“So confident of your abilities? Ye rarely bested him in the past.”
Tavish stared into the fire. “Seven years of war change a man. I assure you, Callum wouldn’t stand a chance.”
He said the words quietly, but given how Mariah flinched, she caught the steel behind them.
“But ye dodged my question,” Tavish continued. “What of your own future?”
“Mine? Hah!” Mariah set down her cup and stared into the low flames, expression bleak. “I merely hope that Callum has a nursery fullof children who need a loving aunt to tend to them. That is the best my life can bring.”
“Perhaps my new adventure will be fairy-kissed, and I will earn enough selling whisky that I can provide ye with a future of comfort.”
His sister shot him a side-eye, rife with her own disbelief.
“The same good fortune that, seven years ago, saw a distant ‘uncle’ purchase you a regimental commission at no small cost? An uncle with whom we have never spoken, before or since?”
Tavish acknowledged the hit with a lift of his chin. Yet one more secret he kept from his family.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” he quoted, setting down his teacup with a faint clink. “Sometimes miracles happen when they are most needed.”
“I stopped believing in miracles years ago,” Mariah snorted. “Someday ye will tell me the truth of how your regimental commission came to be.”
“Someday,” he agreed. He owed his sister as much. “But not tonight.”
4
Eight Years Earlier
August 12, 1809
Pettercairn, Scotland
Today was his seventeenth birthday.
Tavish kicked at the stones lining the base of Cairnfell Castle.
Another year without his mother.
And this year, his father, sister, and older brother were absent as well. Lord Northcairn had taken Callum and Mariah to London to launch Mariah into society with the help of their aunt.
In short, no adults were present to celebrate his birthday.
Had his mother still been alive, she would have planned something for him. Even if she had needed to be in London, she would have anticipated his birthday.
Instead today, like most other days, saw Tavish forgotten.
Cook had taken pity on him and baked his favorite dessert—a large clootie dumpling that she had first formed into a ball and boiled in a cheesecloth sack before leaving it to dry by the fire.
Tavish had eaten his fill and then stolen another large wedge and wrapped it in a bit of muslin. Slipping out the back gate of Castle Balfour, he had stopped by the kirkyard to blow a kiss to his mamma and leave a discreet note partially tucked into a crevice of the opulent monument of the former Duke and Duchess of Grayburn.
Then, he made his way up Cairnfell to wait.
Tavish often came here, resting in the quiet of the ruins. The place where, centuries past, the Balfours and the Kinseys had been a single, united family.
He hadn’t spoken a word to Lady Isla Kinsey since their birthdays last August. Granted, he had been at school for most of the year. But he had finished his studies in June, and he didn’t intend to continue on to university. He hadn’t the temperament for law or the church.
What he wanted, at the moment, was to see Lady Isla.
Over the past year, she had gone from a person he scarcely noticed to the lass he saw everywhere. He watched her stroll down High Street in Pettercairn with her governess, the bespectacled Miss Farnsworth, stopping at the haberdashers and the milliners. Her bonneted head was directly in his line of view during church services on a Sunday. He had caught snatches of her in Grayburn’s carriage, swathed in black, mourning the death of her father just four months past.
