* * *
The Scottish borderlands were everything she had imagined, everything A Patient Heart had led her to expect. Like the best sorts of men, it was rugged and even rough, all firm planes and weathered crags, exactly like the one-eyed hero Baron McTavish. Green slopes crested up and back down again to small eruptions of tumbled fieldstones that refused to be covered by swaying golden stalks, the land as defiant as its inhabitants. It was breathtaking, and Amelia wondered that every woman in search of adventure didn't dash for the place. There must be a dark baron or brooding, poetic highwayman lurking behind each hillock.
They left the wilder country on the north side of River Sark and passed into the first vague hints the place was populated by more than herds of small, red, thick-maned ponies. A flat stone wall retained an embankment where the road curved sharply; Amelia noticed the man-made engineering when the stage's trajectory tipped her white-knuckled against her window. On the straightaway, they rumbled past long stretches of clipped hedge which formed a delicate fence along bronze pastureland. She would come back to this spot and walk that very pasture, she decided, at dawn when the sun was first catching flame and dew hung like tiny diamonds from sweet-scented bluebells. She sighed her anticipation and nestled back in her seat, smiling at her companion's curious frown.
"I was just settling my itinerary," she explained, "arranging what sorts of things I'm going to do first."
"Such as?" His lips had a frustrating way of drawing her eye as he spoke, so that she saw the shape of his questions but nearly always came close to missing their intent. Not that he was a consummate distraction. He was no Baron McTavish, that was for certain. Mister Field's blond hair was well-tended by a barber, not a raven's wing that concealed half of a carved face. He hadn't uttered a single red-tinted curse, and he smiled and smirked too much to ever be counted as 'dangerous'. His clothes were smart and citified, a starched cravat and blue merino coat, and she could not even force an imagining of Mister Field in a kilt. But she didn't have to, she reminded herself. It didn't matter how he looked or what he wore, any more than it mattered with Mister Lochner the attorney; it was all purely business. Still, he was handsome in a traditional way, if she was paying attention to such things, which she wasn't.
She realized she'd been staring, and remembered his question. "Oh, first lodgings will have to be arranged, I should think!" she answered practically, because it sounded more worldly than reciting her scheme for a sunrise walk, and Mister Field had already shifted to a far corner of his bench. She was used to those sorts of reactions, and Grandfather had made her mindful to avoid them when possible.