“There was a time when he was,” Lord Strathrannoch explained, “but that time is long since passed. A few years ago, he became a great pet of some of the Scottish peers—always entertaining, always the merry charming flirt.”
Lydia felt ill. “It’s impossible. He disparaged them in his letters. He was never more scathing than when he spoke of the Duchess of Sutherland—”
“One of his fastest friends,” Strathrannoch said.
Her mind reeled, and she licked her lips. “I had expected that a Scottish earl would be horrified by my more radical beliefs—the abolition of the aristocracy, for one. But he was never horrified. In every possible way we seemed to be in agreement. Even my most outrageous ideas, he… he…”
She looked up at Strathrannoch. TherealStrathrannoch, plainspoken and disheveled and casually exploding everything she’d thought she’d known.
“Your brother lied,” she said. “Didn’t he? He lied about that too. He agreed with whatever it was that I said, not because he felt the same but because—because he wanted something from me. If not my money, then the information I provided him in all those letters.”
It had been a fantasy, all of it, from start to finish. Her friendship with Strathrannoch. Her carefully embroidered dreams.
She could never be the woman from the pamphlets. Her family—her loving, absurd, wildly protective family—had been right to shield and cosset her.
She had been wrong to believe that she could stand on her own.
Strathrannoch looked furious, his big hands opening and closing on his teacup. “I’m sorry, lass.”
Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, and she absolutelyrefusedto let them fall. “Don’t be.”
“Not just because of Davis’s actions,” he said. “But because I must ask something of you, and I fear that doing so makes me not so very different from my brother.”
She looked up at him, his tight jaw, his grim mouth. “What do you mean?”
“I need you to help me find him.”
At this pronouncement, there was a small but decided clamor.
Mr. Trefor looked outraged. “You cannot mean to ask this poor girl, after all she’s been through—”
Mr. Palmer, meanwhile, appeared delighted. “What an excellent idea! Strathrannoch, I do not give you enough credit for cleverness.”
“I—” Lydia said. “I—I’m not certain—”
Strathrannoch quieted them all with a slight lift of his deep voice. “I would not ask if it were not urgent.” He hesitated, then seemed to steel himself to go on. “A month ago, Davis came to stay with us at Strathrannoch Castle. He had not spent so much time here in years. I thought perhaps things had changed between us. He seemed so interested in the estate, in the tenants and mywork.” He laughed, and it was a brief, bitter sound that clutched at Lydia’s insides. “He was, in a way. He stole something from me. A prototype I had built—an object of my own design.”
“Your design?” She did not know what he meant. Was the man not an earl? What sort of designing did he do? She glanced again at the boiled-leather smock he wore. Was he apainter?
“A rifle scope,” Strathrannoch said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Imagine a telescope,” Mr. Palmer put in, “mounted to the top of a rifle. Imagine how far and how clearly you could see through it—and how precisely you could aim your weapon in that case.”
“I don’t understand. You design weaponry? Are you an especially avid hunter?”
Strathrannoch made a sort of growling noise. “For God’s sake, no. I’m a farmer. I make plows. Reaping machines. Sometimes I mess about with engines. I’d thought”—he rubbed at the back of his neck—“I’d thought to make the rifle shot more accurate, if I could. Sometimes shots go wild and the tenants are injured, you see.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “You are an inventor?”
He looked as uncomfortable as Lydia herself. His throat had gone pink, and his hands—she could see now that they were flecked with small burn scars—rotated his teacup rather madly. “I make things, that’s all. For the tenants and the villagers. Little things to ease their way.”
“And you invented this—this rifle telescope? And your brotherstoleit?”
“Aye. He asked plenty of questions. How the device worked. How far away you could be from your target and aim true.” She could see the muscles of his jaw work. “A hundred leagues. Do youknowthe kind of damage that could be done with a weaponlike that? When the Duchess of Sutherland cleared her lands of the farmers who’d been there for generations, she had them driven out, their homes burned. But not all of them wanted to leave. Had her men a weapon of this kind, there could have been a massacre.”
“You think he means to use this weapon of yours—and the information I gave him—to do violence?”
