THE BONFIRE HAD BEEN PILED HIGH with the debris from a dozen gardens and enough twigs and dead boughs to outlast the Guy. The celebrants were gathered about the square, talking and laughing as if the gruesome spectacle they were about to witness was far more exciting than frightening. The match had yet to be tossed into the pyre, but two men in flowing wigs and faded satin coats awaited for the signal. Their sober faces were flushed with wine and duty. The taller leaned towards his companion and said in a low voice, “All this hair itches like the very devil!”

“Yes, well, at least your shirt fits! All this lace will end up strangling me, wait and see! I’m ready to kill whoever thought up this charade.”

“Won’t be long now.”

It was the close of Guy Fawkes Day, and tonight the stuffed effigy of a traitor was about to be paraded around the village square and then thrown into the flames.

Bonfires were a long-standing English tradition, marking the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when the real Guy Fawkes had been caught with his co-conspirators attempting to blow up Parliament and King James with it.

A macabre way of reminding schoolchildren, as they went round their villages and towns collecting pennies to buy Roman candles, what becomes of traitors.

As a rule it was a family affair, held in the back garden, the fire as fat or sparse as the family could manage, the Guy dressed in cast off clothes stuffed with straw. In too many households during four and a half years of war the celebration had dwindled to a token affair, the dearth of able bodied men and the hardships of families struggling to survive without them making the effort increasingly a burden. The village of Marling had decided to revive the custom with a public flourish.

Ian Rutledge had given his share of pennies to the local children this morning, while Hamish, in his head, disparaged the whole affair. “It’s no’ a Scottish tradition, to waste guid firewood. It’s too hard to come by.”

Remembering the barren, stone-scarred mountains where Hamish had grown up, Rutledge said, “When in Rome . . .”

“If ye came for Hogmany, now, a good fire on the hearth was hospitality after a long ride in the cold.”

Rutledge knew the Scottish holiday, the last day of the year when the children demanded gift cakes and the whisky flowed freely—and not necessarily whisky upon which any tax had been paid. He had commanded Scottish troops in the war, and they had brought their traditions as well as their traditional courage with them. He had turned a blind eye on more than one occasion, the policeman subverted by the compassion he felt for his homesick men—many little more than boys—trying to forget how short their lives were destined to be by remembering home.