Lily pushed me back sharply and said in surprise, “Matthew!”
I wheeled and followed her gaze to the man who had stepped through the door she’d forgotten to bolt. He’d entered by the turnpike stair so silently he was but a grey shadow in the doorway, standing watching us together.
“Ye’re looking after her, are ye?” he said to me. “Anyone could have come in, and the both of ye would now be dead.”
Lily stared at him, and then with her heart in her eyes, she rushed past me and into his arms. “I was so worried! When I did not see you in the street, I feared the worst.”
I looked at them and saw how he was holding her and in that moment my plan changed, and I knew what I had to do.
Emotions were an easy thing for me to hide. They always had been. It was not so difficult for me to hide my feelings then and tell him, “Go, then. See you take her somewhere safe.”
Waiting, too, was something I was used to. While I walked the floor of Lily’s lodging, waiting for the paper to be slipped beneath her door by Archie’s messenger to call the meeting—which I guessed would be tonight—I held my racing thoughts in check.
I idly turned the pages of the book that she’d left lying on the table—the book that I had loaned to her of plants of the Americas, still with my note that marked the page that held the illustrations of the ferns. She’d finished with this now, she would not need it any longer. When I’d done what I must do, I would come back here and reclaim it.
I bent once to retrieve the telltale button that had fallen from my waistcoat and was lying on the floorboards by the bed. It was a small thing, but I held it for a moment before tucking it securely in my pocket. There could surely be no harm in keeping something that, as Lily put it, held the memory of a time when I was loved.
And yet.
A man should be a realist… Gilroy’s words became my point of focus. Lily Aitcheson was Matthew’s lass, for now and always. Everybody knew that. Archie Browne would know that, too. And he would never give them peace.
He’d never stop, so someone had to stop him.
*
He seemed smaller than the image I’d been holding of him in my mind.
It might have been because we stood within the shadow of the monument built to the Regent Murray—that hard man of little mercy who had turned upon his flesh and blood and found betrayal had a price.
It might have been because this section of the southern transept of St. Giles’s was lit by only moonlight at this hour, and all things had been cast into uncertain shades of blues and greys and pale, dead ivory, and were thus distorted.
But more probably it was because age had left Archie Browne reduced in every way. Age did not do so with all men. I had known several men of twice my years who sat as upright in the saddle as their younger peers and walked as sturdily behind the plow, and who remained as vital in their minds as they had ever been until the day we laid them in the ground. The years instead had withered Archie in the way a leaf will blacken from an unseen rot.
At first, when he approached me, there was part of me that almost felt the slightest twist of pity.
But then he began to speak, and all the vitriol spilled out, and there was no way not to see the danger he still posed to those unfortunate enough to fall under his power.
“She has made a grave mistake,” he told me. Patting the large pocket of his coat that I assumed held Maggie’s father’s letters, he said, “These will now be published, to the shame of Lily’s precious Graemes and the lass she holds so dear.”
“The lass you helped to raise,” I pointed out, “as you did help raise Lily. Do you not feel any bond of family?”
“Family”—Archie spat the word—“does not abandon ye.” His grim expression, in that moonlit corner of the church’s transept, was a thing unholy. “She will pay for that, as well.”
It was not lost upon me that we were now standing at the place where people long had paid their debts, and Archie’s ledger bore the names of countless souls he’d damaged. All the women who had suffered in that sad house in the Paunchmarket, and given up their dreams there. Simon, who could not come freely home but had to wander now in exile. Walter, whose own dreams of travel and of learning had all come to naught, and now lay buried in the South Leith churchyard with the bodies of his wife and bairn. Henry, with his broken body and his bitter memories, left alone in Riddell’s Close. Matthew, who, while he might have Lily, had to live with knowing he had not been there to help his brothers at the time when they’d most needed him. And Barbara, patient Barbara, who’d once bound them all together.