Sorcha’s heart filled and she resisted the urge to throw her arms around him. Instead, she took a deep breath and tried not to get her hopes up. She gave him her warmest smile. ‘Captain… To learn anything of Robbie’s fate… well, it would be… it would be…’

‘Living.’

‘Aye,’ she smiled, grateful he understood. ‘It would be living.’

‘Consider it done, then.’ He held her eyes for a beat then kept walking. ‘You ken,’ he said, after they’d gone a few more paces, ‘there’s those who believe Marlborough’s really a Jacobite.’

Sorcha gave a little snort. ‘I heard that the man changes his cloth to suit his fortunes.’

The captain chuckled. ‘Just as well, as they change often.’

It was well known that the duke had served under five different monarchs, shifting from being a staunch supporter of the Stuart scions to William of Orange and back again. Under the current queen, Anne, old King James’s daughter, he’d made his name and fame, leading her armies across the continent the last few years. Not that the duke’s fine reputation had protected either the captain’s family or hers.

‘Sometimes,’ said the captain, ‘changing so as to blend in, so you don’t arouse suspicion, is the only way a man can truly work for what he believes in. What he knows is right.’

Before she could ask what he meant by that — and wondering, fleetingly, if Captain Ross was alluding to himself, and what that might signify — they stopped again. Sorcha was astonished to see they were outside her house. Was he someone worthy of her trust? Or was he simply suggesting that he too, like most of the Weem, and despite fighting in the Queen’s army, was a Jacobite? Why did it even matter to her?

Annoyed that she was so curious about this incomer, while at the same time acknowledging she wanted her interest sated, she noticed the glimmer had all but gone and the sky was a shifting mass of dark, bruised clouds. It began to spitter; a fine rain that rested upon their clothes and hair.

Sorcha unstrapped her creel and placed it at her feet. ‘Thank you for bringing me home, captain.’

‘It’s been my pleasure, Mrs McIntyre,’ he said and reached for her hand, but instead of kissing it (for which she was grateful, as she knew her fingers smelled of fish), he bowed over it.

She dropped a little curtsey and opened the door to reveal Nettie kneeling before the fire burning in the hearth. Scrambling to her feet, Nettie went to take the creel, but when she caught sight of the captain, she retreated into the shadows behind the door.

Suddenly self-conscious as she stared at the captain, wishing she had a nicer skirt, cleaner hands and face, that her hair wasn’t so windblown around her neepyin, Sorcha wasn’t sure what to say.