“He’ll be back,” Henry had promised her with certainty, but after nearly seven months now even Henry was beginning to accept that Matthew, once again, was gone.
Neither Henry nor anyone else in his family had made Lily feel for a moment that she was to blame.
Jamie felt this was only right. “It’s not your fault,” he’d said. “He was the one who decided to leave.”
“I’m not sure ‘decided’ would be the right word,” had been Lily’s reply. “I’m not sure he was thinking so clearly. I injured him.”
“He made that cut himself, when he chose not to have faith in ye.” Jamie held firm. “And if that’s his nature, then it’s best that ye did learn it now, and not when ye were facing times of trouble, for it’s then ye need a man to stand beside ye and not leave ye.” Stubbornly, his head set at an angle she remembered from their childhood, he had glanced at her and added, “I would never leave ye.”
“Jamie.”
They’d been walking, for although they met each week at the windmill on the Shore, it was no private place to talk and Jamie never could stand still long anyway, so commonly they walked from there along the sea wall, down across Leith sands, across the broad expanse of windswept beach where every spring the horse races were held.
On that one day in particular, it had been late in March and there’d still been snow. The air had smelt of salt and coal smoke, and the chill wind blowing over the white waves stung Lily’s eyes.
Jamie had said, “All right, I’ll let it lie.”
But she had known that he would not. He’d raised the subject once again in early May, and she had answered him the same as she’d done since he’d first made the suggestion in December.
And now here they were on this final warm Wednesday of June, with the gulls in high flight overhead, and she knew he was going to ask her again because finally the glass had turned and the sand had started measuring their last hours with one another. This morning the drummers had gone through the town calling all of the company’s men to be on board the ships by the following Monday and ready to sail for the colony.
Jamie had been making use of these past months. He’d had new suits tailored, and bought a new hat, and had taken his swords to be furbished. And after much waiting, he’d finally received his official birth brief—the single-page summary of pedigree and descent that men carried with them when they wished to settle in a foreign land.
He’d been concerned that, even though he had petitioned for his birth brief in the proper way and had provided a certificate outlining his descent as proof, he’d not be granted one because his father was an outlaw still in service to King James.
Lily hadn’t shared his worry. “See?” she told him now. “It’s as I told you. No one could deny a birth brief to the grandson of the Black Pate.”
Jamie, grinning at the mention of his grandfather, said, “Aye, well, ’tis a good thing that he did not live to see these times. I don’t doubt he’d have taken up his sword again.”
She knew that it was true. “I miss your grandfather.” As distant as those happy days of childhood sometimes seemed, they had felt closer to her these past months with Jamie here, and it had saddened her to learn that both her grandmother and the old laird had been dead for some time.
Jamie nodded. “Inchbrakie’s not the same without him. Uncle George prefers the town life, so ye’ll almost never find him there. And with my cousin forced to flee to save his neck, the old yew will be waiting yet awhile afore new children come to climb it.”
Lily knew when he faintly frowned afterward that he was thinking of Maggie. It was an easy association to make, not only because he’d been talking of children, but because the cousin he spoke of—the one forced to flee to the Continent last winter—was Maggie’s father.
As everyone had feared, the family of the man Maggie’s father had fought and killed six years ago had finally brought a charge of murder, and because that family was so firmly attached to King William while the Graemes were known Jacobites, Maggie’s father had felt he’d have no chance persuading the lords it had been a fair fight. So he was now a fugitive.
In the beginning, when she’d started having these meetings with Jamie here on the wide sands of Leith, and they began filling in the blanks of their lost years with each other, Lily hadn’t been sure whether she should say anything to him of Maggie.
Yes, they were kin, but what good would it do in the end if he knew that? As Barbara often said, All the truth shouldn’t be told.