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MacEwen, but with all hands—and all passengers, not a one lost overboard.”
    “Did she?” Mr. MacEwen asked thoughtfully.
    Now everyone was looking at Hal. He leaned back against the gate and folded his arms across his chest.
    “How very awkward, to be sure,” he said. “In that case, where did I come from?”
    “Which is the very question that I would like answered, sir.” Mrs. MacEwen’s voice was edged with disappointment. She had fallen very completely for the handsome young stranger. “For unless you came from a shipwreck, it seems very ill-mannered to be found half drowned on the beach.”
    She whipped up her horse and drove on into the yard.
    “Alas,” Hal said with a quiet laugh. “‘Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows.’”
    Prudence glanced up at him. He seemed only amused by this disastrous news. How could he be so cavalier about it? She turned away to follow Mrs. MacEwen into the house.
    And it said absolutely nothing about him that he knew Shakespeare. Who wouldn’t recognize The Tempest ?
    * * *
    “So, we have a conundrum,” Mr. MacEwen said with a considered look at his guest. “There are no other ships reported missing.”
    “‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,’” Hal quoted lightly. “If I was not lost from that French ship, then how did I end up here?”
    Mr. MacEwen glanced down at the pistol in his hand. The beauty of it moved him as it always did, and this young fellow understood that, understood his passion for perfecting the craft, for inventing the ultimate improvement. He made up his mind in that instant.
    “Never mind, lad. We’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough. And in the meantime, how would you like to work for me on a permanent basis? You seem to have a very pretty knowledge of firearms. And though I’m supposed to be a retired man, and the pistols only a hobby now, I have some experimental work in hand that might interest you. There are some ideas about for a whole new mechanism that’ll make our flintlocks as outdated as the matchlock.”
    “I cannot commit to anything, Mr. MacEwen.” Hal was suddenly serious. “I know you will allow me that under the circumstances. But I will freely help you as long as I’m here.”
    His glance followed Prudence as she walked into the house. “Miss Drake is not too happy about my presence.”
    “You would not stay for one more day if I thought you were making her truly uncomfortable,” Mr. MacEwen said. “But don’t mind her, Hal. She’s just nervous about the lad.”
    “Would you think me impertinent if I ask why they are here? It seems a little unusual. I gather that Bobby is an orphan?”
    “Aye, poor lad. Prudence is all he has left, but for an old granny. I knew Miss Drake’s father, sir. We’re old family friends. She just takes the boy for a little holiday by the sea, away from the cailleach .”
    Hal raised a brow. And in that moment Mr. MacEwen knew with certainty what he had suspected from the start. This young fellow might be lost and bewildered as to his place in the world, but when he came into his senses, he was going to discover that it was a very high place indeed. Nobody but a lord, and one who had gone through the cruel rigors of an English public school, could raise one brow in quite such an insolent way while pretending it was merely curiosity.
    But Mr. MacEwen was not to be intimidated. “Cailleach,” he repeated. “Old woman, beldam, the lad’s grandmother. Miss Drake is in her employ, sir. There’s no mystery to it.”
    “No,” Hal said innocently. “I didn’t suppose for one moment that there was. Does Miss Drake have family of her own?”
    “She has one brother at sea and another in India, a sister who teaches school in Edinburgh and one married in Wiltshire. That’s all.”
    “Then her parents are not alive?”
    But Mr. MacEwen would give nothing else away. “No, they are not,” he said.
    And he began to talk about