Shadows Over Caithness
The wind off the Moray Firth had teeth that winter—small, relentless teeth that nipped at ears and wrists and slipped under a man's coat to gnaw his bones. Wick crouched against it like a dog that knows when not to bark, streets narrow, doors low, chimneys hissing peat smoke that the gale tore to tatters as soon as it rose.
Inside the King's Arms, the common room ran on three things: heat, ale, and talk. The hearth was built wide and shallow so the peat could lie like loaves in a baker's oven. Tankards knocked softly, the way men knock who mean no insult. Talk moved like shoal-water over stones—low, constant, changing with each new current of rumour.
In the best chair, near enough the fire to warm silk but not so near as to risk its scent, Margaret Sinclair sat very straight. She had discarded the powdered tower of Aberdeen fashion; the north had bullied it into a simpler knot, though a fine ribbon still bound it. Her gloves were kid—pale, immaculate—and her cloak's sable collar sat on her shoulders like a judgement. The firelight made her face gold in some places, shadow in others, and there was no softness in either.
She had not slept since the pans. Not truly. Sleep came local and skittish, a bird alighting and gone at the scrape of any thought. In the small hours, when the wind found the shutters' bad join and whistled like a hungry thing, she saw again the moment when her shot leapt—clean, perfect—and the man stepped between it and the woman without looking. It was the stepping that undid her. The presumption of it. The… love of it. The word sickened her.
She is nothing, she told herself. A kelp-wife. A salt-queen of a midden. He is mine. He was always mine. The thought did not warm her. Fury was a poor brazier; it burned fast and left ash that did not comfort.
Robert Sinclair sat opposite with his ledger open. He had spread his instruments—quill, weights, a small folding rule—like a commander lays out maps. He was less handsome than his daughter and more formidable: a long face, a measured mouth, eyes that moved without the head, seeing angles no one else noticed. He turned pages as if each leaf were a door to a room he already owned.
"You bring the city with you," Margaret said after the silence had lasted long enough to say disrespect.
"I bring the tools that work," Robert answered. "You bring the ones that satisfy." He did not look up. "Let me know when satisfaction yields results. Until then, let me work."
She swallowed what she wanted to fling back. He had not raised his voice to her since she was ten; he did not need to. His tone was a ledger line: thin, straight, unforgiving.
He tapped the page. "Look. Wick, Scrabster, Thurso. These are the mouths. The Craiks' salt and kelp must pass through them, else the work starves. I have factors in two. The third is owned in name by a man who plays cards poorly. He'll take our gold to patch his luck." He turned another leaf. "The ferries to Orkney run on favours. Ours will be more generous."
Margaret's lip curled. "You mean to win with ledgers."
"I mean to win with reality." He shut the book, very softly. "And reality is this: a line of supply. You cannot duel it. You can only cut it."
She moved to the window and pushed the shutter a finger's breadth. The wind snapped at it like a scolded child and drove spray needles against the glass. Someone in the yard shouted at a horse and then apologized; even beasts took offense here. She watched a gull stand on one foot on a post, eyes half-lidded, smug with the patience of a thief.
"Reality," she said, tasting the word. "Reality is he was mine and now he is not."
"Reality," Robert said, "is that men will sell him if they are hungry. We will make them so."
She shut the shutter. The latch clicked sharp, sure. "And the woman?"
Robert straightened a quill so it lay parallel to the ledger's spine. "Remove him, and the woman will fall. Or Keith will take her pans. Either way, the nuisance ends."
Margaret turned. "Not enough. She looked at me as if I were wrong. She spoke as if the world listened to her. She must be taught."
Robert's mouth thinned. "I will not risk all to satisfy your wounded pride."
"You will," she said, not loudly, with a steadiness he recognized—hers, and his own, reflected back. "Because the city watches me. Because if she lives to stand at his side, I am made a fool in every room that matters. And then your name—our name—loses weight. That is ledger enough."
Before he could answer, the door stirred the warmth with a wedge of cold. Colin Keith came in as if the gale had been made for him and he had found it merely satisfactory. Snow salted his cloak and lashes; he brushed it away with a rough hand that had not seen gloves in a season. His men took places near the wall, not near the fire; men who expect to leave in a hurry choose cold over crowded.
