Prologue
Lochinver, Scotland
January 1818
His mother was going to die.
Lachlan Ramsey stood beside her bed, staring down at her wasted face, and he knew this, as surely as he knew the sun would rise this morning, and again the morning after that.
She might not die today, or even tomorrow, but one day soon the sun would rise, and she wouldn’t be here to see it.
Elizabeth Ramsey plucked at her bedclothes with pale, skeletal fingers. “What of Isobel Campbell? Surelyshehasn’t forsaken—”
“She has.” Lachlan, unable to bear the pathetic hope on her face, cut in before she could finish speaking. “Isobel, and Ewan as well.”
Isobel Campbell, his brother Ciaran’s betrothed, and her brother Ewan, Lachlan’s oldest friend. He hardly had a memory that didn’t include Ewan Campbell. Tearing across the moors on their ponies as boys, brawling with the Fitzwilliam brothers as restless youths, and later, chasing redheaded Scottish lasses as randy young men—Ewan had been by his side for every bloody nose, every schoolboy infatuation. Less than a month ago, Lachlan wouldn’t have believed Ewan could ever turn his back on him.
But he had. They all had.
“Isobel, and Ewan, too.” Elizabeth closed her eyes for a long, quiet moment, and when she opened them again, they were bright with fevered determination. “It’s over, Lachlan. There’s nothing left for you here. Take Ciaran and Isla and leave this place, and once you’ve gone, never look back again.”
“They could still change their minds.”
“They won’t. You know the people here—how stubborn they are, and how proud. They won’t change their minds.”
“We won’t leave you—”
“There will be nothing left of me to leave. I’m dying, Lachlan. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
He wanted to deny it—to rail at her—to storm through this castle’s every room. He wanted to leave nothing but wreckage in his wake—anything to vent the impotent fury clawing at him, its talons ripping deep into his flesh.
But rage would do him no good. His mother was right. Elizabeth Ramsey had never been one to cheat the truth, no matter how painful it was. She would die, and they would leave her behind, buried in the cold ground, her grave the only evidence the Ramseys had ever been here at all.
“Where will we go?” He didn’t say,it doesn’t matter where, though it was true.
Elizabeth rolled her head on the pillow, and gestured weakly toward the small table beside her bed. “There, in the drawer. A key. Fetch it for me.”
Lachlan fumbled through the drawer until his large fingers closed around a tiny silver key. “This?”
He held it up, and his mother nodded. “In my dressing closet, buried under a pile of quilts, there’s a wooden box. Bring it to me.”
Lachlan did as he was bid. The muted thud of his boots and the rattle of her labored breaths were the only sounds as he crossed the room and entered her dressing closet. He knelt down and shoved the blankets aside, but when he found the box, he paused, sitting back on his heels.
It was a plain wooden box, unremarkable in every way, and yet the moment he laid eyes on it, a shadow seemed to pass over the room. Lachlan couldn’t have explained why, but everything inside him recoiled at the thought of opening that box.
“Lachlan?”
He turned at the sound of his mother’s voice, then rose to his feet and hefted the box into his arms. No use hesitating now. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than what had already passed.
Much later, after his mother had revealed her secrets, and he, Ciaran and Isla were on the road to England, he’d think about this moment, and curse himself for a fool.
Things could always be worse.
“Put it here, on the bed.” His mother was struggling to sit up, and Lachlan helped settle her against the pillows behind her. He tried not to notice how emaciated she was, but as he lifted her, a memory of a dead bird he’d found as a small child drifted through his mind. The dogs had killed it, and underneath the scattered feathers was a pile of tiny, fragile bones—white, impossibly thin, pathetically breakable.
His mother turned the key in the lock. Lachlan lifted the heavy lid and peered inside.
Papers—thin stacks lay neatly on top of each other. Most were letters, their seals broken. It looked as if a crest had been pressed into the dark red wax, but it had cracked and hardened over the years, and he couldn’t make it out.
