, and looked at what was inside.
A strip of linen. A few inches long, torn along the seam, darker at one edge where blood had set into the weave fourteen years ago and had never quite come out.
He didn’t pick it up, only looked at it, the way a man looks at a headstone. Then he closed the tin, set it back behind the ledger, and shut the drawer.
I ken what ye’re saying, Ewan. I’m saying it to myself.
He took a long pull of the small beer, straightened his back, and picked up the quill to finish the letter to Smith.
Chapter 4
Abigail
Nearly three weeks into her new assignment, and Abigail had catalogued six boxes of correspondence without finding a single interesting thing.
Supply requisitions. Accounting ledgers. Form letters from the Commissioners’ office in Edinburgh, all written in the same careful clerk’s hand, all saying variations ofplease remit your accounts at your earliest convenience.She’d worn through two pairs of cotton gloves and developed a permanent smudge of dust on her left cheek, and the most exciting discovery so far had been a pressed flower that fell out of a supply invoice dated 1789.
The days had begun slipping together in the peculiar way museum days always did. Dust. Tea gone cold beside her elbow. The soft rasp of old paper beneath her gloves while darkness arrived a little earlier each evening beyond the archive windows.
The Bronmuir Brooch paper had led her here, though. That was the thing. She’d written about Katherine MacLeod’s brooch, about the mysterious woman in folklore who appeared at the edges of storms, and the archive reference team had flagged a dozen cross-references in the Kinnaird Head collection. Folk traditions. Lighthouse keeper accounts. Stories that kept circlingaround the same figure. The woman with silver hair. The old woman at the stones.The Cailleach.
Abigail had thought the cross-references might be coincidence. Now she was starting to think otherwise.
“Riveting stuff?” Arthur asked, poking his head into the archive room.
She turned from the narrow archive window where Fraserburgh had begun preparing for Samhain in small quiet ways. Carved turnips glowed in a few shop windows down near the harbor, their strange crooked faces flickering gold against the gathering dark.
“I found a dried daisy in a shipping manifest.”
“Ah. The glamorous life of the historian.”
She smiled. “I didn’t go into this for the glamour.”
“Could be worse,” Arthur said cheerfully. “Tomorrow night half the town’ll be drunk around harbor bonfires pretending they don’t believe ghost stories.”
“Comforting.”
“Aye, well. Samhain brings out everyone’s superstitions,” Arthur added. “Bonfires, whisky, ghost stories, half the fishing fleet refusing to leave harbor till the first of November.”
He set a cup of tea on the desk. “Sandra wants to know if you need more acid-free tissue paper.”
“I always need more acid-free tissue paper. It’s the one constant in my life.”
