Read Chapter 3: The Silver Brooch

The chest sat at the back of her mother’s wardrobe, buried beneath moth-eaten shawls and a stack of hymnals no one had opened in years. Iona had told herself she was only looking for a christening gown—something small and white that might remind her father of softer days, days when the world wasn’t bleeding out through a gunshot wound in his shoulder.

She found no gown. What she found instead made her stop breathing.

The false bottom gave way with a soft click, almost as if it had been waiting for her. Inside lay a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, tied with a length of faded green ribbon. Iona’s hands trembled as she worked the knot. The cloth parted to reveal a brooch—silver, heavy, exquisitely worked. A stag’s head, antlers arched proud, set against a thistle motif. She knew that crest. Every child in the glen knew that crest.

Campbell.

Her thumb traced the cool metal. The stag seemed to watch her, its garnet eye catching the weak afternoon light slanting through the window. She turned the brooch over. Scratched into the backing, thin and uneven as if made by a trembling hand, were two initials. *A.C.*

Alistair Campbell, perhaps? Old Callum’s father had been Alistair. Or maybe—

No. The second set of initials, carved smaller beneath the first, made her stomach turn over. *E.M.*

Eilidh MacTavish. Her mother.

Iona sank onto the edge of her mother’s bed, the springs groaning beneath her. The room smelled of dust and dead lavender. Her mother had been gone six years now—gone to the fever that had swept through the glen and taken four others with her—and still this room felt like a shrine. Her father never entered it. Ewan never spoke of it. And Iona, who had inherited the key to the wardrobe on her sixteenth birthday, had never once thought to look beneath the floor of the chest.

Until today.

She lifted the letter from the oilcloth. The paper was yellowed, creased into thirds, the ink faded to the color of weak tea. She did not want to read it. She knew she should not read it. Some things belonged to the dead, and the dead had their reasons for hiding them.

But her father’s blood was still drying on the kitchen floorboards downstairs, and the lawyer’s voice still rang in her ears. *Sixty days, Miss MacTavish. Sixty days, or the estate goes to the consortium.*

She unfolded the letter.

*My dearest Morag,*

Iona frowned. Morag. She knew no Morag. The name felt half-familiar, like a tune she couldn't quite place. She read on.

*I have tried to write this letter a dozen times, and each time I have burned it before the ink could dry. But I cannot keep silent any longer. The harvest is in, the cattle are fat, and my father speaks of nothing but the price he can command for the lower pasture. He does not know that I lie awake at night thinking not of profit but of your face. He does not know that when he speaks of the MacTavish name with contempt, I feel the words like a blade between my ribs.*

*I know what our families are. I know what they have done to one another, and what they will do to us if they learn of what has grown between us. But I cannot help myself, Morag. When I saw you at the summer gathering—when you laughed at something your sister said and the wind caught your hair—I knew that no feud, no hatred, no old blood-grudge could ever mean as much to me as you do.*

Iona’s hand shook. The letter rustled. She glanced up at the doorway, suddenly certain that someone stood there watching. No one did. The house was quiet save for the wind rattling the window frame and the distant lowing of cattle in the near pasture. Her father slept in his sickroom. Ewan had taken the pony into the village an hour ago, muttering about lawyers and vengeance in equal measure.

She read on.

*I know this letter may reach you too late. Rumors reach Auchnacraig even here, filtered through servants and traders, and they say your father has accepted another offer for your hand. A MacTavish of Lochbuie, they say—a cousin, a safe match, a man who will keep the land in the family. I cannot bear to think of it. I cannot bear to think of you bound to someone who will never understand the fire that burns in you.*

*But if the rumors are false—if there is still time—then meet me at the old ford on the night of the new moon. I will wait until the stars begin to fade. If you do not come, I will understand. I will not trouble you again. But if you do come, I will ask you to leave this place with me, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of the answer you give.*

*Yours, whatever the cost,* *G.C.*

Iona lowered the letter. Her hands had gone cold.

G.C. Gavin Campbell, then? No—Gavin would have been a child when this was written, barely old enough to hold a sword. Her mother had died when Iona was fourteen. This letter, by the look of the paper and the style of the hand, was older. Twenty years, perhaps. Thirty.

G.C. Could be Callum. Old Callum Campbell, the current head of the house, Lachlan and Gavin’s father.

Could be Callum’s brother, Geordie, who had died in a riding accident before Iona was born.

Could be any number of Campbell men who had crossed the glen in the years before her mother married.

But Morag. The letter was addressed to Morag, not Eilidh. And yet the brooch carried her mother’s initials, and the letter had been hidden in her mother’s chest.

Unless Morag and Eilidh were the same woman. Unless her mother had used a false name—a secret name—in her letters to a man her family would have killed her for loving.

Iona turned the brooch over again. The stag’s eye glittered at her. The initials scratched into the silver felt sharp beneath her thumb.

She thought of Lachlan Campbell’s face as he raised his pistol. She thought of the flat crack of the shot, the way her father had crumpled like a felled tree. She thought of the lawyer’s dry voice enumerating debts and deadlines. And she thought of her father’s hoarse whisper in the dark last night, when he thought she was asleep.

*There are things buried in this glen that should stay buried.*

She had thought he meant the treasure stories, the old tales of gold hidden during the Jacobite risings. Now she was not so sure.

A sound from downstairs—the front door. Iona stuffed the letter and the brooch back into the oilcloth, shoved the bundle beneath the loose floorboard of the chest, and slammed the false bottom shut. She was on her feet and reaching for an old shawl from the wardrobe when Ewan’s voice called up the stairs.

“Iona! Are you in Mother’s room again?”

She schooled her face before she turned. “Looking for the christening gown,” she called back. “Thought I might cut it down for a cloth to lay over Father’s wound.”

Ewan appeared at the top of the stairs, mud on his boots and something dark and bitter in his eyes. “He’s asking for you. Says he wants to speak to you alone. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

Iona’s heart stuttered. Perhaps it was only the fever. Perhaps it was the laudanum muddling his thoughts. But a small, cold voice at the back of her mind whispered something else. He knows what I just found. He knows there’s a reason the brooch was hidden.

She brushed past her brother, her palms damp. His hand caught her wrist.

“What did he tell you last night?” Ewan’s voice was low, tight. “He sent me out of the room, same as now. What is he hiding, Iona?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and it was almost true. “Let me go. He’s waiting.”

Ewan held her gaze for a long moment, then released her. She hurried down the corridor to her father’s room, the oilcloth burning in her memory like a brand.

The door was ajar. Her father lay propped against the pillows, his face the color of candlewax, his eyes open and fixed on the door as if he had been watching it for some time. When he saw her, something flickered in his gaze. Relief. Fear. A warning.

“Shut the door,” he rasped. “Lock it.”

She did as he asked. Then she crossed to the bed and knelt beside him, taking his unbandaged hand. His fingers were cold.

“What did you want to tell me?” she asked.

Alistair MacTavish stared at her for a long moment. His mouth worked, as if he was trying to force the words past some obstruction. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.

“Eilidh was not my first wife.”

Iona’s blood turned to ice.

“There was another,” he said. “Before her. A woman I loved when I was young. Before the feud swallowed everything.”

“What was her name?” Iona heard herself ask, though she already knew.

Her father closed his eyes. The word came out like a confession torn from his chest.

“Morag.”