Stunned, Lily looked up from her work. “I cannot take your ring.”
“Ye can. ’Tis mine to give, and I will have no argument. For years it has reminded me I was well loved, and it can mind ye of the same till Matthew comes again to give ye proof.” She smiled. “I hope I will be here to see that day. But if I’m not, will ye do me one favor?”
Lily answered without hesitation. “Anything.”
“Take Maggie with ye, when ye leave here. She would have a better life with ye and Matthew than she would left here in Riddell’s Close.”
Of that much, Lily was completely certain, so it was an easy promise. But it still felt hollow. “And if Matthew never does come home?”
“He will.” Barbara, while remaining firm on that point, did allow for a contingency. “Could ye please fetch my strongbox?”
Barbara kept her strongbox underneath the bedstead. It was Spanish made, of lovely dark wood and the size of a large, heavy book, ornately bound with strips of iron.
Lily slipped the silver ring onto her finger, set her mending to the side, and bent low to retrieve the strongbox. When she straightened with it, Barbara had the key.
“I keep the letters Maggie’s father sent in here,” she said, and opening the box she showed to Lily a tight bundle of those letters, tied with string. “He wrote more often in the year afore he married, but he still wrote after that, each time he sent the payment for her keep, to see that she was well. That she was happy.” Barbara touched the letters lightly. “I have saved them for her, because it is very plain from how he writes that he is proud to claim her as his daughter, and ’tis plainer still that she’d be welcomed if she turned up at his door. If Matthew does not come, and I am gone, ye can take Maggie to her people up in Perthshire. They were once your people also, were they not? Well then.” She closed the box again and locked it. Slid the key beneath the bolster. “This is where I always keep the key, and ye ken where I keep the strongbox. If that time comes, take those letters with ye, for they’ll prove to young Patrick Graeme Maggie is his daughter.”
Lily wondered whether she ought to tell Barbara Maggie’s father was a fugitive and no longer in Scotland, but in the end she did not bother giving her that news, for fear it might cause Barbara added worry. Nor was Archie ever likely to let Lily leave this house with Maggie, when he would not let her leave alone. Ye ken that I’ll not let that happen, she could hear him saying in his calm and even way, and Lily felt the walls close in more tightly still around her.
Barbara saw her face and smiled in sympathy and reassurance as she handed Lily back the strongbox to return to its place underneath the bed. “But Matthew will come home,” she said again. “I ken my sons. I ken their hearts. And he has given his into your keeping.”
Maybe so, but it appeared to Lily he had found a way to live without it then, for summer reached its end and Matthew did not come.
The autumn followed, endless rains that brought a harvest yet more devastating than the last, the crops so poor that people faced the falling darkness of the season with a rising sense of desperation. And still Matthew did not come.
In late October, with food scarce already, they awakened to a frost and snow as hard and cold as if it were the dead of winter.
Barbara had no gentlemen to visit her beyond that day. She grew thinner while her stomach swelled, and then her legs began to bloat as well, and Archie called the doctor in to bleed her. “I am sorry to be troublesome,” she told them.
Archie brushed the hair from her hot cheek, his mouth in a grim line. The next day he told Lily, “Away ye go to Walter’s house and watch the bairn awhile. His wife has work to do.”
Each time that she was sent to mind the bairn at Walter’s lodgings, Lily died a little more inside. The shame on Walter’s wife’s face as she slipped home from wherever Archie had arranged to send her was a sight that Lily could not bear to see, and in the evenings, back within the bedchamber upstairs at Riddell’s Close, Lily tucked Maggie more securely in the blankets than she used to do when settling her to bed, as though by doing that she’d somehow keep her safe.
And Lily lit the candle every night and set it in the window. Simon often looked for it, she knew. He’d told her this, although they so rarely saw Simon anymore that she could not be certain whether all her effort was for naught.
Still, it was something. One small light against the darkness. A little piece of hope that had no right to be so hopeful.
Were it not for hope, as Barbara said, the heart would break.