He said, “I’m not like to forget it, am I? Not that year. First Walter’s wife and wee lad died of fever, then our mother died, and then Maggie and Lily left…”
It seemed as though he might have added something else beyond that, but he only took a deep drink from his glass and said, “It was an evil year.”
I took him at his word. “You’ve not seen Lily since then, either, I’d imagine?”
There was evidently something in my tone that made him wary.
“She’s in trouble,” he said. “Isn’t she?”
Like Gilroy, I had instincts. It was plain both Henry and myself were on the same side when it came to Lily’s welfare. “Yes, I think she is.”
“What has she telt ye?”
“I haven’t been able to speak to her privately.”
“I could,” he offered. “Where is she?”
“I’m not sure that would be a good idea. She is being watched.” I told him of the man in grey, and while I spoke I saw that he was coming to the same opinion I had come to of that man’s identity, because when I had finished, Henry sat in thoughtful silence with his drink.
I asked him, “If he has come back, do you know where he would be staying?”
“Couldn’t say.” He sniffed. “To tell the truth, I might not even recognize him, after all this time.”
I wasn’t having that. “You might not recognize your brother?”
Henry met my gaze with stout defiance. “People change.”
Except they didn’t, really.
Any man might put on armor for a while, like Don Quixote in that book which little Maggie Graeme had so loved to read, but you could yet glimpse him when he raised his helmet’s visor, and beneath the armor he remained the man he’d always been inside.
As I drank my brandy, I imagined that the shade of young Matthew Browne moved past me now and bent to Lily at the writing table, and she turned her head to him and smiled, and I knew one thing sure.
She’d always be his weak side.
VI
I believe that, in my heart, I’d known exactly who the man in grey was from the moment I’d stepped from the shelter of the wall when I’d been looking at the candle in her window, and he’d followed from the shadows.
I’d have had to be a fool, with all I knew, not to suspect it, and the more I turned it over in my mind as I walked back alone to Edinburgh that evening after leaving Henry, the more deeply I felt sure.
I have a certain memory of that night, held in the way one holds a seashell gathered on the shore—time dulls its brightness, and wears down its sharper edges, yet we only have to hold it to our ear and we can once more hear the singing of the sea. And so it is with memory.
I remember that the moon was nearly full, and there was music spilling out into the street from Pat Steell’s tavern as I passed his door, and near the shuttered Luckenbooths a little cat lay curled and sleeping, putting me in mind of Lily’s kitten.
All these things I do remember, just as clearly as the moment when I glanced up at the window of her lodgings and saw not only the candle, but her standing close beside it, looking down into the street.
She saw me. I touched one hand to my hat and went on walking, knowing well that mine were not the only eyes that would be out there in the darkness, watching Lily’s window. It felt wrong to turn my back to her.
I thought of all the times in life she’d had to stand and watch men walk away. I heard her saying to her grandmother, “He promised me that he would never leave me…”
She’d been speaking of James Graeme then, and on that night I felt a bond of kinship with him, thinking that if he had lived, he would at least have understood the nature of my jealousy.
As I walked up the final way to Caldow’s Land, I thought, I don’t know why, of Helen’s cousin’s wife—the one who in her former marriage had been sad because half of her husband’s heart was always held by his first love.
It made me wonder just how much of Lily’s heart was held by Matthew, and if she’d have any left to give another man.
Chapter 25
Sunday, 28 September, 1707
I always became thoughtful when I sat in great cathedrals. I suspect that was the point. Most had been built by ancient bishops with a single purpose—to make those of us who entered them feel small and insignificant within the sight of God.
St. Giles’s had that effect upon me.
Like my country, St. Giles’s had been passed like a child’s plaything, hand to hand, down through the long wars of religion—from the Catholics to John Knox, who’d held the pulpit here with fiery sermons, to Episcopalians who’d sought the restoration of their bishops and been met with riots, back to Presbyterians who’d cheered the killing of a king, restored once more to the Episcopalians who’d seen their power falter when King James had fled to France, and now again to Presbyterians, who since the revolution had maintained it with a firm, unyielding hand.