“It was quick-like,” he said. “Rory and Bruce Gordon were accused of throwing in with the Jacobites, and the crown come looking for them—English soldiers all, forty of them if there was a one. But do you know, they slipped out under a heavy mist, bound for France.”

“This doesna surprise me. I’ve never put much store by Gordon,” Arran said.

“But that wasna the whole of it, laird,” Jock said. “Gordon left behind a few things, and one of them was a letter from Tom Dunn, aye? In the letter, he insinuates that he and his partner will share the wealth of Balhaire when you are hanged for treason.”

Arran swallowed. “As we suspected,” he muttered darkly.

“But did you suspect his partner was my father?” Knox asked.

“What?” Margot said. “That can’t possibly be.”

“But it is, darling,” Knox said. “Thomas Dunn was steeped in duplicitous dealings. When the authorities came for Father, he finally confessed to me what he and Bryce had known all along—Thomas Dunn was in a great deal of debt. Moreover, he’d fallen out of favor with the queen as talk of uprisings and conspiracy to remove her from the throne kept coming from the very men he’d vowed would keep James Stuart from our shores. He was desperate, and he devised a scheme to cast the blame on someone else and profit from it at the same time. He landed on Mackenzie because of his self-made wealth and his marriage to you.”

“Aye, this we’d surmised,” Arran said impatiently.

“But how was Pappa involved?” Margot asked.

“Dunn told him that Mackenzie was a traitor. Father panicked and sent you to discover if that was true before Dunn could act. But while you were gone, Margot, Dunn apparently realized that it could all go wrong and he’d be exposed. So he offered our father a deal of sorts—if Father would agree to corroborate his accusations against your husband, he would receive a substantial stake in the Mackenzie holdings once they were forfeited. Dunn assumed the holdings would come to him for exposing the treason.”

This news was a knife to her heart. She knew her father was culpable in some way, but this was so despicable it knocked the breath from her. “No,” she whispered. “How could he?”

“It was dirty business,” Knox said quietly.

“Will he hang?” Arran asked flatly, and Margot’s heart squeezed. She was as disillusioned and hurt as she’d ever been in her life, but she did not want to see her father hang.