He did not bow. He never had. It wasn't pride. He bowed for no one because he had learned that heads lowered to anyone make habit of the movement.
"Sinclair," he said, which served for both, then claimed a chair with a boot and sat. Robert slid a glass across the scarred wood. Keith took it, swallowed, and made the face men make when whisky chews back. He set the glass down empty; the conversation could begin.
"You bled men for little," he said. No accusation. A line in a report.
Margaret let the insult bite. "We showed them we could reach them," she snapped.
Keith's eyes slid to her, back to Robert. "You showed them you wanted to reach them, and they learned how far your arm could go." He scratched at the edge of a scar along his jaw, an old conversation scored into flesh. "Gunn stands better when tested. The Craik woman thinks like weather. She banks her fires and moves her barrels. She's no ornamental."
"She is a peasant," Margaret said.
"There are peasants I've chosen not to meet in narrow places." Keith's tone was mild. Only the tiniest hitch at the corner of his eye suggested he had not enjoyed admitting it. "You came to Caithness to remove a man. You brought coin, a story about honour, and very little sense of the ground. I can fix two of those."
Robert's fingers steepled, the gesture he used when he had decided he could afford to pay attention to a man. "Tell me your price."
"Not now." Keith leaned forward, forearms across his knees, the posture of a man about to throw dice. "First we cure you of impatience. Let him breathe. Let him think the ridge is safe. Rumour will make our work easier than force. We will pull the bracing from his house at night and let the roof sag. When the sag is bad enough, a hand will do what a hammer cannot."
Margaret shook her head, curls stiff with the violence of it. "No. I will not wait. He will marry her. He will stand in front of their fire and take her hand like a free man while I—" She bit off the rest. All the words she wanted to spit were not fit for this room. "He will not give to her what he never gave to me."
Keith's voice had a granite patience. "If you push now, you'll spend men for theatre. I don't bleed for applause."
Robert lifted the ledger again, as if to remind both of them what held real weight. "We squeeze trade," he said. "We'll salt Wick with coin. We'll make every wagon short, every boat late, every cask suspect. We'll lean on Thurso with paper. We'll have the law write the world as we want it."
He turned a page and flicked it with his fingernail. "Meanwhile, you learn where Craik ground gives—footpaths, burns, the seam by the sheds. When we strike, it will be with the tide, not against it."
Margaret's teeth worked behind closed lips. She wanted to argue. She wanted to hurl the glass into the fire and watch it spit. But she had been raised on the taste of winning, not the taste of performance. She swallowed both. "Then make it soon," she said. "Before spring. Before he can—" She would not say bind her. The word sat like a hot coal in her mouth. "Before he can dig in."
Keith tipped the empty glass against his bottom lip, considering. "Soon," he said. "But we plan so that when soon comes, it sticks."
Silence filled the seams. The wind clawed the walls. In the corner an old sailor hummed under his breath; it might have been a psalm or a ribaldry—either way, it held the same notes of endurance and sin.
Robert closed the book. "Good. We have shape. My men will begin with the factors at Scrabster. I'll pay off the ferryman at John o' Groats; he'll forget that Craik casks ever existed. We'll buy a sheriff's writ in Thurso about unpaid duties on salt. It will be nonsense, but it will slow them. You," he nodded at Keith, "send your lads to count steps—accurately. I won't underwrite heroics."
Keith stood. "I don't sell heroics," he said. "They rot on the shelf." He pulled his cloak around him and nodded once to Margaret. "My lady."
She held his gaze, refusing even the courtesy of acknowledgment, and then she could not help herself. "Tell me one thing, Keith," she said. "Is he afraid?" She meant Gunn. She didn't say his name; she would not give him the courtesy of sound.
Keith's answer came after a breath. "Of death? No." He turned for the door. "Of living? He used to be. I'm not sure he is, anymore."
The door let in a swing of cold and then shut on it. They watched the snow he had carried on his cloak melt to dark freckles on the plank floor.
Robert rose without hurry. "I have letters to write. Men to buy." He paused, palm on the ledger. "Keep your temper," he added to Margaret as an afterthought. "You'll waste it and we'll need it later."
