Effie was being put up in one of the rooms in the servant’s attic, to begin her new job until the cottage was ready and her father could join her. Jayne had promised to look in and sit with him every day, and to bring him meals in her absence – but still Effie worried. With her meals and board provided here, she would send her wages back to him till he could be put on the train and brought down here; Lord Dumfries had even promised his driver would collect him from Glasgow. It was a luxury she hadn’t been afforded – she had walked the hour trek from Auchinleck station herself, the blisters on her heels forcing her to a limp by the time she reached the estate. She had been grateful that her bag was reasonably light in her hands as she followed the unmade road. Her possessions amounted to the clothes on her back, her climbing tweeds, Sunday best, her brushes, paints and books. She had nothing else and she had been glad of it.

‘I cannot say, Miss Gillies. That’s the domain of Mr McLaren, the estate manager. I concern myself only with the running of the great house.’

The great house. It was certainly that. Effie’s bag had dropped clean from her hand as she had caught her first glimpse of it from the bridge – a vast bluff building that chested into the gardens, with bustling chimneys on the roof and windows that stretched from ceiling to floor. The perfect symmetry, heroic ambition and sheer scale of it had astounded her; even in books, she had never seen such a sight. It was a palace, a home for a king! Even the gardens, of a deep and luscious green unknown back home, were clipped and shaped into patterns that swirled from the ground itself, bright-headed flowers nodding in deep beds. For several long, silent moments it had been as though her very eyes had deceived her. She had only ever known nature to be wild and untameable, a punishing force against which they continually battled for survival; but here it was nature that bowed into deep submission to man’s whimsy, as though a plaything to be whittled and fashioned.

She had looked on in astonished, aghast wonder, recognizing for the first time the breach between her world and Sholto’s and she had wondered what he must have thought when he had stepped into her domain. Had he thought it less than this – or more? Wasn’t there a majesty to her world? Wasn’t its very wildness exhilarating—?

‘I’ll leave you to settle in, Miss Gillies. My office is downstairs, second on the left.’

Stairs. Even they were a novelty.