He took the boy by the shoulders and said softly, “You are your mother’s keeper, Rufus. You are her shield and buckler now. And it is for you now to avenge our honor.”

He turned aside to the table and took up the parchment, rolling it carefully. He held it out to the boy. “Rufus, my son, I lay upon you now the most solemn trust: that you will be avenged upon the house of Granville, and you will bear our name with pride even in the face of those who call it dishonored. You will by your deeds make the house of Rothbury a watchword for truth, justice, and honor even though you are condemned to live outside the law, to create your own world, your own truth, your own honor.”

Rufus swallowed as he took the rolled parchment. His throat seemed to have closed under the dreadful weight of his father’s words. He was eight years old, but his shoulders stiffened as if all the better to bear the great burden of this responsibility his father had laid upon him.

“Do you swear so to do?”

“I swear.” Rufus found the words, though they sounded strange, as if coming from a great distance.

“Then go.” His father laid a hand on the boy’s head in a moment’s benediction, then he kissed his wife and urged her toward the priest’s hole. Rufus looked back for an instant, his hair ablaze in the light of the oil lamp the messenger held high; his eyes, no longer the innocent, candid eyes of an eight-year-old boy, were filled with the foreboding of loss and the dreadful knowledge of duty. Then he turned and followed his mother into the darkness.

The messenger followed them, and the stone on well-oiled hinges closed silently behind them.

William strode from the chamber. He walked down the wide sweep of stairs to the stone-flagged hallway and out into the dusk, to stand on the top step and survey his accusers. To look in the eye of the man he had once called friend… the man who had now come to dispossess him of his house, his lands, his family honor.

For a moment the two men looked at each other, and the silence stretched taut as a bowstring between them. Then William Decatur spoke, his voice low, yet each bitter word thrown with the power of lead shot. “So, this is how you honor the vows of friendship, Granville.”

George, Marquis of Granville, urged his horse forward, away from the line of cavalry. He raised one gloved hand as if in protest, “William, I come not in enmity, but in-”

“Don’t insult me, Granville!” The furious words cut through the other man’s speech. “I know you for what you are, and you will pay, you and your heirs. I swear it on the blood of Christ.” His hand moved from his side, lifted, revealing the dull silver barrel of a flintlock pistol.

Rooks wheeled and shrieked over the gables as the hideous shock of the explosion faded into the stunned silence. William Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, lay at the foot of the steps to his house; blood, a thick, dark puddle, spread beneath his head. His eyes, sightless now, stared upward at the circling rooks, the scudding clouds, the first faint prick of the evening star.

A soldier stepped forward, carrying a pitch torch. The flame flared, blue and orange under a gust of wind. He stepped over the fallen man and hurled his torch into the open doorway.

George Granville sat his horse, immobile. He had come here to oversee the king’s justice. He had come to mitigate that justice, to work with his old friend to avoid the worst. But his intentions were so much chaff in the wind now.

The earl of Rothbury lay dead at the foot of his burning house, and his heir, a lad of eight summers, was cast out into the world beyond the laws of man with a burden of vengeance that sat ill on the shoulders of a child, but that, George Granville knew, the lad would grow into. Rufus Decatur was his father’s son.

Chapter 1

Edinburgh, Scotland, December, 1643


Acrid smoke billowed around the windowless room from the peat fire smoldering sullenly in the hearth. The old crone stirring a pot over the fire coughed intermittently, the harsh racking the only sound. Outside, the snow lay thick on a dead white world, heavy flakes drifting steadily from the iron gray sky.

A bundle of rags, huddled beneath a moth-eaten blanket, groaned, shifted with a rustle of the straw beneath the stick-like frame. “Brandy, woman!”

The crone glanced over her shoulder at the hump in the corner, then she spat into the fire. The spittle sizzled on the peat. “Girl’s gone fer it. Altho‘ what she’s usin’ to pay fer it, the good Lord knows.”

The bundle groaned again. A wasted arm pushed feebly at the blanket, and Jack Worth struggled onto his elbow. He peered through slitted eyes into the smoke-shrouded room. Nothing had improved since he’d last looked, and he sank back into the straw again. The earth floor was hard and cold beneath the thin and foul-smelling straw, pressing painfully into his emaciated body.

