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“T ell me, Miss MacLeod. Is there blood spurting from my eyes?”

“Blood?” Cat glanced up from the papers piled in her lap. It had been hours since they’d spoken, and Lord Ballantyne’s voice was loud in the silent room. “No. Should there be?”

“One would hope not, but after hours of trying to decipher your father’s notes, I fancied I felt blood trickling down the side of my face. Perhaps it’s just my brains leaking out of my ears.”

My goodness, such dramatics. “If you have a headache, my lord, I’d be happy to mix up a batch of Astrantia tea for you.”

He cast her a withering look. “Is that a joke, Miss MacLeod? Because it’s not amusing in the least, and thus, an utter failure.”

Well, then. Someone was out of temper.

Although to be fair, she could hardly blame him. After they’d returned from their visit to the Duffys, they’d gone straight upstairs to her father’s study, and they hadn’t stirred one inch since, the soft shuffle of papers as they turned them over one by one the only sound in the room.

She’d been hopeful at first, certain they’d find something in the mountain of papers her father had accumulated that might help them determine where he’d gone on his final adventure, or at least what direction he’d taken.

But it wasn’t going well.

Lord Ballantyne snatched up a torn bit of paper from the pile on Rory’s desk, glanced at it, then tossed it aside in disgust. “I can’t make sense of any of this.”

Cat peered down at the paper in her hand. It was a drawing of . . . well, something. The wall of a cave, perhaps? She’d been turning it this way and that for the better part of the past ten minutes, and she still couldn’t decide what it was.

No, not a cave. It looked more like a sheet of rock, or a ledge, but what was the dark blob to one side of it? Was it a mountain, or an unusually large bird?

Her father’s papers were, generously speaking, a trifle disorganized.

Ungenerously speaking, they were a chaotic mess of half-finished letters, unintelligible drawings, smudged maps worn at the seams, and endless bits of paper with incomprehensible notes in her father’s untidy scrawl.

One of these notes only had one word written on it.

Cairn.

It had been underlined three times with dark, thick slashes of ink, and thus was presumably important to her father, but she couldn’t make any sense of the cursed thing. One could hardly stir a step in Scotland without stumbling over a cairn. How was she to know which cairn he was referring to?

“Did your father ever have a single comprehensive thought, Miss MacLeod? Was he capable of speaking in complete sentences? If so, one can’t tell it from his papers.”

She abandoned the drawing of the rock wall and took up the next paper in her pile. “I’m sure it all made sense to him.”

“Well, it’s bloody hieroglyphics to us. What do you suppose this is? A dagger, perhaps? I’ve seen this drawing a dozen times on a dozen different crumpled bits of paper, none of them with a single word of explanation.”

She took the small, grubby bit of paper he held out to her and smoothed it against her knee. “It looks like it, yes. A hand holding an upright dagger, with some sort of circle around it.”

He rubbed a weary hand over his eyes. “Does it mean anything to you?”

She bit her lip as she carefully considered her answer. The drawing didn’t mean a thing to her, but Lord Ballantyne’s patience was already wearing thin, and she didn’t want to push him over the edge. “Let me see if I can find a similar drawing in my pile.”

He snorted. “Neatly done, Miss MacLeod, but don’t think for one moment I didn’t notice how you sidestepped that question.”

“There’s no need to . . .” She trailed off, her eyes going wide.

The thin sliver of the sky visible in the window behind Lord Ballantyne’s head had gone the deep, dark purple of twilight.

When had the sun gone down?

“Goodness, how long have we been up here?” She rose to her feet, catching the messy pile of papers before they could slide off her lap. “Why, it must be eight hours or more.”

Lord Ballantyne unearthed his pocket watch from his coat pocket and flipped open the case. “It’s been nearly ten hours, and we’re no closer to finding anything useful than we were when we began. We’ve accomplished nothing.”

“Not nothing , my lord. All told, it’s been rather a revealing day. We now know for certain there was a promise made between our fathers, and that it had something to do with a treasure.”

It must. Where else could they have found four identical Louis d’Or gold coins, if they weren’t part of a larger treasure? It would be a small miracle to find even one such rare coin, never mind four of them.

“Very well, Miss MacLeod—next to nothing, then. Where do you suggest we go from here? It will take us months to get through your father’s papers. By then, someone else will have made off with the treasure.”

