Outside, the night was clear and cold, a perfect half-moon hanging in the sky, with all the watching stars to serve as sentinels. I could see no one in Steell’s Close nor in the High Street, though I looked in both directions, but I knew he could not have gone far. I also knew it would be best to face him now and get our meeting over with, instead of always wondering when it was going to happen.
There was silence tonight at the front of St. Giles’s, and the dark, shuttered Luckenbooths held their own secrets. My footsteps rang hard on the stones of the street as I passed them all by.
Though the shadows lay thickly as always at the head of Forrester’s Wynd, there was nobody there, either. And there was no candle shining tonight from Lily’s window.
My mind had barely registered that fact before I’d started up the turnpike stair toward her door.
It was not, in looking back, the wisest thing to do. The hour was late, and I was not the only person looking for that light who knew its meaning. But I acted on pure impulse when I saw that darkened window, thinking only that the candle’s absence meant something was wrong.
A troubling play of possibilities ran through my mind as I went up those stairs, and when I reached her door and found it had been left unbolted and ajar, I feared the worst. I drew the whinger from its scabbard as I stepped inside her lodgings.
All was silent. There was little light to see by, save the moonlight coming through the windows, for the fire in the hearth had burnt too low to be of any use.
Lily spoke up quietly. “I’m here.”
The oath I swore could not be helped. I closed the door securely. Slid the bolt home. Sheathed my blade. “Why would you be so careless as to sit with your door open?”
Lily could have answered that I had no right to chastise her, but she did not. She only said, “I knew that it was you upon the stair. I saw you.” She had dragged the cushioned chair close by the window with the candle, and was sitting curled up on its seat just far enough out of the light that she would not be seen, while she yet had a view of where the High Street met the wynd below. She would, indeed, have witnessed my approach. “You often take your walks this time of night,” she added, and I lost my irritation then, because it caught me strangely in my heart to think she might have sat here watching for me.
Waiting for me.
And now that my senses were no longer on alert and had begun to function normally—at least, as normally as they could function in her presence—I could tell that something was wrong. All the vibrancy had drained from her and left her looking weary and dejected.
Making a decision, I crossed to the fireplace and stirred the small fire to life.
“Come, sit where it is warmer,” I said. “You’ll catch cold if you stay there.”
I moved the cushioned chair for her, and while she settled into it, I took a twisted paper spill from the container on the mantel and used it to transfer a single, tiny piece of flame from the now-glowing fire across the room to light the candle in the window.
I did not want any interruptions from the other man who I knew might be out there right now watching Lily’s lodgings for a signal of distress. I stayed well to the side, so I would not be seen, then rejoined Lily at the hearth and took the cane-backed chair across from hers.
She knew a reckoning was coming. “It is no use,” she told me. “I’m beyond your help.”
“You said you trusted me.”
“I did. I do.”
“Then trust me now.” I held her gaze. “I don’t believe you ever married onto Jamie Graeme. Did you?”
In the pause that followed, I could feel the strong pulse in my own veins counting off the moments like a clock.
And then she slowly shook her head.
I asked her, “Why? Why take the risk of coming forward with a false claim?”
Lily raised her chin, and her attempt to smile was heartbreaking. “Because,” she told me, “with Archie, there’s always a price.”
Chapter 31
Wednesday, 29 June, 1698
She’d been unwilling to believe, at first, that he had truly left her. On the morning after Lily had watched Matthew walk away—the same morning she’d first arranged to meet with Jamie at the windmill—she had gone to Matthew’s lodgings to convince him to come with her to that meeting, so that he could speak to Jamie for himself and know the truth.
There’d been no answer at his door, and he had not been at the stables in the Kirkgate where the carters kept their horses, nor at work upon the Shore.
Day followed day, and by the end of that first long week of December when she knocked on Matthew’s door it had been opened by a stranger, a new tenant, and another carter had begun to hitch the mare named Lennet to their cart, and Lily knew then Matthew had done more than leave to calm his temper.