The Compass of Craigmore Cove

The storm came up out of the north at the worst possible moment, which, in Lachlan Mackay’s experience, was the only moment storms ever came.

He had the Selkie’s tiller in both fists and a keg of French brandy lashed against each knee. Astern, close enough that he could hear her gun-ports banging open, the revenue cutter Argyll was gaining on him by the minute. Ahead, the cliffs of Craigmore reared out of the dark, black and wet and streaming. The wind had gone from a wail to a roar, and the whole North Sea seemed to be trying to climb into the lugger and take her apart plank by plank.

“Captain!” Tam Gunn bawled from the mast. “Captain, she’s coming on!”

“I can see her, Tam.”

“She’ll have us by the cave mouth!”

“She will not.”

“How d’ye ken?”

“Because I’m a very fine liar,” said Lachlan, “and I’ve told the sea we’re not here.”

Old Dougal Bain, braced in the bows with a lantern shielded under his coat, said something short and heartfelt about the Fox of Craigmore and his mother. The boy Jamie, wedged between two tea chests, said nothing at all. His eyes were enormous.

Lachlan grinned.

It was not a sensible grin. He was thirty-three years old, with a good ship under him, forty kegs and six chests of contraband in her belly, and the most determined revenue captain in Scotland at his heels. He had been shot at twice that month and had stolen a bishop’s tea. And God help him, he had never felt more alive.

It was not all brandy, either. Under the tea chests, where no revenue man had ever thought to look, lay twelve sacks of oatmeal and two of salt, for the widow Bain and the eleven households who would not see a full pot before Michaelmas. The brandy would buy the meal. The meal would feed the village. That, if he was honest, was the whole of the trade. The rest was only showing off.

The brass compass lay in his left palm, where it had lain for the last hour.

It was a battered, plain, egg-sized thing, the lid worn smooth by a lifetime of thumbs, with his grandfather’s initials scratched into it and a small wave beneath them, a sailor’s mark. The first Lachlan Mackay had sailed forty years in the Baltic trade with a matched pair, one for the helm and one for the coat, and had said that a man who trusts one thing at sea deserves what he gets. The pair had passed to his son Ruaridh. And Ruaridh, dead of a lung fever nine days from the first cough to the kirkyard, a man who had never been ill in his life, had pressed them into the hands of a boy of sixteen from his bed. Never trust a single needle, lad, he had said. One for the helm. One for the coat.

He had never once been without both.

The swell lifted the Selkie like a hand. Lachlan threw his weight on the tiller, and she heeled, and the cutter’s bow-chaser spoke. A ball plowed the sea off the starboard quarter in a column of white.

“Now, Dougal!”

The lantern went up, a single yellow eye on the black cliff, and far above, on the headland, an answering light flashed twice.

The cave mouth opened in the rock like a mouth. It was ten feet across, and the sea was trying to go through it all at once. Lachlan took the lugger straight at it on the back of a wave, with the cliff rushing up like a wall, and the boy Jamie shut his eyes, and the Selkie’s keel scraped rock with a sound like a coffin lid.

He felt it go.

It was a small thing, and quick. The sea slapped the bow, the tiller bucked, and his left hand flew open as if he had been struck. He saw the compass go over the side, a little gold wink in the lantern light, and then the water closed on it and it was gone.

Something in him lurched, too. It was absurd. It was a lump of brass.

Then they were through.

The roar of the storm fell away behind them to a hollow boom. The Selkie slid into the black, still water of the cave, with torches flaring on the ledges and the village’s men leaning out to catch her lines. Behind them, outside, a long way off, a voice that could only have been Captain Ambrose Pike’s was heard to scream a single word across the surf.

“FOX!”

The men cheered. Tam Gunn flung his cap in the air. Old Dougal sat down on a keg and put his head between his knees, and Jamie opened his eyes and was sick over the side.

“The devil’s own luck, Captain,” Tam said, grinning, wiping the spray from his beard. “The devil’s own luck.”

“There’s no luck in it,” Lachlan said. “I’m just very good at this.”

He said it lightly. His hands, he found, were not quite steady. He leaned on the tiller and flexed the empty left one, and the loss sat in his chest as a small, cold, ridiculous weight.

A compass, he told himself. A brass bauble. You can buy another in Wick for four shillings.

Something moved against his ribs.

He went still.

It was inside his coat, where it always was, the second needle, the backup. It was moving. Not the lazy swing of a thing jostled by a boat, but a restless, deliberate tremor, like a hound on a scent. It tugged at the inside of his pocket as though it wanted out.

He took it out.

By the flare of the nearest torch, in his open palm, the needle was spinning. It did not point to the north. It did not point anywhere on the cave’s black walls, or toward the sea, or toward home. It swung and steadied and swung, with the odd, steady insistence of a living thing, and settled at last on a line that ran past the rock and the cliff and the long dark shoreline and out into something that was not a place at all.

Toward a someone.

It was a ridiculous thought. He was a ridiculous man for thinking it.

And yet he stood in the smell of brandy and wet rope, with the cheering of his crew fading around him, and the little brass compass pulled at his palm as steadily and as tenderly as a hand.

He could not have known that two hundred and thirty-two years away, on a shingle beach in a spring gale, a young woman in a knitted hat with a pom-pom was about to bend down and pick up its twin.

Nor that she was going to be extremely annoyed about it.