He’d ignored me. Reading it, he’d held the letter closer to the light to see the signature, refolded it along its seams, and with a frown, replaced it.

What else he’d searched while I was sleeping, I knew not, but from the first, he had determined I was not a man to trust.

This morning, as I woke, he watched me. Setting down my washbasin, he said, “Terrible things, tertian fevers.”

His tone had a purpose I couldn’t unravel, so when there was no need to make a reply, I kept silent. What was there to say? The fevers were a nuisance I’d been plagued with now for several years. The first infection, starting in the full heat of the jungle and continuing on shipboard, had been worst of all. Since then the agues cycled round at random, striking when they pleased, and disappearing till the next attack. I’d learned the way to live with them.

MacDougall told me, “’Tis what happens when men muck about in foreign lands. The master, thanks tae God, does have a stronger constitution and brought none of that foul sickness home with him.” He looked at me directly. “Ye must find it inconvenient, falling ill in other people’s houses.”

“I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Do ye not?”

I found his open insolence uncommon for a servant, and a contrast to the timid housemaid who kept closely to the kitchen like a shadow and was scarcely ever seen, but my hostess had already warned me that MacDougall was a law unto himself.

“You will forgive him,” she’d apologized. “He’s served my husband’s family since he was a lad, as did his father before him, and he considers it a calling. He is overly protective, more so now I am with child, but he does mean well, and is harmless.”

I was not so sure. MacDougall, for his life of service, had the hardened look of one who knew how to do violence.

I preferred to meet him on my feet. I stood, but taking up the gauntlet he’d cast down I said, “I’m here by invitation. As you know. You’ve read my letter.”

“Aye. Ye must have telt a sad tale for the master tae have written ye those lines, for him tae offer ye his outstretched hand. He is a giving man, the master. He’d turn out his pockets for ye, let ye use his name and his connections tae advance yerself, and ask for naething. But I’m sure that’s not why ye came back.”

He said that last sarcastically, and while I felt my blood heat from the insult, I held back my temper.

I owed this man no explanation. Someone like MacDougall, who had never strayed from Scotland’s shores, could never know what drove a man like me. He’d never feel the pull that made a soldier like myself, after the lonely years of hiring my sword to foreign princes under foreign skies, turn homeward once again to seek a face I recognized, a hearth that I could call my own, a wife to build a future with. He’d never understand.