“I own it’s rather daunting.” She’d hardly made a dent in the pile of papers in front of her, and Lord Ballantyne’s own pile was discouragingly tall, as well. “Perhaps we should go over what we know once again. We may have missed something that could prove useful.”

“Go right ahead, Miss MacLeod.” He propped his feet on the desk in front of him, rested his head on the back of the chair, and closed his eyes before waving an imperious hand at her. “I’m listening.”

“I can see that, my lord.” Still, it might help her to go over it again. “There are four coins.”

“Yes. That fact has been well established, Miss MacLeod, since all four coins are here on top of the desk.”

“Hush, will you? I’m thinking.” Four coins, one of which had initially belonged to her father, and one to Lord Ballantyne’s father. “If Rory made Duffy promise to send the coin to your father once he’d died, then it’s reasonable to assume your father had a similar arrangement on his end.”

Hamish opened one eye. “I suppose that makes sense. I daresay Williams, his man of business, would know.”

“It stands to reason, then, that the same is true of the other two coins, as well. That would mean there were four gentlemen involved, each with their own coin . . . wait, that’s it! Of course. How did we not see it sooner?”

Hamish opened the other eye. “See what?”

“You told me, Lord Ballantyne, that your father had three coins at one time, but then after his death you searched for them, and only found one.”

“Yes. You don’t think—”

“That your father received the two other coins once the gentlemen who had them passed away? Yes, I do think so. It wasn’t a promise between two men, but a pact between four of them. Each of them had a coin that was to go to one of the others after he passed.”

“Malcolm Ross passed away first. He died at Culloden, and then Angus Dunn was next, some eight years later, of a fever. My father was the third one to pass away, and so he never had more than three of the coins.”

“Yes, and my father was the last.” Cat leapt to her feet, too excited to sit still. At last, they were getting somewhere. “Your father’s coin and the two others in his possession came to Castle Cairncross after your father’s death. That’s how my father came to have four coins.”

“But if that’s the case, why did Duffy send your father’s coin to London? Wouldn’t he have known my father was dead already, since he’d received his coin?”

“My father would have known of it, yes, but there’s no reason Duffy would have. He merely sent the one coin to your father after Rory passed, as my father had instructed him to do. If he hadn’t done so—”

“Then I never would have known to come to Castle Cairncross.”

“Yes, just so. Duffy said he thought the coins arrived here only just before my father’s sudden decision to embark on another treasure hunt. The coins were the signal to the last man still alive to retrieve the treasure. That man was my father.”

“But where did he go? And who were the two other men?”

“Malcolm and Angus,” she said at once.

His boots hit the floor with a thud, making her jump. “Am I correct in assuming you didn’t just come up with those names out of the blue?”

“Of course I didn’t, my lord. You recall I told you my father died of an infection from a wound in his leg. During his feverish ravings, he repeated three names—”

“Archie, Malcolm, and Angus,” he murmured. “My father, Archibald Muir, Malcolm Ross, and Angus Dunn.”

Cat ceased her pacing, her heart leaping into her throat. “You know them?”

“I do, yes. Or I did. Both gentlemen have been dead for some years, but their sons, Callum Ross and Keir Dunn, are among my closest friends.”

Cat dropped down into a chair, her head spinning. “That’s some of the puzzle solved, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but there are still a few large pieces missing. Why did they make the pact in the first place, first of all? If the four of them stumbled over some treasure, why not just take it at once? Why was there a need for a pact at all? And, perhaps more importantly, where is the treasure now?”

Yes, they’d have to answer those questions, wouldn’t they?

But how? Rory’s papers were no help. There wasn’t anything to be done, was there?

Unless . . . there was one way they might get more information, but it was a bit risky. If they pursued it, there was a chance they’d learn what they needed to know, but there was also a chance they’d end up . . . well, there was no sense in mincing words, was there?

There was a chance they’d end up dead .

“Why do you look like that, Miss MacLeod? What are you thinking?”

She looked up and found Lord Ballantyne watching her with bright blue eyes that seemed to see right through her. “I do have one idea, but—”

“Let’s have it then, Miss MacLeod.” He gestured at the pile of papers on the desk. “It can’t get much worse than this.”

Yes, it could. It could always get worse, and anyone who thought otherwise was either foolish or lucky.

But they’d gotten this far, hadn’t they?