Mrs Grant said, ‘We’re nae spikkin aboot ye. ’Tis Billy Wick I meant.’

He simply gave a nod and said, ‘Oh, aye,’ which meant he either was acknowledging her comment or agreeing with it. Guessing Rory’s mind was never easy. He took an oatcake from a nearby plate and ate it, and when Mrs Grant prepared to scold him for it, he answered it was likely all the food he’d have that afternoon. ‘I’m away within the hour with her ladyship. We ride to Dunottar.’

Another clifftop castle to the south of Aberdeen—the home, so Kirsty told Sophia now, of the countess’s nephew by marriage, the Earl Marischal. It was not uncommon for there to be visits between Slains and Dunottar, but not within an hour’s notice. Kirsty frowned. ‘Would there be trouble, then?’

‘I dinna ken.’ Rory shrugged. ‘Her ladyship telt me to get the horses ready and prepare to ride with her, and that much I can do.’

‘And you, Kirsty,’ said Mrs Grant, ‘should nae worry aboot what the countess does, or why. Things happen in this house that none of us need question.’

Kirsty bore the reprimand in silence, but she pulled a face when Mrs Grant had turned her back.

The cook, not turning, said, ‘And if ye carry on wi that, I may forget I have a mind tae let ye have a holiday the morn.’

Kirsty stopped, amazed. ‘A holiday?’

‘A wee one, aye. I’d need ye back again by supper, but with her ladyship away to Dunottar, and Mistress Paterson the only one about, there widna be sae much tae do I couldna spare ye for the day.’

The prospect of a day to spend whatever way she wished left Kirsty without speech a moment, something none of them had seen.

But she knew what she would do with such a gift. ‘I’ll go to my sister.’

‘Ye’ll have a long walk,’ Rory said.

‘’Tis but an hour up the coast, and I’ve nae seen her since the birth of her last bairn.’ Inspired, she asked Sophia, ‘Will ye come with me? She’ll give us dinner, that I’m sure of. Even Mrs Grant’s fine broth is nae match for my sister’s kail and cakes. And she would be that glad to meet ye.’

Mrs Grant was not so sure it would be fitting for two girls to walk so far, and on their own.

‘Och, we’ll have the castle in our view the whole way,’ Kirsty argued. ‘And her ladyship is highly thought of in these parts, so none will think to harm us when they ken we come from Slains.’

‘The countess,’ Mrs Grant said, looking squarely at Sophia, ‘widna like it.’

To which Kirsty’s pert reply was, ‘Will ye tell her?’

Mrs Grant considered silently. ‘No,’ she said, and turned back to her cooking. ‘I’ll say naethin. But ye’d do well tae mind that, even here, the devil turns men’s thochts when it amuses him.’

‘Is that what ails ye, Rory?’ Kirsty smiled at the groom. His stoic features didn’t change, but his eyes warmed a trifle.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I’m long past redemption. Take the dog,’ was his advice on leaving, as he tucked a final oatcake in his jacket. ‘Devil’s thoughts or no, there’s none will lay a hand on ye with Hugo at your heels.’

Sophia thought it sound advice, and the next morning after breakfast when she started out with Kirsty, she held Hugo, the huge mastiff, by his lead. Hugo’s bed was in the stables, and by day he roamed the castle grounds with Rory, as a child might keep close by his father’s knee. He was a gentle beast, for all he barked at strangers and at any sound he took to be a threat. But when they passed the garden wall where Billy Wick was hoeing over stony earth to make a plot for planting physick herbs, the mastiff curled his lip and laid his ears back, growling low.

The gardener took no notice. Straightening his back, he leaned upon the hoe and looked them over. ‘Comin tae see me, my quines?’ His hard eyes speculated in a way Sophia found discomforting.

She knew that Kirsty felt it, too, because the younger girl lied bravely, ‘We’re away to run an errand for her ladyship.’ And without further explanation, she urged Sophia to quicken her pace and the two of them passed by and out of the castle’s great shadow. Ahead lay the broad, grassy sweep of the land curving clean to the edge of the black cliffs, the sea stretching wide to the sunwashed horizon.

Kirsty paused, in full appreciation. ‘There,’ she said. ‘The day is ours.’

And though Sophia hadn’t felt at all confined within Slains castle, nor had she been treated any way but with great kindness by the countess, she too found that she was glad, in that one moment, that the countess was away from home, that she and Kirsty might enjoy such freedom.

There were countless sights to wonder at.

They passed above a large rock at the sea’s edge that was colored with the stainings of a multitude of seabirds, flapping wings of all varieties, returning to their roosts. The rock, said Kirsty, was called locally ‘Dun Buy’, which meant the yellow rock, and was to many visitors a pleasing curiosity.

The mastiff found it curious as well, and it was plain from Hugo’s interest and the way he eyed the birds that he would happily have lingered for a closer look, but Kirsty gripped his lead more tightly and persuaded him to move along.

A little further on, they came to a great circular shaft, like a giant’s well, cut at the edge of the cliff, where the sea had eroded the walls of a mammoth cave till the cave’s roof had collapsed, leaving only a strip of stone bridging the cleft at its entrance, through which the waves sprayed with such force that the water appeared to be boiling below when Sophia dared stand at the edge to look down.