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seemed distant, four long days since.
    She closed her eyes and tried to conjure it: the bed with its crimson and gold hangings, the fresh-ironed linens that smelt sweetly scorched against her face, the smiling maid who brought the jug of water and the basin, and the unexpected kindness of her host, the Duke of Hamilton. She’d heard of him, of course. There were few people in these times who didn’t have a firm opinion of the great James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, who’d all but led the Parliament in Edinburgh and had been long considered one of Scotland’s fiercest patriots.
    His sympathies towards the exiled Stewart king in France were widely whispered, if not openly expressed. He’d been arrested in his youth, so she’d been told, for his connection to a Jacobite conspiracy, and held prisoner in the Tower of London, a fault which could do nothing but endear him to his fellow Scots, who had no love for England or its laws – and even less since this past winter’s Act of Union, which in one swift, bloodless strike had stripped the Scottish people of what shreds of independence they had clutched as their inheritance from Wallace and the Bruce. There was to be no government in Scotland now; no parliament in Edinburgh. Its members would disperse to their estates, some made the richer by the lands they had been granted in return for their approval of the Union, others bitter and rebellious, talking openly of taking arms.
    Alliances were forming where they never had before. She’d heard the rumours that her own kin from the Western Shires, all staunchly Presbyterian and reared to loathe the Jacobites, were seeking now to join them in conspiring to restore the Catholic king James Stewart to the throne of Scotland. Better a Catholic Scot to rule them, so they reasoned, than Queen Anne of England or, worse still, the German prince the queen had named as her successor.
    She had wondered, when she’d met the Duke of Hamilton, just where he’d stood upon the matter. Surely there could be no restoration of the Stewarts without his knowledge of it – he was far too well-connected, too powerful in his own right. There were voices still, she knew, that called him Jacobite, and yet he had an English wife, and English lands in Lancashire, and seemed to make himself at home as well at Queen Anne’s court as here in Scotland. It was difficult to judge which side he’d choose if it should come to war.
    He hadn’t talked of politics while he had been her host, but then she hadn’t thought he would. She had been thrust upon him suddenly, and, for her part, unwillingly, when the kinsman who had ridden with her from the west, as chaperone and guide, had fallen ill upon their entry into Edinburgh. Her kinsman claimed some slim acquaintanceship with the duke, having once served the dowager duchess his mother, and from that had gained for his young charge a bed for the night at the duke’s grand apartments at Holyroodhouse.
    She had been accepted kindly, and been fed such food as she’d forgotten in the long days of her journey – meat, and fish, and steaming vegetables, and wine in crystal goblets that reflected back the candlelight like jewels. The room she’d been shown to had been the chamber of the duke’s wife, who was visiting relations in the north of England at the time, and it had been a gloriously rich room, with its gold and crimson bedcurtains, and the Indian screen, and the paintings and tapestries, and on the one wall, a looking-glass larger than any she’d seen.
    She’d looked at herself with a sigh, having hoped her reflection would show something more than the road-weary waif who sighed back at her, bright curls dishevelled and darkened by dust, pale eyes reddened and circled by shadows of sleeplessness. Turning, she’d washed in the basin, though it had been no use. Her reflection, while cleaner, had looked no less pitiful.
    She had sought solace in sleep.
    In the morning she had breakfasted, and after that