Me at fourteen in the scorching bright sunlight, the day I was taught how to fire a musket.

A turn, and I’m deep in the jungles of Darien, fighting the Spaniards, and Lieutenant Turnbull, my friend and commander, is urging me onward in spite of the shot to his shoulder that’s just made him fall. “Go,” he says. “Do not stop. Go!”

Turn again, and it’s several years on and I’m once again following Turnbull’s directions, his letter inviting me to come and visit him tucked in my pocket as I climb the worn stones of Edinburgh’s High Street in search of his door.

He lived, that year, in Caldow’s Land—the term land being commonly applied in that town to those great, high tenements in which each floor was, of itself, a separate dwelling, serviced by a common stair. It was a narrow building, and an old one, and the evening I arrived in mid-September under skies that threatened rain, it looked unwelcoming. The hollow shadows lying deeply in the arched shop booths at street level, the several looming stories of dark windows, and the jagged roofline cutting at the sky all seemed to warn me not to stay.

But I was stubborn, I was weary, and I did not heed the warning.

So, for what came next, I’ve no one but myself to blame.

Chapter 1

Monday, 22 September, 1707

MacDougall was watching me. It was unsettling to waken and find him half-shielded by shadow, an arm’s length away from my bed. For a sick moment I thought I was still in the grip of the trembling fever that had been my curse these past years and that had, as it always did, struck without warning, the same night I’d set foot in Caldow’s Land.

Making things worse, my friend Turnbull was not even here in town.

Instead, on his threshold, I’d found myself facing his wife, great with child, who had offered apologies. “But do come in. You can sup with us, surely?”

He’d written to me that he’d married and that they were well matched, but this was my proof—for few women, upon opening their door to find me standing there, a stranger, would have welcomed me inside. And fewer still, when I had shown that night the first signs of my fever, would have brushed aside my protests and insisted that I stay.

I should have protested more strongly. But before I could collect my wits I’d found myself installed within a bedchamber, attended by the Turnbulls’ rough-edged and rough-handed manservant, MacDougall.

He was not pleased by my presence.

“It’s not right,” he told me one evening. “Ye should not be here when the master’s away.”

I’d have gladly obliged him by leaving, but I had no choice. There was naught to be done for an ague like mine but to faithfully drink my infusion of Jesuits’ powder and wait while the hot fevers cycled their course.

At the peak of my delirium, I’d watched MacDougall search the pockets of my coat, remove the letter I had brought from Turnbull, and unfold it. In my outrage, with my lips too dry to form the words, I told him, “Leave that!”