Page 91 of A Scot on the Rocks

Jamie couldn’t tell whether offering passage had made her leaving easier or more difficult, and for once he was afraid to ask.

The wind found the open corner of the room and sent a cold draught beneath the table. Jamie rose to wedge an old folded cloth into the gap beside the shutter. It was a poor repair, but it stopped the worst of the chill, and Olivia watched him return with that familiar look she wore whenever he tried to mend something instead of replacing it.

“Ye can tell me what I’ve done wrong with the window after breakfast,” he said.

“Only after breakfast?”

“I ask for a little mercy.”

She smiled, though her eyes returned to the purse. Jamie sat down and left her to think. When she had an opinion about his porridge, the woman could fill a room with it. He’d learned that when she went quiet, another question seldom helped.

He wanted to ask her to stay through the next run, and then the next, until perhaps she ceased to count the days at all. He knew enough to keep such wishes to himself. She’d agreed to work for her passage, and he’d see that she was paid fairly for it.

So he rose, and put the purse in the chest then returned to the table. Jamie turned his palm upward and let her decide whether to take it.

She did, a small smile on her face though her eyes looked sad.

Outside, somebody shouted for the ghost to come and mend a gate. Olivia laughed under her breath, and Jamie told her that if the spirit began taking requests, the north wall was first in line. She laughed again, and he went to fetch more wood for the fire. The money was hers when she earned it, whether he liked what she meant to do with it or not.

Chapter 18

Olivia

By ten o’clock the next morning Olivia had barley dust on her apron, a blister forming beneath one thumb, and a firm understanding that Alasdair considered every square foot of the still house his personal territory.

“Move yer foot, lass,” he said, passing with a tub of hot water.

She stepped aside, only to find Ewan coming the other way with a bundle of staves. “There ought to be a place I can stand without getting in somebody’s way.”

“Outside,” Alasdair suggested.

She made a face. “And miss your charming company?”

He grunted, which she was beginning to recognize as a perfectly respectable answer. Olivia took the empty tub from him and carried it to the door, where a boy was waiting to fill it at the water butt. She could have stood back and watched. Jamie had offered her more than enough money to reach Greenock and secure passage across the Atlantic, and no one here would have expected a guest to spend the day hauling water. But she’d told him she meant to earn that money, and she had no intention of changing her mind because the work was hard.

The fact that a ship from Greenock would deliver her to Boston two hundred and forty years too early remained a problem she couldn’t discuss with anyone.

Alasdair called her back before the boy had finished filling the tub. The older man stood beside a washback, listening with his head inclined toward the wooden rim. The room was warm enough that Olivia had pushed her sleeves past her elbows wishing for the hundredth time that she was dressed in her jeans and shirt that she’d packed away in the bottom of a chest. She knew she ought to burn them but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Rain tapped against the shutter and the flagstones near the door were slick with mud. Copper caught the firelight, ropes and tools hung from pegs in the wall, and someone had set a loaf and cheese beneath a cloth for the men to share when they stopped to eat.

“Tell me whether this one is ready,” Alasdair said.

Olivia bent over the wash. The familiar warm smell of grain and yeast rose to meet her, with a hint of orchard fruit beneath it. She’d spent years judging whisky in tasting rooms where the glasses were spotless and the samples arrived at precisely the temperature she wanted. Here she had to make room for damp peat, cold air coming beneath a door, and the smell of the stew somebody had left simmering over a smaller fire.

“Nearly,” she said. “Another few hours?”

“Maybe. Listen.”

She put her hand against the stave and waited. The bubbles broke against the wood with a soft, irregular sound. Alasdair knew the wash by what it had done the day before, as well as what it was doing now, and when she asked how long he’d been judging fermentation that way, he looked at her as though she’d asked how long he’d been breathing.

“Long enough to know when it needs leaving alone.”

“That’s a useful talent. You should teach Jamie.”

“I heard that,” Jamie called from the open doorway.

He’d been helping Ewan load an empty cart and had come in carrying a coil of rope. Rain darkened his hair at the temples, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to expose the small scars on his forearms. He set the rope on a bench, caught her looking at him, and smiled in a way that made her forget her next question.

She turned back to the wash before he could make anything of it.