He had come to Scotland for a weekend owed to his godfather, and now duty was keeping him here. He felt misgivings, his mind unsettled, the peace he’d found at Hadrian’s Wall worn off. And Hamish, in his accustomed place behind the driver’s shoulder, was as disturbed by the turn of events as Rutledge himself. He could hear the voice as clearly as if there were a passenger. Blaming—stubbornly refusing to accept the change in plans.

“And I’ll no’ go to the glen again—”

Rutledge tried to shut him out and then fell prey to another kind of haunting, awakened grief.

For the motorcar also carried the “ghost” of Ross Trevor. Rutledge had felt the dead man’s presence so strongly at The Lodge. In France he had arrived at an acceptance of Ross’s death, but in the house where Ross had spent every summer for twenty-five years or more, it seemed that he must surely be somewhere just out of sight—down the passage—upstairs in his room—out riding and expected soon—talking to Morag in the kitchen. His laughter preceding him, his swift, energetic footsteps approaching the door. Ross Trevor had been a powerful presence, and Rutledge had found himself watching the doorways, listening over the ticking of the grandfather’s clock or the wind in the eaves, for some sign of it. It seemed impossible that such a man had vanished so completely, swallowed by the sea—

Over the last four months, Rutledge had begun for the first time to realize what the civilian population had endured during the long, dark days when casualties mounted and there seemed to be no end to the fighting. It was different from the way that soldiers saw the dying. But no less terrible. A time for mourning . . .

He wondered if David felt that same sense of anticipation, and if he did, how he lived with it—and then realized that for Ross’s father and for Morag, it might be oddly comforting.

Hamish said, as if picking up the thought, “They never saw him dead. They never closed the lid over his coffin and watched the earth shoveled down on it. Like me, he never came home. And so they’re still waiting—”

JEDBURGH, LIKE ITS neighbors from Berwick to Dumfries, was not the Scotland of kilts and pipes and Bonnie Prince Charlie. These were the Marches that ran on either side of the frontier between Scotland and England, the border towns of the Lowlands, where a different kind of war had raged for centuries, raids into England for cattle and sheep and horses, shaping generations of hard men.

The English had raided north too, with equal vigor and cunning. It had been a way of life until the 1600s, sometimes condoned and sometimes condemned, but always profitable enough to be a main local industry. Union between Scotland and England had finally put a stop to that.