Page 24 of Fierce Highland Longing

Shetookitupwith her when she went to bed. I heard the drawer.

I was down on the shale by seven, working the same thing I’d worked all night. She said it was mine. She left it on the table for an hour and said it was mine and she did not say the rest of it, and I cannot tell her which words are missing.

That is the whole of my position. She has to give it. I am not allowed to ask, and if I could ask I would not.

The tide was further out than I have seen it in years. Twelve days now with no weather in it at all.

Then the wind shifted a point and brought me a smell off the top of the beach.

Iron. That first, and iron on a man is nothing—half this village works with it and the other half has it nailed over the door.

Machine oil under the iron. The heavy kind, off an engine, worked into a coat that never comes clean.

And a third thing beneath the pair of them, and I could not put a name on it. Dry. Shut up. Something that has stood a long time in the dark with the air not moving through it.

I had my weight off my heels and my head round before my mind caught up with my nose, and I stood there on the stones with my mouth open like a fool, hunting for it.

Then it came.

That is the smell of the inside of a box. I had my face in it for the length of a breath nineteen winters ago, and I have not had it in my nose since, and my throat shut on me there on the shale in the flat morning light.

There were prints under the boathouse wall the morning after she pulled me out. Bigger than hers, in before out, no hurry in them.

I gave my skin away. I want that plain, because most of my kind have theirs taken and I did not.

Her name was Elspeth Sim and I will not say it twice.

She knew what I was. I told her the way I have told the one other person I have ever told, which is to sit down and say it and let it land. She took it well. She took everything well.

Before her I was not a man without a home. I had one on both sides of a surface: a room with a key, and a hide that let me go. Losing the skin did not make me itinerant. It made me a man who could no longer keep either of the homes I had.

And after a year of it I put my skin in her hands on the beach at Rattray with nobody watching, because I meant it, and putting the thing in somebody’s hands is the only way our sort has ever had of proving we meant it. That is not a gesture. There is no other proof. You hand over your life and you say, here, and if you are wrong about the person you find out afterward.

I was wrong about the person.

She sold it to Callum Brodie.

She got his dead brother’s insurance money for it, and a boat, and the rest of a quiet life in a house at Crimond. I know the sum. I have never said it out loud and I am not going to.

I stood on the shore and watched him shut the lid.

I gave it. That is the whole of it.

The other thing came to me standing there with the smell in my nose.

The cross on the boathouse boards. Black, hand-forged, the length of my palm, hanging loose in nails driven into soft wood.

We have a name for those. Any place you see iron nailed up on this coast, one of us went wrong there. Somebody in the village knew about it, or guessed enough, and did the small kind work of putting up a marker so their children would leave the spot alone. A watched place. Eight generations of it, and every one of them meaning well.

They hammered that cross up because of me.

And it sat over the boards for nineteen years and kept me from knowing my own hide was two feet behind it, and I slept under it four winters out of the rain.

Two reasons I will never ask her.

One is the law: pressed, it is not given, and it stays bound.

The other is that I have already done it. I gave freely, to somebody who knew exactly what she was holding, and it was sold inside the week.