Jack wanted to die, but the flicker of life was persistent. And if he couldn’t die, he wanted brandy. Portia had gone for brandy. His enfeebled brain could hold that thought. But where in the name of Lucifer was she? He couldn’t remember what time she’d gone out into the storm. The blizzard obliterated all signs of time passing, and it could as well be midnight as dawn.

His pain-racked limbs were on fire, his eyes burned in their sockets, every inch of his skin ached, and the dreadful craving consumed him so that he cried out, a sound so feeble that the crone didn’t even turn from the fire.

The door opened. Frigid air blasted the fug, and the smoke swirled like dervishes. The girl who kicked the door shut behind her was wire thin yet exuded a nervous energy that somehow enlivened the reeking squalor of the hovel.

“Brandy, Jack.” She came to the mattress and knelt, drawing a small leather flask from inside her threadbare cloak. Her nose wrinkled at the sour stench of old brandy and decaying flesh exuding from the man and his sickbed, but she pushed an arm beneath his scrawny neck and lifted him, pulling off the stopper of the flagon with her teeth. Her father was snaking so hard she could barely manage to hold the flask to his lips. His teeth rattled, his lifeless eyes stared up at her from his gaunt face, where the bones of his skull were clearly defined.

He managed to swallow a mouthful of the fiery spirit, and as it slid down his gullet his aches diminished a little, the shivers died, and he was able to hold the flask in one clawlike hand and keep it to his lips himself until the last drop was gone.

“Goddamn it, but it’s never enough!” he cursed. “Why d’ye not bring enough, girl!”

Portia sat back on her heels, regarding her father with a mixture of distaste and pity. “It’s all I could afford. It’s been a long time, in case you’ve forgotten, since you contributed to the family coffers.”

“Insolence!” he growled, but his eyes closed and he became so still that for a moment Portia thought that finally death would bring him peace, but after a minute his eyes flickered open. Saliva flecked his lips amid his thick uncombed gray beard; sweat stood out against the greenish waxen pallor of his forehead and trickled down his sunken cheeks.

Portia wiped his face with the corner of her cloak. Her stomach was so empty it was cleaving to her backbone, and the familiar nausea of hunger made her dizzy. She stood up and went over to the noisome fire. “Is that porridge?”

“Aye. What else’d it be?”

“What else indeed,” she said, squatting on the floor beside the cauldron. She had learned early the lesson that beggars could not be choosers, and ladled the watery gruel into a wooden bowl with as much enthusiasm as if it was the finest delicacy from the king’s table.

But it was a thin ungrateful pap and left her hunger barely appeased. Images of bread and cheese danced tantalizingly before her internal vision, making her juices run, but what little she could earn in the taproom of the Rising Sun, drawing ale, answering ribaldry with its kind, and turning a blind eye to the groping hands on her body so long as they pushed a coin into her meager bosom, went for brandy to still her father’s all-consuming addiction. The addiction that was killing him by inches.

“Port… Portia!” He gasped out her name and she came quickly over to him. “In my box… a letter… find it… quickly.” Every word was wrenched from him as if with red-hot pincers.

She went to the small leather box, the only possession they had apart from the rags on their backs. She brought it over, opening it without much curiosity. She knew the contents by heart. Anything of worth had been sold off long ago to pay for brandy.

“At the back… behind the silk.”

She slipped her fingers behind the shabby lining, encountering the crackling crispness of parchment. She pulled it out, handing it to her father.

“When I’m gone, you’re to s… se…” A violent coughing fit interrupted him, and when it subsided he lay back too exhausted to continue. But after a minute, as Portia watched his agonizing efforts, he began again. “Send it to Lammermuir, to Castle Granville. Read the direction.”

Portia turned the sealed parchment over in her hand. “What is it? What does it say?”

“Read the direction!”

“Castle Granville, Lammermuir, Yorkshire.”

“Send it by the mail. When I’m gone.” His voice faded, but his hand reached for her and she gave him her own. “It’s all I can do for you now, Portia,” he said, his fingers squeezing hers with a strength she hadn’t known he still possessed; then, as if defeated by the effort, his hand opened and fell from hers.