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can present a bill of griev—”
    “You know nothing about it,” he snapped. “Go tend to your woman’s work.”
    “But I do know,” she said calmly. “What your tutors did not teach me along with reading and writing, you taught me yourself, Hugh. You explained about wardens’ meetings, and less than a fortnight ago you were complaining because Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch had refused to agree to the site Lord Scrope suggested for the next one. You blamed Buccleuch for delaying it, but then you and Scrope refused to accept the site he suggested, or was it the date? I do not recall precisely, but Truce Days originally were supposed to occur once a month, were they not? Mayhap the reason they now occur only a few times a year is because you men can never agree when or where to hold one.”
    “Don’t you have household duties to attend?”
    “Aye, I do, but I want to understand this because I am a Graham, sir, just as you are. When one Graham breaks the law, men call us all lawbreakers.”
    Surging to his feet so hastily that he overturned his chair, he leaned across the table and roared, “Hold your tongue, woman! You speak of affairs that do not concern you.”
    “But they do,” she insisted. “We must never forget that the Scottish Grahams are a broken clan, Hugh. It is they and men like them who have kept the Debatable Land a haven for lawlessness. Though we strive constantly to separate ourselves from those Grahams, ’tis only by the greatest good fortune that Thomas Scrope likes you well enough to have named you his deputy.”
    “’Tis men’s business to deal with reivers,” he snapped, ignoring, as was his custom, a point that he did not wish to debate. “It is your business to tend the kitchen, or your needlework or tatting, or whatever the devil it is that you women find to eat up your time. You ought to be married by now, Janet, but will any man have you? No, because you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head. You dare to look every man in the eye as if you too were a man. What you need, lass, is a good beating, and if you do not take yourself off at once, that is what you will get.”
    He meant it, and she knew that she dared not press him further. Bobbing a curtsy, she said, “I will go, sir, for I had no wish to infuriate you, but I do think it is unfair that you men make all the rules and simply expect us women to obey them.”
    “Well, at least you know how it should be,” he muttered. “You might put that knowledge to use, lass, and behave as a well-brought-up young woman should. Now, go,” he said, adding, “I doubt that my prisoner would thank you for your interest. Doubtless he feels sorry enough for himself by now without your pity.”
    Although the prisoner was not one who wasted time in self-pity, when the door at the top of the stone steps had slammed shut, the blackness enveloping him had seemed absolute, even terrifying. He had been unable to see anything, and his other senses seemed to have shut down along with his sight. He knew he was locked in an underground cell behind a stout, ironbarred door, with a crude stone bench at the back. The state of its stone floor told him his host had imprisoned others there before him and was not a man anyone would praise for his housekeeping. That he had been right to expect a lack of comfort gave him no satisfaction, however, and when the blackness enveloped him, the shock of its totality was petrifying.
    Time seemed to have stopped, and in that moment, that unnaturally lengthening and expanding, timeless moment, his imagination had conjured up a swirling, bottomless pit that surrounded him. He felt as if he stood on a pinnacle of stone no bigger around than his own two feet. He had always thought them huge, but suddenly, in that pitch-blackness, they seemed unnaturally small and growing smaller by the minute. He felt dizzy and terrified that he might fall, a terror not mitigated in the least by his vague awareness that it was wholly