If I were to help both my friend Turnbull and Mrs. Graeme, I’d have to be careful, conceal what I felt, and be always on guard.
I wanted to smile back at Mrs. Graeme, but I held it to myself and merely gave a nod and shifted my chair back into position. “Good. Let’s begin, then, with this list of those who knew you and your husband. What names can you add to it?”
“None,” was her answer. “At least, none who knew us as adults.”
I looked at her, curious, and she said quietly, “We met as children.”
And although she owed us no piece of that past, she began, in a soft voice, to speak of it, drawing us back with her words to the girl she had been when she’d first known James Graeme.
Chapter 2
Saturday, 14 July, 1683
He always went a step ahead.
He’d done that for as long as Lily could remember—since they’d both been set to run together through the fields and woods and rivers of Inchbrakie, the estate in Perthshire where she had been born, in the same cottage where her mother had been raised, within a family that had always served the laird.
“A bit of play will do the lass no harm,” was how her grandmother had silenced any protest. “Let her keep her childhood.”
As though childhood were a thing that could be taken from you, Lily thought. What foolish things old people said, sometimes.
This summer she was seven and a half. When all her chores were done—the careful sweeping and the dusting and the little bits of mending that her grandmother was starting to allow her—she was free to go outdoors and look for Jamie.
He’d been here three days already, with his brothers and his mother, come to visit his grandfather, the old laird. And he’d be here for nearly two weeks more, but it was never long enough.
She found him waiting by the gate, as he had promised. He’d been waiting long enough to craft a pair of makeshift swords for them from twigs bound tightly into shape with strips of bark, their handles wrapped with rushes.
They were almost the same age and the same height but he was sturdier, his fair hair as unruly as himself, his cheerful grin a welcome. “Come on, then,” he said, “they promised they’d not start without us.”
Lily didn’t need to ask who “they” were. He’d already started off across the long grass of the field, toward the neighboring estate of Abercairney.
He had cousins there. Their mother was the sister of his father, so the old Laird of Inchbrakie was the grandfather to all of them.
Last winter, with the Abercairney boys away at school in Perth, the two girls—Anna and Emelia—had set up a play school of their own, with Lily as their pupil.
They’d used the room their tutor used for teaching them. They’d taught her how to read, and write, and once Emelia had set her to copy out a chart of all the family of the house of Abercairney.
It had been the family name that had tripped Lily up, at first. She’d copied down the letters carefully: M-o-r-a-y. And she’d frowned. “But that’s not how it’s said at all,” she’d pointed out. “It’s ‘Murray.’”
“Aye,” Emelia had agreed, “but it’s the way we’ve always spelled it. We had ancestors who fought alongside William Wallace and who walked with kings and they all spelled it that way, too.”
Visual evidence of their ancestral ties to royalty was everywhere within the house. One afternoon with wintry shadows slanting through the windows of the corridors the elder of the two girls, Anna, who was then fourteen and fond of tales of kings and queens and knights and noble romance, led a history lesson solely from the portraits on the walls.
There were dashing men and women of a different time, with eyes that seemed to follow Lily as she walked, but all their names and exploits blended into one dull monologue, until Anna stopped at a portrait of a handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes and a serious face turned toward them, half over his shoulder, as though to say, “Come, follow me!”
“This,” said Anna, “is who your friend Jamie is named for. An earlier James.”
Lily read the nameplate on the frame: James Graham, Marquis of Montrose.
Even the last names were the same, she thought, though Jamie spelled his “Graeme.”
Lily’s eyes widened. “Is this Montrose the hero?”
Emelia said, “Aye, he’s the one John always wants to be when we play Covenanters and Montrose.”
“One of the bravest men who ever lived,” said Anna, “and our grandfather at Inchbrakie was his most trusted friend.”