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did not say to which family she belonged. Perhaps she was ashamed to have me know, but she seemed to know a fair bit about my own people.
    â€œAnd, pray, what is so special about the headstones at Strachur?” I asked her, annoyed by her complacence and by the thought that our Pitfour kirk should be outshone by some distant village in Argyll.
    If she heard petulance in my tone, she did not heed it. “Some of the stanes there ha’ faces upon them.”
    â€œFaces?”
    â€œAye. Graven atop the stane will be a face with wings on ither side of it.”
    â€œAngels, do you mean?”
    â€œNot angels at all. ’Tis the brideag on those stanes.”
    I did not understand the word and shook my head impatiently.
    She raised her eyebrows and looked at me as if to question my ignorance. “Do you not know it then? And you a Ferguson?”
    â€œI am from Edinburgh. We set no store by rustic superstitions. Anyway, I do not speak the Gaelic, which I presume that word to be.” In my tone I gave her to know how foolish and unfashionable I thought both her language and her quaint notions.
    â€œIt is an old word,” she said. “There are other names for it.”
    â€œWell,” I said. “We have fine kirkyards in Edinburgh, too. Have you ever seen the monuments at Greyfriars?”
    She shook her head. “I have not. But there will be Fergusons there, too, perhaps,” she said.
    â€œYes, I expect I shall be buried there one day,” I said, trying to make a jest of it.
    She turned and looked at me with great green eyes, and suddenly I was put in mind of an owl’s gaze. “No, ye will not.”
    The shrill scream of a small creature rent the air, and I flinched, startled by the sound, but the girl reacted not at all to the sounds of the death agony. She could not have been calmer if she had been expecting it. I supposed that the creeping stoat I had seen a while before had found its prey—a young rabbit, judging by the sound of it.
    â€œA merciful death,” she murmured. “Scarcely any pain. Soon over.”
    â€œI wouldn’t want it,” I said.
    She turned her green owl eyes on me then. “Would you not?” she said, as if she really wanted to know.
    â€œSignifying nothing,” I said. “A death which means something would be worth the price of pain, I think. Of course, I’m meant to be a soldier.”
    She nodded. “And would you die to save an empire, then?” she asked me.
    I thought she might be making sport of me, but she regarded me with a grave expression as if she really wanted to know.
    â€œTo save an empire would be worth my life,” I allowed grandly. Easy enough to speak of such things in peaceful churchyards when you are yet a schoolboy, I suppose, but I meant it.
    â€œSo you would rather have a protracted death in service of a cause than a meaningless, but merciful, release?”
    â€œI am a Ferguson of Pitfour,” I said. “I have my honor to consider. I don’t suppose you could understand such a thing.”
    Her eyes widened for an instant, and I thought she might reproach me for my hasty words, but then she simply shrugged, and said, “It shall be as you wish then, Ferguson of Pitfour.”
    Before I could ask her what on earth she meant by that, it began to rain in earnest, and Betty appeared at the church door, shouting for me to make a dash for shelter before I caught my death in the downpour. I pulled my coat up to cover my head, and hied myself off toward the sanctuary. When I turned to look for the owl-eyed girl in the gray cloak, she had gone.

CHAPTER THREE
    August 1780
    When Isaac Shelby came to find me in August of 1780, it put me in mind of the time four years past, at Fort Watauga, when I had allowed four young girls, armed only with wooden buckets, to venture outside the wooden walls. Shelby’s news made me recall the one thing I had learned from the incident of