“Observe, love. Look through his things. Listen.” He smiled and touched her cheek. “You must trust your cunning...and your allure. Believe me when I tell you that he will eventually confess all to you. He will give you whatever your heart desires, and you will be home in time for Lynetta’s nuptials.”

Margot groaned now as she recalled that conversation with Knox. She couldn’t imagine Arran confessing anything to her after all that had happened.

She looked to the chest of drawers, to where she’d seen the folded letter last night. She had no idea what she was looking for, really. Would a man of Arran’s stature and cunning outline his plans in writing, then leave them on his chest of drawers? That seemed ridiculous. So what, then, was she supposed to find?

Maybe she at least ought to have a look at that letter. Maybe it was from someone in France, someone sending word of when the French would arrive. Could it be so simple?

She wrapped part of the bed linens around her, stood up and looked around the room. In the morning light, she saw the undignified mess of his chambers, something she hadn’t noticed last night in those anxious moments after he’d escorted her up. His clothes and boots and a sword or two were scattered about the chairs and floor as if a cyclone had torn through the room. A table near the cold hearth was stacked high with papers and gloves and a pistol.

She glanced down and realized that she’d walked across his buckskins last night, thinking they were carpet. A whisky bottle was on the edge of the rug underneath the buckskins, its contents apparently having spilled out at some point. “Goodness,” she said to herself. “Whatever has become of Mrs. Abernathy?”

The room smelled of smoke and intercourse; Margot moved to a window and cranked it open, breathing in the cool morning air. She could see outside the walls here, to the hills beyond, shrouded in the morning mists. The country here had seemed bleak to her when she’d first arrived, but she had come to appreciate its beauty. Balhaire stood a half mile from the sea and what felt like millions of miles from any proper civilization.

Margot turned from the vista and padded across the carpet to the chest of drawers in search of the grimy, folded bit of vellum she’d seen last night. She lifted up the things on top of his bureau, looking for it—but it seemed the vellum was gone.

She absently fingered the gold necklace he’d put around her neck as she thought about it. He’d obviously taken the letter with him this morning. Had he taken it to keep her from reading it? Or had he simply taken it to respond to whoever had written it?