She lifted her chin. "And if he marries her?"
"Then we ruin them as a pair," Robert said. "Names are easy to unmake when you own the mouths that speak them."
He went. The room swallowed him without noticing; men like Robert are the sea's cousins—they shape everything and leave no single mark.
Margaret stayed, but not with patience. She sat, then stood, then sat again. She set her gloves side by side on the arm of the chair and then moved them a finger-width closer, as if order could be forced on air if only things aligned. Her mind ran hot and fast, a fox in an unfamiliar field, looking for the hedge that would take it home.
He stood for her. The thought returned like a wave and broke in the same place each time. He stood as if his body were worth less than her breath. The insult of it skinned her raw. He had stood for nothing when she was his wife—not for duty, not for appearance. He'd given her coin and silence, a house and a ghost. And now, on a broken shore, he had found a woman who drew words out of him like iron from ore.
Envy was a word Margaret had learned to despise in other mouths; in hers it tasted like bile. She told herself it was not envy, only justice. He had treated her as an ornament, then left her to be gossiped over like a cracked teacup. He owed her a face-saving death, at least.
She called for ink and paper and wrote four letters, each in a different hand that said a different thing to a different man.
To Mr. Brodie, sheriff's substitute in Thurso: I have cause to believe illicit salt passes unmustered from Craik ground. As a loyal subject, I cannot bear to see the Crown deprived. I enclose a donation to the widow's fund. (A bribe that would not look like one.)
To Mr. Fraser, factor at Scrabster: You have my father's custom in your hands; do not break it on the back of peasant promises. Turn every Craik cask away. (A threat wrapped in velvet.)
To Mrs. Manson, innkeeper and gossip: Beware the Gunn. He is not what he seems. A reward for any word that helps me protect respectable folk from his violence. (A lie, but useful.)
To a certain captain whose ship had carried illegal French brandy the year Margaret turned eighteen: There are casks on Craik ground that may not see their destination. Boats in the dark often lose their way. Men who help them find the right shore might be remembered when their sins come to light.
She sanded each letter deliberately, blew the grit away, sealed wax with a crest that did not shake. Rage can be made useful if given a task.
When the boy went to carry them, she stopped him with a hand—not gentle—on his sleeve. "Run," she said. "If a horse throws you, I'll have your ears."
He blanched and bolted. Fear moved messengers as surely as coin.
Left alone with the fire and the hum of men who pretended not to watch her, Margaret let herself imagine the ending she wanted: Gunn on his knees, Agnes Craik fallen, the kelp pits cold and the pans rusting. She saw herself standing over the ruin in a gown the colour of blood, and no wind could blow that picture out.
But when she shut her eyes, the image wavered, as if the heat distorted it. She saw instead Gunn's face at the last—older than when she'd married him, harder, and lit with something that had never flickered for her. That was the thing she could not forgive.
She rose. The room shifted around her like a school of fish before a shark. "Have the horses saddled," she told the boy who dared be nearest. "We ride to Clyth at first light."
The boy swallowed. "My lady, the paths—"
"Are for feet that falter," she said. "Mine do not."
Upstairs, Robert wrote in a hand that had closed contracts and opened wars.
To Mr. Douglas, Advocate: draft for me an interdict restraining the Craiks of Clyth from trading salt within the bounds of Thurso and Wick until fees are rendered and arrears discharged. There were no arrears; there would be when he was finished writing.
He paused, quill raised, thinking of Keith. The man was valuable: he knew how men broke and how ground saved them if they were clever. He also had his own story to satisfy. Robert did not like men with stories. They made arithmetic messy. Still—use what the country gives you. He returned to the letter: And advise on the most expeditious means to seize goods in transit pursuant to said writ. The law could be taught to bite in the right place.
Downstairs, the wind moaned in the chimney, a low animal sound. Margaret stood again at the window, listening. The gale did not frighten her. It was loud, yes, but honest. It took what it wanted and said so. She could live with that.
She whispered to the glass, as if sound could travel through weather and reach a man on a cliff: "I will not be forgotten." The pane clouded with her breath; she drew her finger through it and left a clear line. The line looked like a blade.
