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the way there.”
    â€œThis is not wise, Constance.”
    â€œNo one will see me, Eliza.”
    â€œYou should have at least brought a suitable shirt. This shift is insufficient to cover your bosom. You look a fright. An heiress should not go about the countryside as you do.”
    Constance laughed. “It warms me, darling, that you take more care in my appearance than in my safety.”
    â€œImpertinent girl.”
    â€œAnd yet for all of these years you have stayed with me,” she said with a grin. “There must be hope for me yet.” Leaning forward, she bussed her companion on the cheek. Then she threw open the carriage door. Rory had brought them along the road directly to the stable block. But even at a distance the impressive mass of Castle Read dwarfed all else. A solid medieval keep of golden brown limestone topped with a dozen pointed turrets of gray slate and fronted by a low forecourt wall, it both beckoned and warned. “Walcome,” it seemed to say, “but anly if ye be allies.”
    It was a heathen place. No gardeners cut the lawn. No one touched the rose vines that had gone feral about the forecourt gate. No industrious clippers tamed the ivy that snaked up the fortress’s walls.
    She adored it. It was solid and strong and wild all at once, and she had missed it.
    The carriage continued to the forecourt where Eliza would disembark, and Constance entered the stable. Her skin was too hot, as though it had sucked all the heat within her and threw it to the surface to battle the late-winter air. But inside the stable fashioned of ancient stone, her mind quieted. At the sound of her footsteps, her horse turned its head.
    â€œGood afternoon, Elfhame.” She stroked the mare’s milky brow, then saddled and bridled her.
    A short canter brought her to the river and another thirtyminutes to the apex of the hill from which she could glimpse the hulking pinkish tower of Haiknayes Castle, present home of Gabriel Hume, the Duke of Loch Irvine.
    The Devil’s Duke.
    All over the countryside, at tea tables and in shops, gossip boiled: The enigmatic Duke of Loch Irvine was the head of a secret society. A selective society to which only rich and wellborn married couples received invitations. A society dedicated to the Dark Arts. And in this society’s lair somewhere in Edinburgh, the practitioners of this evil religion sacrificed maidens.
    The police had yet to solve the mysteries of the disappearances in September and December of Cassandra Finn and Maggie Poultney: unwed girls of marriageable age, only Maggie’s bloodied cloak discovered upon the bank of the loch near the Duke of Loch Irvine’s Edinburgh residence, and marked with a six-pointed star that bore three symbols: a flame, a wave, and a mountain peak. The same unique star was carved into the lintel over the main portal of Haiknayes Castle.
    Some whispered that during his years sailing the seas as captain in the Royal Navy, the mysterious Duke of Loch Irvine had become a practitioner of native magicks, a worshipper of Satan, a fiend. The villagers that Constance had spoken with at the cloth mill that morning had called him Christsondy : the Devil.
    But she would not find answers staring at his castle. She must meet the duke again and learn the truth of it from him.
    Shadows cut swaths across the hills as she walked Elfhame home. She would tell her father that she intended to move to the house in Edinburgh for the spring. After allowing her to live with only Eliza in London for years, he would not deny her.
    In the stable, she gave her mare into the stable hand’s care.
    â€œThey be some fine animals visitin’, my leddy. I’ll gladly volunteer to put that bay through his paces.”
    â€œHave Dr. Shaw and Miss Shaw arrived already, Fingal?” She whipped off her hat and gloves. “Am I that late?”
    â€œNo’ the doctor, my leddy.” Fingal gestured along the stable.