But twenty minutes later, Rutledge was driving north once more. This time toward the Border. Something in his godfather’s voice, a relief at hearing from him, a need that wasn’t spoken—a surge of warmth when he thought Rutledge had called to give his time of arrival—had made it nearly impossible to refuse or suggest any alternative. It had been taken for granted. As if nothing had changed.

Better to return to the rain of London and the empty flat—better to go to York or Lincoln or Carlisle rather than Scotland, where voices at every turn would remind him of Scots he’d commanded. Men he felt he’d betrayed . . .

There was hardly a town of any size in the Highlands that he didn’t know by name, because one or a dozen of the men under his command had lived there.

How many lies had he told frightened boys facing battle for the first time? How many lies had he written to grieving women who had just lost a son or a husband? And yet his men had trusted him. He’d listened to them talk about families, crofts, the land, small victories won in short lives— lonely men leaning against the wall of a trench in the dark watches, wanting to remember home, or lying on a stretcher, trying to die bravely. The Scots had made good soldiers and they’d died hard. Not in their tens or hundreds, but in their thousands. Rutledge felt a duty to them still, and it was a burden he hadn’t healed sufficiently yet to put down. It wasn’t easily explained—but it was there, that sense of duty to the dead.

He was going to Scotland now, there was no turning back—

It’s not as if I’ll be driving as far as Edinburgh, he argued with himself. The Lodge is in the country, for God’s sake! Once there, I could be anywhere—in any part of Britain. It will have to be done sometime. I can’t hide from the past—somehow I must do this—

It would be arrant cruelty to call again and say I’ve changed my mind—

But in the deep recesses of his mind, he could feel Hamish refusing to accept any justification Rutledge might offer. For Rutledge this was a hurdle of the spirit. For Hamish it had been the unacceptable horror of dying in France—his permanent exile from the Highlands. He had not come home then. He would not come home now.

The strain of traveling with that stiff, solid wall of refusal began to take its toll.