A shadow moved by the door. Donald MacRae, scarred throat, one ear nicked like a torn sail. He had the air of a man who had already done something wrong and would do it again for the same pay. "My lady," he said, deferential without pretending he enjoyed it. "You'll be wanting watch kept on the Craik place. We can put eyes there by midnight."
"Do it," she said. "Watch the seam by the sheds. He stands there when he means to be brave. And watch the cliff path by the burn. He goes there when he means to pretend he is not."
MacRae's mouth twitched—surprise at the accuracy, or respect for the pettiness, it was hard to say. "Aye."
"And Donald?" she added. He turned back. "If you get a shot, take the woman first."
He didn't ask why. Men like him didn't. "Aye."
When he was gone, she sat again and folded her hands, palms cool against the kid. She thought of the ribbon she had seen at his belt—red wool, crude, an insult of a token—and she dug her nails into her glove until the seam whispered. She gives him ribbon. I give him rope.
The door opened once more. Not Keith this time, but the innkeeper's wife, apron twisted in her hands in the way of women who wish to ask a boon.
"My lady," she said, eyes on the floor. "There's word from a pedlar out of Lybster. He says a boat went down near Clyth Burn last week. No men lost, praise God, but crates on the water. Might be Craik trade."
Margaret's head lifted. "What crates?"
"Couldn't say. It were night. But he saw folk hauling by lantern light. Secrets."
Margaret smiled, slow. "Secrets are paper when the right heat touches them," she said, mostly to herself. Then to the woman: "Send your pedlar to me in the morning. I pay for truth."
"Aye, my lady." The woman backed out. Fear and greed pull the same way when enough coin is attached.
The common room thinned. Men went out into the weather single-file, as if the door only admitted one fate at a time. Margaret remained until the fire sank into embers. She watched the last blue flame lick a peat's rough edge and die. In the quiet she thought she heard the sea grinding its teeth. It comforted her. Grinding wore things away. She could be patient long enough to see it done.
Upstairs, Robert blew on the last pool of wax and pressed the seal. He stacked the letters so they would not warp. He turned down the lamp so oil would last. Then, for the first time since they had crossed into Caithness, he let himself feel something like fatigue. It was not worry. Worry was for men who could not afford the outcome of their errors. It was calculation rubbing skin thin. He lay on the hard bed and put an arm over his eyes. The wind thumped the shutter once, twice. He counted between the gusts the way a sailor counts to learn a storm's heart. Three beats, then four, then two. Unreliable. Like men. Like weather. He slept.
Keith did not. He stood under an eave and rolled a pebble with his boot, listening to how the town breathed. He had measured the Craik ground in his head already—the bad footing near the seam, the way the salt smoke slid down when the wind swung east. He respected the woman's sense for lines and the Gunn's habit of turning himself into a wall. He thought of Margaret—beautiful as broken glass—and Robert—useful as a knife you don't show company. He thought of his own men and how many he could spend before the song turned against his name. When the pebble found a crack, he let it stay there. Some things were better as wedges than as ornaments.
He walked to the stable and touched each horse as if to take its temperature. When he reached his own, the animal flicked an ear and bumped his shoulder with a head as heavy as a promise. "Soon," Keith told it. The horse breathed out in a fog. He breathed with it. Then he went back into the storm.
By dawn the letters were away, the men briefed, the names of three ferrymen translated into coin, and the first whispered lie set to travel faster than any rider: that the Gunn had slit a man's throat in the dark and laughed while he did it. It was not true. It did not matter. Lies are nets; truth is a fish. Nets do not care what they catch.
On the ridge above East Clyth, where she had watched smoke and sneered, Margaret reined in again, this time without disdain. The sea lay below, white shouldered, angry. She could just make out the line of kelp pits and the slow, patient smoke of work. She thought of fire a long time—how it moved, what it loved, what it feared. Then she turned her horse's head and rode for Wick.
"Soon," she said aloud, the word hot enough to steam in the cold. "Before spring."
The wind took it and tore it and carried it down the cliff, where a man on a ledge, checking a trap for rabbit, felt a shiver he could not name and looked up into weather that did not look back.