his bride but not without love. Tugging at her hands, he pulled her close to him and kissed her. At first she stiffened, but as his kiss deepened, her lips parted and moved against his. Relieved, he ended the kiss and pulled away. Mairi had responded.
“I love you,” he said, his face flushed and humble. “I’ve always loved you. I can make you love me.”
Mairi pulled her hands away and looked up at the sky. “It would be a relief to know ’tis settled,” she said. “Still, I am in mourning for Father. Will you wait for my answer, David?”
His dark eyes glowed with pleasure. “If I must, I shall wait forever.”
She laughed, and once again, her eyes met his. “I don’t deserve you,” she admitted. “I promise it won’t be that long. Come. The fish will spoil.”
Feeling as if he’d weathered a crisis, David took her hand and led her back to the house.
EDINBURGH
1993
I awoke before dawn. It wasn’t my normal type of awakening, where consciousness is welcomed and immediate, where the very idea of a new day, a new beginning, bursts upon the senses like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. This time my awakening came slowly, miserably, my body reluctantly bracing itself for the memory of the previous night. It was happening all over again, the inevitable bone-weary dawns following my separation from Stephen. The feeling that if I could only hold on to that tenuous time between waking and sleeping when the mind knows that something is wrong but hasn’t yet identified what that something is, if I could only prevent my sated body from waking completely, I could hold at bay the ache of betrayal.
Of course, it never worked. I was no more capable of stopping time than the next person. In the past two years I’d learned that pain can’t be outdistanced. It must be faced head-on like all other seemingly impossible challenges. After the pain comes rage and after rage a kind of balancing as if the entire world shifts a bit and resettles to accommodate a new perspective. Only then, after pain and rage and acceptance, does the healing begin.
I was thirty-seven years old. If Ian Douglas wasn’t the man I thought he was, weeping into a hotel pillow wouldn’t help. Determined to get on with it, I showered, dressed, injected myself with insulin, and ordered breakfast. By eight o’clock I was on my way.
By American standards, the Hall of Records was old. In a city where time is measured in centuries, it is a large, modern building equipped with comfortable furniture, spacious rooms, and state-of-the-art computers. The clerk, a friendly woman seated behind a beautifully carved oak desk an American antique dealer would pay a fortune for, smiled at me.
“I’ve located the files you asked me about, Miss Murray. There are quite a few of them, I’m afraid.”
“Thank you,” I said, gathering the mountain of paperwork she’d collected. The desks were small, semiprivate cubicles with just enough space to stack books on one side. I selected a file from the top of the stack and pushed the others away.
Three hours later, I found what I was looking for. The baptismal records from a small church in Selkirk showed the baptism of a girl, Katherine Douglas, born in the year 1946 to Miss Morag Douglas and the laird of Traquair. The birth certificate from the hospital listed only the child’s birth and the mother’s name but not the father. Morag Douglas had kept the father’s identity a secret from the hospital, but she could not lie to her God. There, in black and white, was the evidence that Kate Douglas Ferguson was the daughter of James Maxwell, laird of Traquair—my grandfather. Kate was my aunt, my mother’s half-sister. She was also, it seemed, related to Ian, but how closely I didn’t know.
Rifling through the newspaper clippings, I almost missed it. If the man hadn’t looked so much like Ian, I would have skipped over it completely. The headline read, “Local Landowner Indicted.” Skimming the page, I read the grim details of the evidence leading to the arrest of Ian’s father, his subsequent suicide, and the return of his son. My eyes moved quickly over the page, discounting most of it, looking for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to why Kate and Ian had allied themselves against me. I almost gave up and moved on when a name in the last paragraph jumped out at me. I stopped, reread it,