They’d used the room their tutor used for teaching them. They’d taught her how to read, and write, and once Emelia had set her to copy out a chart of all the family of the house of Abercairney.

It had been the family name that had tripped Lily up, at first. She’d copied down the letters carefully: M-o-r-a-y. And she’d frowned. “But that’s not how it’s said at all,” she’d pointed out. “It’s ‘Murray.’”

“Aye,” Emelia had agreed, “but it’s the way we’ve always spelled it. We had ancestors who fought alongside William Wallace and who walked with kings and they all spelled it that way, too.”

Visual evidence of their ancestral ties to royalty was everywhere within the house. One afternoon with wintry shadows slanting through the windows of the corridors the elder of the two girls, Anna, who was then fourteen and fond of tales of kings and queens and knights and noble romance, led a history lesson solely from the portraits on the walls.

There were dashing men and women of a different time, with eyes that seemed to follow Lily as she walked, but all their names and exploits blended into one dull monologue, until Anna stopped at a portrait of a handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes and a serious face turned toward them, half over his shoulder, as though to say, “Come, follow me!”

“This,” said Anna, “is who your friend Jamie is named for. An earlier James.”

Lily read the nameplate on the frame: James Graham, Marquis of Montrose.

Even the last names were the same, she thought, though Jamie spelled his “Graeme.”

Lily’s eyes widened. “Is this Montrose the hero?”

Emelia said, “Aye, he’s the one John always wants to be when we play Covenanters and Montrose.”

“One of the bravest men who ever lived,” said Anna, “and our grandfather at Inchbrakie was his most trusted friend.”

His own personal history, so Anna explained, was like Scotland’s—divided. “He was himself a Covenanter, at the start, but—”

Lily interrupted her with, “Why are they called Covenanters?”

“Why, because of their Covenant. D’ye not know what that is?”

Lily shook her head.

Anna explained. “Well, a long time ago, everybody in Scotland was Catholic. For centuries, they were, and then up came the Presbyterians, led by John Knox. He was fighting with Queen Mary, who was Catholic, and at length he won and the Presbyterians became the new official Kirk. But when Queen Mary’s grandson, the first Charles, became king—he was Episcopalian, like us—he stood against the Scottish Presbyterians and then there was rebellion here and rioting in Edinburgh, and in the end the Presbyterians rose up and signed a document that they called their great Covenant—that is a word that means a solemn promise or agreement—that they’d always keep to their own faith. ’Tis said some signed it with their blood. That’s why they are called Covenanters.”

“And they went to war against the king,” Emelia added, “and they caught him, and they cut his head off.”