"Franklin, my darling jo, my sanctuary! You have not aged a day!"

It was small surprise to Franklin MacEachern, with Master Cuthbert standing on his doorstep with case in hand and the other spread wide to embrace him, to see that his old friend had not changed at all.

It was absurd, of course, to look upon a man of forty years now and still dub him in his mind young master. Perhaps Franklin had not aged a day, but Master Cuthbert certainly had - even in the five years or so since they'd last met, the lines were clearer on Cuthbert's weathered face, his widow's peak sharper on his crown, his hair more white than charcoal grey. Franklin knew all this, and knew the stories of lashes and malaria and gaol cells more intimately than many another man in the fellow's life, but for all those years and stories, he could not shake that the man who stood before him - the boy - had barely changed.

He ought to know. They had been boys together, albeit Franklin was a few years senior between the two. He had come to work at the Douglas estate of Orbiston in his fourteenth year, employed as a stablehand; at that time, they had all been children, save for Master Archie who was just making his debut - Miss Jane a fair sixteen, and Miss Beatrice his age, Master Robert but twelve, and the youngest, William, only eight.

Master Cuthbert had been eleven, then, and a precocious child, competitive at his games and sporting and resistant of his parents, a gallant pair from the Glasgow gentry with the grand legacy of Black Douglas at their backs. Not that they had much to do with the children; most of that was left to the servants, but when Franklin had joined the staff at Orbiston, Master Cuthbert alone among his siblings had been uniquely punishing to the poor domestics.

But it was the boys he was cruellest to. The stories came down to him from the house as the years went by: that Master Cuthbert had tripped a hallboy upon the stairs just to watch him fall and laughed uproariously when he hit the bottom, the tray of tea and biscuits he had been carrying up to the young master smashed and scattered across the stairwell. That Master Cuthbert had surprised a second footman on the landing with his fencing foil in hand and cried 'en garde!', frightening the poor boy into the old grandfather clock to irreparable damage, so said the clocksmith called to attend the ghastly scene.

Or, when the boy was thirteen, that he had tricked his dear friend, young Master Patrick Spence, at their afternoon tea in the schoolroom with an egg, looking for all the world to be boiled in its jolly cup but in fact hollow, cunningly disguising a live slow worm, lethargic with the cooler months, which a stable cat had brought in still alive - and of which Master Patrick was mortally afraid! The screams could be heard across the estate, they said, and in the neighbouring town of Hamilton, the poor thing had been so badly scared.

Of course Franklin was not immune to such nastiness. Master Cuthbert had a prized horse, a beautiful white stallion named Apollo, and he doted on the thing as if it were his only playmate. This put him in constant contact with the stable staff, again uniquely amongst his brothers, all of whom regarded the horses as more utilitarian than Cuthbert and his hours spent with Apollo, brushing him, plaiting his mane, and speaking to him quietly in the privacy of their stall.

It was a servant’s place to leave him to his soliloquies, and Master Cuthbert surely knew that, yet when Franklin entered the stables while the boy was tending to his horse, he was treated to vicious silence and glares shot around the horse’s neck. Should he dare interject, say, to feed the horse or other such basic purpose, Master Cuthbert had words for him the likes of which Franklin had not even heard on the farm he’d grown up upon, so rough in his language was this mere child: tripe-faced, bumble-footed, ass-headed, fat-gut loon.

“Now where’d ye learn that patter, master? Ye’ve crabbed me, y’hae; ye dinnae call nae’n else ‘ere sich rotten ‘hings.”

“I only call you what you are, Franklin, and that’s a rattle-skull bastard, nothing more.”

He could only laugh. Cuthbert had been only thirteen; Franklin all of sixteen. The ire of a child did not cause him much grief.

Now here in his house in bonny Hamilton, some near thirty years later, Master Cuthbert was more careful with his language. He had been a devil when Franklin had met him in Bombay, cursed bluer than the Arabian Sea. But the whip had taken it out of him, and more so the ears of Franklin’s three children, all younger than ten, and his wife Maggie, who had heard such language before but Cuthbert appeared determined to keep up appearances. Franklin couldn’t hold that against him; he was a guest in their house, and the Douglases did raise their children well, so far as it came to people they actually respected. After so long, Franklin was proud to consider himself within that number – not just a servant, not just a groom as he’d eventually become. Not just a comrade on the subcontinent, the role in which he’d finally reunited with his childhood master some lifetime ago. But a friend. An ally. A sept, perhaps, by proxy; but faithful. And he had been rewarded, many times over in his life.

Remaining in contact with their banished son was a more controversial decision, but Franklin did not see he had any other choice. When Cuthbert had first returned from India, and when the quiet exile of his family had come home to roost and he was turned away from the old house, there had been no one for the young master but Franklin. That was the last time he had seen the fellow, stood, gutted, before the fire in his parlour, a wasted and ruined man. Franklin had seen him in his prime, as a proud and decorated soldier in Bombay, as much a Black Douglas as any of his ancestors who had died beneath the blade of an Englishman. In Hamilton, thrown from the Orbiston house by words alone, post court martial, flogging, stripped of his medals and disgraced, and post too three months in hospital on the subcontinent and six months around the Cape back to Britain, Cuthbert had been nearly unrecognisable.

But when he took Franklin by the hands, his fingers cold and dry like paper, and looked in his eyes to ask if he could stay, just that night, in a room before he left for London, the same boy looked back at Franklin. Through the haggard years, the scratched spectacles, the pain - those same eyes, gleaming and untamed. And he heard a whisper echoed through them, unspoken now, but once so often some fifteen years ago: Are we alone, Franklin?

They were not. But how could Franklin to refuse him that much - a touch, hand to hand - nothing more.