But we were not alone. There, at my right hand, was Gilroy, his pen in hand, waiting. Across from me, Helen, observing the scene with her clever and curious gaze. And MacDougall, a dark presence who might be standing behind any door, wishing me gone.

If I were to help both my friend Turnbull and Mrs. Graeme, I’d have to be careful, conceal what I felt, and be always on guard.

I wanted to smile back at Mrs. Graeme, but I held it to myself and merely gave a nod and shifted my chair back into position. “Good. Let’s begin, then, with this list of those who knew you and your husband. What names can you add to it?”

“None,” was her answer. “At least, none who knew us as adults.”

I looked at her, curious, and she said quietly, “We met as children.”

And although she owed us no piece of that past, she began, in a soft voice, to speak of it, drawing us back with her words to the girl she had been when she’d first known James Graeme.

Chapter 2

Saturday, 14 July, 1683

He always went a step ahead.

He’d done that for as long as Lily could remember—since they’d both been set to run together through the fields and woods and rivers of Inchbrakie, the estate in Perthshire where she had been born, in the same cottage where her mother had been raised, within a family that had always served the laird.

“A bit of play will do the lass no harm,” was how her grandmother had silenced any protest. “Let her keep her childhood.”

As though childhood were a thing that could be taken from you, Lily thought. What foolish things old people said, sometimes.

This summer she was seven and a half. When all her chores were done—the careful sweeping and the dusting and the little bits of mending that her grandmother was starting to allow her—she was free to go outdoors and look for Jamie.

He’d been here three days already, with his brothers and his mother, come to visit his grandfather, the old laird. And he’d be here for nearly two weeks more, but it was never long enough.

She found him waiting by the gate, as he had promised. He’d been waiting long enough to craft a pair of makeshift swords for them from twigs bound tightly into shape with strips of bark, their handles wrapped with rushes.

They were almost the same age and the same height but he was sturdier, his fair hair as unruly as himself, his cheerful grin a welcome. “Come on, then,” he said, “they promised they’d not start without us.”

Lily didn’t need to ask who “they” were. He’d already started off across the long grass of the field, toward the neighboring estate of Abercairney.

He had cousins there. Their mother was the sister of his father, so the old Laird of Inchbrakie was the grandfather to all of them.

Last winter, with the Abercairney boys away at school in Perth, the two girls—Anna and Emelia—had set up a play school of their own, with Lily as their pupil.