Page 30 of Fierce Highland Longing

The sea was still quiet. And I had no idea if I’d ever see her again.

Chapter Thirteen

The Lowest Water — Mara

“You’llhaveworkedoutI folded that cloth.” Callum waited expectant, sure of himself.

“Corners in. Top over. Over again.”

“Aye.” He had a coil of line over his arm and a lamp in his other hand, unlit. “I’d hoped you’d not, and you did, and there we are.”

The water past the harbor wall lay flat and dead with the moon sitting on it. The tide was out further than I have seen any tide go. There was black rock showing beyond the moorings that no one alive had walked on, and it stank of ground that spends its life under the sea.

“There’s a passage down the shore that opens twice in a lifetime. It’s open tonight, and it’ll be shut again in about forty minutes when the storm pushes the water in ahead of it.” He started walking. “You can come or not. I’d rather you came.”

I went with him, because he was the only person left who could tell me what I was carrying and why it had cost me everything I had.

He knew that shore the way I know a lens.

Down past the last of the beach, over rock running with water, to a slot in the cliff no higher than my chest. He put the lamp on and went in on his hands and knees. I followed him.

It went down. Twenty feet, forty, the passage widening and dropping, weed hanging off the walls at head height where the water sat when the water was where it should be.

“Thirty-five minutes, near enough. Keep moving. You’ll not need to hurry.”

He talked the whole way, unhurried, never once out of breath.

“I’ve been at this since I was thirty-nine. I’ve had divers down twice—the first pair took my money and told me there was nothing there, and the second pair got as far as the wall and couldn’t shift it either. I’ve had a man from Aberdeen with a compressor. I’ve had charges down there, twice, and all that did was bring the roof down at the second bend and put a year on the work.”

“And nothing’s ever opened it.”

“Nothing I’ve got. It’s not a door you take off its hinges.” He put a hand out to a shelf of rock, steadying. “Nineteen years I’ve kept a thing in a box behind a plank in a boathouse and walked past it twice a week, and I’ve been waiting on two things to arrive at once. A tide like tonight, and one of them on this shore. I had the second for four years without knowing it. He slept under that cross out of the rain, and I’d not the wit to look at him.”

“You could have asked him.”

“Ask him what? Come down a hole in the dark and open a thing for the man who’s had your hide in a box since 1993?” There was no anger in his voice. He might have been talking about a fence. “You don’t ask. You get yourself into a position where the answer’s already made.”

The passage narrowed, and I heard something overhead, dull and long, going on and stopping and going on again. The storm had got to the top of the cliff.

“Rory was nineteen.” A step down, a hand out to steady himself on the rock. “He’d been down here four times. Fifth time the water came in behind him, and he’d nothing to hold on to. I was up top with the rope. It went slack in my hands.”

He said it and moved straight on to where I should put my feet.

“That’s why I’ll not be told I’m a thief. I bought that skin with what they paid me for him.”

He had something under his arm wrapped in plastic, and he set it down on a dry shelf while he worked the line, and the plastic came open on the corner of a book. Old. Leather gone soft as cloth.

“Are those your tide records?”

“Some of them are.” He got the line coiled. “That one’s not mine.”

I got the flyleaf in the lamplight. A crest stamped into the leather, worn nearly flat—some kind of bird over a bar. And a date. 1791.

“Whose is it?”

“A man who had this errand before me.” He wrapped it up again. “Mind that shelf, it’s greasy.”

His attention shifted. He was already talking about the last twenty feet.