A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,119

in the common room. “I can’t decide if it’s one person’s fiction—a fantasy in the midst of a horrid event—or if someone, or multiple someones, actually saw something they thought was a flaming sword. In the absence of a firsthand source, I have to think it’s fiction.”

“Either way, just seeing a flaming sword isn’t much of a story, is it?”

She exhaled. “Not really. While I might use a superlative to tell a story, I try not to embellish what I’ve actually heard.”

“So you won’t position the sword as the turning point in the battle?” he asked wryly.

She smiled. “Not unless someone tells me that. I always write down my sources and whether they were firsthand.”

“Do you get many of those?”

She shook her head. “Not until lately as I’ve begun traveling to collect stories.” She’d accompanied Aunt Leah on trips to visit family and friends over the past year. “It’s much different from writing down a legend or a myth that’s been retold countlessly across time and space.”

“I can imagine.” He looked at her with a light in his eye. Was that admiration? “How wonderful to spend time talking with people and recording the history of our land through their eyes as they are living it.”

Elspeth hadn’t thought about it in that way, but she supposed that was what she was doing. “I find it fascinating, but I wasn’t sure anyone else would.”

He glanced toward the parchment on the table. “Miss Marshall, I wonder if you might allow me to read one of your stories.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t expected that. No one asked to read her stories except her father and her aunt. Children and even some adults asked her to tell them, but no one asked to read them.

“Nearly all of them are at home in Dunkeld. I do have one that I finished in Inverness. It was told to me by a man who lives near my cousin. Her husband was at Culloden. He didn’t fight. He was there to help care for anyone who was wounded.”

“Is he a physician like your father?” Tavish—since he’d asked her to call him that, she would—knew from their first meeting that her father was a doctor and that her mother had died. At the time, it had been only six years since her mother had been gone. Elspeth’s grief had lessened, but the sense of loss, especially at this time of year, was still keen. She, on the other hand, knew very little about him. She realized in retrospect that she’d done much more sharing during their time together in Dunkeld. Probably because he’d been hiding who he really was.

Elspeth returned her focus to their conversation and replied to his question. “No, he isn’t, but he’d like to be. I think my father is going to help him get to the University of Edinburgh to study.” She shuffled through the parchment and found the few pieces that held the story she’d recorded.

“Is that it?” Tavish asked, coming toward her from the hearth.

She held the papers in one hand up to her chest. “Yes. However, you’ll have to trade me for it.”

He stopped and arched a brow. “What do you want?”

“Information. You know I collect that, and I am especially interested in people I know—or those who have misrepresented themselves.” She hardened her gaze at him for a moment. “I told you a great many things about myself when we met, while you revealed next to nothing, not even your true name.”

“I’ve told you my name,” he said slowly.

She shook her head. “Not good enough. I want more. I require more if you want to read my story.” She lifted her shoulder and gave him a saucy look before setting the papers back on the table—facedown—and sitting in one of the pair of chairs.

“You drive a steep bargain, Miss Marshall.”

“Is it so hard to reveal something about yourself?” She looked up at him expectantly.

Exhaling, he sat opposite her. “When you are going about clandestine activities such as supporting Jacobites, saving them, or hiding them, yes.”

“Why do you do that?”

“That is where things become difficult.” A fleeting smile dashed across his mouth, then his eyes narrowed as he frowned at the table. “My father was not a Jacobite. My mother’s family was. She angered them when she married my father.”

“The cousins are your mother’s family?”

He nodded. “After my father died—that was fifteen years ago—I finally got to meet my mother’s family. Without any siblings, I was rather thrilled to meet my cousins. We became close.