“I have that.” He did. But he also couldn’t shake the feeling she wantedmore.
Regrettably, he wasn’t in a position to helpanyone.
His days of solving the problems of others ended with the sinking of his ship, theSilver Thistle. Perhaps he was doing his part for the memory of unlucky artists such as his father and Arbuckle Priddy by restoring Priddy’s home. But he’d gained the house for a pittance and he did the work himself. Fortune helped now and then, such as when a flash flood deposited his possibly-medieval table and its benches on the sloping bank of the TullieGorge.
Butotherwise?
His coffers weren’t full – theyrattled.
And after the disaster with his ship, he refused to cast the shadow of his ill fortune onanyone.
He did cross his arms as he studied the old woman, suspecting she knew all about his visit to an Inverness pub a year or so before. How he’d used the last of his coin to purchase theSilver Thistle, a ship he’d hoped to sail to the Arctic. He would have, too, if a night of dense sea fog and the illness of an otherwise ever-alert lighthouse keeper hadn’t doomed theSilver Thistleand an Irish merchant ship. The collision cost many lives and forever stained Greyson’sown.
He tookresponsibility.
There wasn’t a soul living who could make him see itotherwise.
“My ears are open.” He met the crone’s gaze. “But I’ll no’ speak of things that cannae bechanged.”
She thrust out a bristly chin. “Yourship?”
Greyson could almost see the wheels turning in her grizzled head. “I’ve gone down that road often enough. I dinnae need a Highland cailleach to tell me that it was fog and a blackened lighthouse at fault. I knew where the lighthouse should have been, and the reefs. So did the other captain. In seeking safe waters, away from the submerged rocks, we didn’t reckon with another ship doing thesame.
“We should have.” He spoke the truth as he saw it. “That wedidn’t-”
“Neither one of you could have known.” Devorgilla poured an ale and pressed the cup into Greyson’s hand. “You thought to avoid submerged rocks no one could see. Tragic as it was, it was no’ the first loss of a good ship and it willnae be thelast.”
“That I know.” Greyson tossed back the ale and slapped the empty cup on the table. “But it will be the last time I cause harm to anyone, intentional ornot.”
“Och, to be sure,” Devorgilla agreed. Then she rubbed her knotty-knuckled hands together in a way that lifted the fine hairs on the back of Greyson’sneck.
The old woman was up tosomething.
