When a motorcar came barreling down the drive and turned toward the town, Rutledge could see quite clearly that Holden was alone behind the wheel.

He gingerly climbed out of the tower, brushed himself off, and set out on the long walk in to the farmhouse.

Extensive and attractive gardens had been laid out around it, with trees forming a screen in front of the vast stables that ranged back to the pastures beyond. Jacobean in style, the house had a wide terrace leading to the door and handsome gables rising above the old glass in tall windows. The property had been made more fashionable a hundred years earlier, with lawns and beds and vistas, Rutledge thought, but the core was much older.

He crossed the terrace with long strides and rapped at the door. An elderly woman in a black dress came to answer his knock, and looked at him with a disparaging expression. He realized that there was still straw on his shoulders. Grinning, he said, “I’ve come to see Mr. Holden. Rutledge is the name.”

“Mr. Holden isn’t in, I’m afraid. We don’t expect him back for another two hours.”

“Ah. Then perhaps I might speak with Mrs. Holden.” The tone of his voice was pleasant but firm. This was not a request to be rejected.

“She isn’t feeling well today, sir.”

“Then I shan’t keep her long.”

The maid invited him into the cool, high-ceilinged hall, dim after the sunlight on the road. It was Scottish baronial, with banners hanging from the rafters and targes ringed with pistols and dirks and swords, like sunbursts on the stone between the high windows. The furnishings were more comfortable, a long table by the door and a grouping of chairs around the cold hearth that took up half the side wall. The maid asked him to wait there, and Rutledge walked around studying the array of weaponry. It was, he thought, real—not Victorian replicas of lost family heirlooms.

Many of the swords were claymores, the dreaded double-bladed weapon of the Highland Scots, capable of cleaving a fighting man in two. The blades were rough-edged in places, as if they’d met with bone. Battle swords, not dress swords. He moved on to look at the dirks. They were the famous skean dhus, the black knife of the Highlander, worn in the cuff of the stocking.

He smiled, looking at them. Not the elegant ones with cairngorms in the hilt and stags carved in the sheath—these weapons were plain and deadly, with horn to fit a man’s hand in the handles and blades honed to razor sharpness.