Maggie grumbled only slightly while she dressed. “Why must I wear both of my petticoats at once?” she asked.
Lily hushed her. “It is simpler than carrying them.” She, too, wore two petticoats, and two shifts beneath that, and Barbara’s old straw hat with the brown ribbon tied securely on her head. Besides the file of papers, she carried a bundle of their clothing, neatly wrapped around their few books and belongings. When they reached a safer place, she’d buy a proper chest to store them in for traveling, but for tonight she’d have to take no more than she could carry in her arms.
Maggie had Dolly, who was also dressed for travel in her yellow gown and blue cloak, with the heart-shaped wire brooch hidden beneath it. “Is it Saturday already?” she asked, sleepily.
A floorboard creaked behind them in the passage. Lily jumped, and turned, expecting to see Archie standing there, but it was nothing. Just the old house settling.
“Almost,” she told Maggie in a low voice. “And we’ll have to walk a ways to meet the coach.” There would be time for her to share the truth with Maggie—all the truth—when they were somewhere safe. For now, a few more hours of ignorance could surely do no harm. She heard her grandmother’s approving voice say, “Let her keep her childhood.”
Henry cautiously stepped into the close before them, walking its length up and down to look into the shadowy places and see for himself that their way would be clear. When he came back inside he knelt in front of Maggie and quietly told her, “Now, give me a kiss.” She did. “And keep ye warm. And mind whatever Lily says. And be a good lass always.”
“Are ye coming up to London, too?”
“Someday,” he said. “Someday I will.” He held her very tightly. Then he kissed her hair, and let her go, and stood.
Lily had no words that could tell him how her heart felt, but she knew he knew.
She reached for him in silence and he held her for a moment, hard, then set her from him with reluctance. “Go,” he said. “And don’t write letters, he’s too clever. Don’t leave any trail that he can follow.”
“Henry…”
“Don’t look back,” he said, “no good will come of it. I’m going to close the door.”
She knew how much it would have broken Henry’s heart—Henry, who for all his life had wanted nothing more than a real family—to push them so gently from the passage out the door into the waiting night, but still he did it, and she saw his eyes and watched him try to give her one last smile.
Lily did not obey his last words. She looked back. He’d closed the door, as he had said he would. The little house in Riddell’s Close looked lonely and forlorn.
Maggie, too, had looked behind. Her small hand holding on to Lily’s tightly, she said in a sad whisper, “But we did not light the candle.”
“No,” said Lily, looking from the empty window that had been her own for all those years, and was no longer, to the other windows that were watching them in silence. “Not tonight.”
Shivering, but not from cold, she took a firmer hold of Maggie’s hand and turned toward the road to Edinburgh, her steps as soft and swift as though the devil were behind.
Some things were better done in darkness.
Chapter 34
Friday, 3 October, 1707
In the flicker of the firelight, Lily’s face looked sad as she remembered. Sitting curled into her cushioned chair, she said, “I did not know what else to do. There was nobody left to ask for help, not really. They’d all gone.”
I leaned toward her in my chair and took her hand in both of mine. “I’ve not left you,” I said. “And I am not going anywhere.”
She gave my hand a grateful squeeze and let me keep possession of it, so I counted that a victory.
“But,” I said, “you’ve not yet made it clear how Archie came to be involved in this affair. How did he find you here in Edinburgh?”
“How does he ever find a person? He has ways, and I’d grown careless. Maggie had this offer of a teaching job, and oh, you should have seen her. I could not have told her no. I told myself, since we were living very modestly and under different names, perhaps it would not be a problem. And then one day I came out of the Luckenbooths and there he was.” She said it very evenly, although it must have been a terrifying moment for her.
“Maggie was not with you then?”
She shook her head. “She does not know that Archie knows where we are living. I have kept that from her.”