Library

Prologue

December 1819

Scotland

"B raemore, are you ready? Come join us." A light knock at the study door, a sweet voice, and Miss Elinor Cameron peered inside. "Edgar and I are off to the old tower."

Sir Gavin Stewart, 7th baronet and laird of Braemore Castle, professor of history, and happier lately than he could remember, smiled to see his fiancée. Sea-blue eyes, dark curls framing a lovely face, that bright, kind smile… Despite the morning's grim task, he felt a rush of love and contentment.

"Not quite yet, my dear. I am still sorting through my father's things. Go ahead if you and your brother want to explore the old tower again. Mind the ruins—and the ghosts," he added, shifting papers on the desk.

"I do enjoy a chance to spy the ghosts here!" She leaned around the door's edge. "Though Edgar is not so eager as I."

"Your twin does not have your affinity for such."

"Thanks to my Highland grandmother, who passed along knowledge—perhaps learned from my seventh great-grandmother, burned as a witch." She dimpled as he put a finger playfully to his lips. "Braemore—Gavin," she amended; the names they had used as children came easily now, "do come soon."

"I will, my lass. As soon as I finish here." She nodded and was gone, her voice fading as she and her twin, Edgar Cameron, Writer to the Signet, author, and a fellow less than enthusiastic about ghosts, left the library that adjoined the study.

Gavin sighed, closed a drawer in his late father's desk, and sat back in the elbow chair. He rubbed a weary hand over his brow, fingers pushing through dark waves of hair, skimming over the hidden scar; the head injury acquired at Quatre Bras was slowly healing, headaches fading. With health in sight, life was improving quickly: his childhood friendship with Elinor Cameron, so devoted during his recovery, had ripened to love.

Last month, she had agreed to be his wife. Under her kind influence, his natural reserve had lessened along with his skepticism about ghosts. He could now admit that logic did not always suffice. More importantly, he had learned that genuine, passionate love could transform someone like him, even after the harrowing experience of war.

Grateful, deeply in love, he was determined to give Elinor the most perfect life possible. But his recovery and then his father's untimely death, which had left the title and estate to Gavin and a Highland property to his sister, delayed their wedding.

Now Elinor was planning an autumn wedding for next year, wanting a ceremony in the glen chapel followed by luncheon in Braemore's picturesque medieval tower. Gavin pointed out that the Jacobean wing was more suitable; the tower was unsafe in places. Otherwise, she might have anything she desired, even a ghost or two in attendance if they could behave. He chuckled softly.

There, that was sorted, he thought, locking a drawer. He had gone through account books, correspondence, sketches for castle improvements, even the contents of a wooden box containing wax tapers, ribboned locks of hair, pen nibs, and packets of horehound drops, barley sugar candy, and sugared violets. For all his gruff character, his father had often shared candies with his children and their friends.

Tucking a packet of sugary treats into a pocket for Elinor, he stood, glancing at the tall bookshelves lining the study. They should be cataloged, but that would take time.

Trouble was, after seeing the accounts, he could not say how much time was left at Braemore. His father, anticipating promising investments, had spent a fortune helping Highland Stewarts keep their homes during the Clearances. The investments had collapsed and debts flowed in, but his father had kept it to himself.

If Gavin could not stave off the debtors, he might have to sell the estate. Though he would never fault an effort to ease Highland suffering, he faced a dilemma. He loved Braemore and was loath to sell.

Here, his parents, grandparents, and ancestors centuries back had written letters, tallied accounts, loved, raised families, endured loss, and carried on. They had loved this place just as he did. Looking out the window, he saw cultivated gardens, fieldstone walls, trees bare in winter, misty Scottish hills. And he glimpsed the stone tower that remained of the original castle. A haunted ruin.

Ghosts were part of Braemore too: a sad, gentle Gray Lady; a bewigged gentleman on the stair; a dark shadow in the tower said to be a knight who perished in the dungeon. His mother had respected the ghosts, while his father dismissed them in favor of logic. In a castle several centuries old, ghosts—at least stories of them—were inevitable. Gavin had seen or heard odd things himself, though he'd dismissed them.

Lately, Elinor had convinced him to reconsider. She was not just sensitive to ghosts, but a fine scholar of folklore and legends; he looked forward to years of scholarship as well as blissful marriage with her.

Ghosts aside, financial woes were the greater problem. Surely there was a solution. For now, he had newfound joy—and a promise to meet Elinor in the tower.

"Ghosts," he said, trying a jovial tone, "Braemore will soon have a new lady. My bride and I will find a way to keep this place. We—and you, I vow—will live happily ever after, as they say."

Heading for the door, he stopped as a twinkling light skimmed past him. The day was cloudy; the light was not from prism, candle, or hearth. He turned.

The light swirled and disappeared. Then a book on a shelf moved, yanked as if by an unseen hand. It fell with a thunk to the carpet at his feet. Bewildered, Gavin bent to pick up the volume that lay open.

He examined the book, which looked very old, with handwritten text on foxed deckle-edged paper bound in soft worn leather. The name and date were clear on the first page: Sir Josiah Stewart, Esq., Braemore Castle, Pentland Hills. Oct 1690.

He frowned, having never seen the book before; family papers and accounts were stored together. Josiah Stewart had been his sixth great-grandfather, or thereabouts. This volume had been lost, and yet somehow had fallen here; perhaps a floorboard had shifted.

"Curious." Sitting in the leather elbow chair, he flipped pages, quickly discovering that the book was a compact yet accurate history of the Stewarts of Braemore. He sat forward, rapt, a history professor forgetting that a lovely lass waited in a haunted tower.

In the pages nocked with his finger, he found a description of the Braemore ghosts—the Gray Lady and a shadow that had once been a prisoner in the tower. The gent in satin on the Jacobean stair was not mentioned. Yet the story Sir Josiah detailed was new to Gavin—the prisoner had been the lady's lover; when she died in childbirth, her kinsmen tossed him into the tower dungeon and left him to die.

With his last breath, the knight cursed the Braemore Stewarts with doom, saying he would haunt them with terror and trouble. He vowed madness and misfortune would visit for five hundred years. Then the laird of Braemore would lose his health, his fortune, his lands and castle, and his lady love would die in his arms. The last laird of Braemore would suffer unbearable loss, just as the knight had done.

Stunned, Gavin sat back. Health, fortune, Braemore threatened—all of that had occurred recently. Quickly he searched for the date of the knight's death. October, 1320.

His wedding to Elinor was planned for October, 1820. Ten months away, and the end of the five hundred years mentioned in the knight's curse.

Bolting to his feet, he stared at the book he held. A horrible tale of tragedy and family doom lost on the shelves—or had his father known, and concealed it?

Glancing up, he wondered if the book had fallen by design rather than accident. The light had appeared—the Gray Lady was sometimes accompanied by odd lights, he knew. And some invisible force had thrust Josiah's book off a shelf to fall at his feet.

A warning . In his gut, he felt the heavy spin of truth.

Hearing laughter floating across the garden, he glanced out the window and saw Elinor standing at the door of the tower. She was bright, beautiful, kind, precious to him. He loved her beyond love.

If tragedy befell her, he could never forgive himself. He could endure losing Braemore and its treasures, its memories, its ghosts. But he could not bear for harm come to her. Not Elinor, who in her loving way, had saved his life.

Now he must save hers.

He shoved the book on the shelf as far back as it could go, as if to make it disappear. But he could not erase what was written within.

Leaving the study, he took a back corridor out to the gardens and crossed to the tower, that wicked old ruin haunted by a blackguard, darkened by a curse. As he walked, hands fisted, his heart breaking, he made the most painful decision of his life.

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