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We stood there in the Highland night, our voices carrying across the dark fields—unrestrained, unguarded, unmistakably alive. For a moment, the weight of expulsion, the uncertainty ahead, and the looming shadow of rebellion receded.
I looked at the two of them, and a steadier truth settled in me, quiet but unequivocal.
Whatever awaited us, we would face it together. Not as schoolboys dismissed from their studies, nor as outcasts marked by circumstance, but as brothers—bound by something far stronger than the authority that sought to divide us. No rebuke, no exile, no empire could ever sever our bond.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAMES
Tuesday, 1 May 1798
Keiss, Scotland
The Sinclair Family Home, Castle Connemara
Lá Bealtaine Celebration
Long before the ridge shows a trace of dawn, the house is already awake.
We’ve doused every fire before first light—letting the old hearths die their cleansing death, the way Bealtaine demands.
I stand in the hall with Da while the last red glow in the great hearth fades to a dull ash; the stone goes black and cold as an old bruise. Not a spark left in the kitchens, not a wisp from a chimney anywhere on Sinclair land.
Bealtaine always begins this way: no lingering flame, no borrowed heat. A clean slate.
Later, up on the rise after daybreak, they’ll kindle the need-fire—tein-eigin—with the old rites. Two oaken beams worked till they spark, no iron allowed near it, no shortcuts taken. A single flame, born the proper way. Blessed. Clean. Protective. Lucky.
By afternoon, when that fire leaps high and sure, folk will wait with whatever they’ve brought to carry it home. Iron braziers, clay crocks, lantern frames with the glass taken out. They’ll hold them out like offerings until a coal or burning sliver drops inside—something small and fierce they can cradle back through their doors.
Every hearth on Sinclair land burning from the same bright beginning.
Outside, the yard is pale with dawn. Kitchen women hurry past with baskets on their hips, skirts dark with dew at the hem. One of them shoves a sack of oats at me with a distracted “Mind ye don’t drop that, lad,” as if I were twelve again.
Men are already down by the byres, and I’m meant to be with them.
“Go down, lend a hand,” Da says, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “A laird’s son should ken his herd.”
“I ken ‘em well,” I reply. “They smell and complain and shit where they please.”
He snorts. “Aye, much like the tenants. All the more reason.”
I make a reasonable show of heading that way. I get as far as the path behind the east wall, where the ground dips and the old birch trees start. The light there’s softer, catching on the pale trunks and the first shy green of the leaves. Birds are already furious with song, as if they’ve a mind to outdo the pipers later.
Bealtaine, for most men, means cattle and wood-hauling and checking casks. For me… well, I’ve never been most men. I’ve a quiet fascination with botany—a harmless oddity I keep close to the chest, and today I’m keen to see whether a certain bloom has opened.
Primroses.
They’ve been showing since last week. Small, rare, stubborn enough to bloom where the wind never shows mercy—that’s why they catch me. That, and my gran, Isobel, always smelled of them. Swearing the scent steadied her better than any tonic.
She was the one who taught me every flower’s name, kneeling in the dirt beside me while my granda, Alasdair, muttered it was no business for a laird’s son to be poking about in what he called women’s work. I learned early to keep my fascination quiet—but the smell of primroses has settled me since I was a bairn.
I check no one is watching, then turn my back on the byres and slip into the birches.
The grass has soaked through my boots, damp soaking steadily into my hose. A blackbird bolts away ahead of me, scolding, as I follow the faint deer track up the rise. The further I walk, the quieter it gets.
And there they are.
Scattered across the slope as though someone spilled colour over the grass are clusters of soft purple petals still beaded with dew, nestled among crumpled green leaves. I crouch beside one, brushing my thumb along the edge of a bloom. They push through the remains of last year’s dead growth as though the world belongs to them.
