Free The Touch by Colleen McCullough Page B

know, Elizabeth.”
    “Indeed I do,” she said slowly. “Indeed I do. I sensed that there was something wrong from the moment I met you—you didn’t act like any Drummond I knew.” A smile came, dragged up from some reservoir of strength and independence that she hadn’t known she possessed. “In fact, you reminded me of the Devil, with that beard and those eyebrows. I was absolutely terrified of you.”
    That provoked a laugh, a look of astonishment. “Then the beard comes off at once, though there’s not much I can do about the eyebrows. At least there can be no doubt of the identity of this child’s father.”
    “None at all, Alexander. I came to you untouched.”
    For answer he lifted her right hand and kissed it before he turned and left the room. When she went up to bed he wasn’t there, nor did he come that night. Elizabeth lay wide-eyed in the darkness, weeping. The more she found out about her husband, the less she believed she could ever come to love him. His past ruled him, not his future.
     

Two
In the Footsteps
of Alexander the Great
     
    WHEN ALEXANDER ran away from home on the night of his fifteenth birthday, he took nothing with him except a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese. The only decent clothes he had were those he wore to the kirk, everything else too torn and ragged to bother packing. Though he wasn’t massively built, the life his father had forced on him had endowed him with more than usual strength, so he ran at a lope all through the dark hours without needing to stop to catch his breath. Other Kinross boys had absconded occasionally, but they were always found a mile or two from home; Alexander fancied that in their hearts they weren’t committed. Whereas he was absolutely committed, and when he paused at dawn to suck water from a brook, he was already seventeen miles from Kinross. What did that place hold for him if he couldn’t leave it to go up to the university in Edinburgh? To spend his life working in the tartan mill was worse than a sentence of death.
    It took him a week to reach the outskirts of Glasgow—he couldn’t bear to head for Edinburgh—where he hoped to find some sort of employment. He’d chopped firewood or hoed gardens for food as he traveled, but these were activities he could perform in his sleep. What Alexander wanted was a chance to work at something he could learn, something that required intelligence as well as brute strength. And he found it as soon as he reached Glasgow, the third-largest metropolis in the British Isles.
    The thing sat inside a yard forcing air into a foundry, its stack smoking, its round girth wreathed in white vapor. A steam engine! There were two steam engines in the Kinross flour mills, but Alexander had never laid eyes on them—nor ever would have, had he stayed in Kinross. Mill territory was divided up among the local families, and Duncan and James Drummond were denizens of the tartan mill, which meant their children were too.
    Whereas I, thought Alexander, am going to follow in the footsteps of my namesake, the Great, by striking into completely unknown territory.
     
     
    EVEN AT FIFTEEN, he had a way with him. Until now it had been directed at no one save the departed Robert MacGregor, but when he sallied into the foundry yard he found a new target—and not the grimy figure shoveling coal into the boiler’s flaming, hideously hot maw. A better dressed man was standing by, a rag in one hand, a spanner in the other, but doing nothing.
    “Excuse me, sir?” asked Alexander, smiling at the idle one.
    “Yes?”
    “What do you make here?”
    Why, thought the man later, did I not just put my boot up his arse and send him flying on to the road? As it was, he lifted his brows and smiled back. “Boilers and steam engines, laddie. There’s no’ enough boilers and steam engines, no’ enough.”
    “Thank you,” said Alexander, slid past him and walked into the cacophony of the foundry.
    In one corner of this inferno was a