She did not fear it any less, but Matthew understood her fears and tried his best to make it easier. He showed her on the map the gate they’d enter by at Flanders on their journey overland to Paris.
Walter had been wounded Matthew would see Paris before he would, but he hid it well. He was still hopeful he would make it to Utrecht, although it was becoming clear this would not be the season. “Archie says I might have traveled in the spring,” he told them, “but for the invasion.”
Henry answered, “There is always an invasion.” Which was truly how it seemed.
This one, like those before it, had begun with a brave gathering of Jacobites in France—this time at Calais, and supported by a great conspiracy at London aimed, so it was said, at an assassination of King William. And like those before it, this invasion failed.
“Be careful,” Lily said to Matthew, “that ye do not find yourself at Saint-Germain, instead of Paris.”
Matthew smiled, and kissed her. “You’re the one who must be careful.”
He asked Simon to step in for him while he was gone and keep watch on the house. And this time, he was not away so long.
When he returned, Lily had news for him. “Walter is married.”
They were on the Shore. Matthew stopped walking. “Married?”
“Aye.” She had struggled over how much she should tell him of the truth, in part to spare his brother, and in part to spare the lass involved, but Matthew was no fool and Lily knew he’d learn the truth himself in time, so in the end she shared the whole of what she’d witnessed and been told.
Matthew listened, and his mouth made a hard line. “The black-haired lass from the Paunchmarket. Aye, well, it would be, wouldn’t it? Didn’t I tell him to mind how he went down that road?”
“Simon believes she was with child already, before she and Walter…that is, Simon thinks Archie might have been solving two problems at once: getting rid of a lass who was of no more use to him, and keeping Walter in Leith.” Of course, Walter wouldn’t believe that, but it had been plain to the rest of them from the way Archie had managed the affair, first finding reasons to send Walter to the Paunchmarket on errands, and then sending Simon elsewhere long enough to let the lass play out the part of her seduction.
Archie knew his foundlings well. It mattered not to Walter whether he had proof he was the father, only that he might have been the father, for then he could not stand by and let the bairn be named a bastard, and its mother made to suffer.
“I wish them well,” said Matthew, but he knew as well as Lily did what Archie had accomplished.
There was no more talk of school for Walter. He made no more plans for travel. Archie smoothed the way for him to join the maltman’s trade and settle into lodgings with his new wife. In December, sadly, she did lose the unborn bairn inside her and they all did mourn the loss, but Lily did not think that Walter’s grief was for the bairn alone.
All through that winter and the spring and summer that came after, Lily set the candle in her window every evening.
“What’s it for?” asked Maggie sleepily one night. Lily did not tell her that it was a signal meant for Matthew, in case Archie pried that information from the child. Instead she said, “To keep away the dark.”
She knew that Matthew came by every night to see that light, although she did not always hear his footsteps passing by. Once, looking out the window, she by chance had seen him standing sheltered in the same arched entrance to the passage opposite between the houses where he’d stood the first day they’d gone walking on the Links.
Even when he’d seen her candle, he had stood awhile there in the shadows as though guarding her, and Lily had felt safer simply knowing he was there.
She felt less comfortable within the house with Archie.
In the workroom now, she was always aware when he was watching her, and had to ask him not to do it, for she could not concentrate.
So on that late November day in 1697, when she felt the prickling crawl begin along the bent nape of her neck, she said, not turning from the writing table, “Archie, please, I’ve telt ye. I can’t do this when ye are behind me.”
Matthew said, “I thought you did no longer use your copy book.”
She spun, and smiled, and reached to put her arms around his neck and draw him down to her. “Why do ye never use the door?”
“Who says I didn’t?”
Lily let that pass. “As to the copy book, I’m practicing my flourishes.” She showed him.
“Here’s a flourish for you.” Taking up her pen, he signed his name, then set a small, bright, open brooch of silver on the page above the place where he had signed.