This was not the moment to indulge in sentiment.
MacDougall found me now within the writing chamber, putting things to rights. I turned.
He faced me with the same distrust. I knew it did not matter to him that I had worked diligently in his master’s place on the inquiry, given Turnbull all the credit, asked for none. Men like MacDougall went through life expecting to see nothing but the worst in men, and so became blind to the good.
He studied me with narrowed eyes. “Ye’re nearly finished, then?”
He wanted me to leave the room. To leave the house. To leave their lives.
I gave a nod and said, “Time I was gone.”
MacDougall grunted. “Ye’ve a visitor.”
I couldn’t think who…？
Gilroy thanked MacDougall. Stepped around him, and dismissed him. He was carrying his file of papers, neatly tied.
I thought I understood how Robert Moray must have felt when I’d surprised him in his prison chamber at the castle that last morning, and, like him, I felt a moment’s urge to simply sigh and ask, “What now?”
But I did not. I greeted Gilroy with a patience that I did not feel.
He said, “I’ll try not to detain you, for I hear you have a ship to meet, but this might be important.”
“Please.” I indicated he should take the seat before the scrutore.
He closed the door behind him, so that we could talk in private. “It is about the man in grey who stood within the entrance to the close across the street, perhaps you noticed him? Well, Mrs. Graeme noticed him, the one day we did walk her home, but she seemed keen that we did not, which made me wonder whether Matthew Browne might have returned. For, as you know, I’ve always felt she was not doing this alone.”
He set his papers on the writing surface of the scrutore and untied the file.
“I asked my stabler friend in Leith what he remembered about Matthew Browne,” he said, “specifically. And then I did some research of my own.”
Gilroy, with everything prepared now, turned his head to me, and even having worked with him so short a time I knew from his expression he had made a new discovery.
He said, “I believe you might be very interested in what I’ve found.”
*
There was a candle in the window of the house in Riddell’s Close. I hesitated for a moment, then I raised my fist and knocked a single time upon the door.
The night wind rose against my back and chased the ghosts along the dark curve of the narrow close, with all its waiting, blackly watching windows.
And then the door swung open.
Framed within the warmly golden light stood Lily.
I forgot the cold.
She wore a petticoat and bodice in a print of orange flowers and green vines—not new, but kept with care—and I had never seen her look more beautiful. Her eyes searched my expression and she offered an uncertain smile.
Behind her in the passage I saw Henry, standing near the door to the front room. And coming down the staircase was a tall and well-built man I would have recognized even without the grey cocked hat and coat, who surged toward me now as Gilroy stepped out from the shadows just behind me.
Swiftly, I moved as a shield in front of Gilroy, and I told my brother Simon, “It’s all right. He knows.”
VII
I must go back, I’ve missed a step, and you will be confused.
When Gilroy came to see me earlier at Caldow’s Land and faced me in the writing chamber, with his papers ready on the surface of the scrutore, I did have a fair idea what was coming next.
He’s like a bulldog with investigations, Robert Moray warned me, and I’d several times seen wheels and gears at work behind his level gaze, and known that he was piecing things together.
There were wheels and gears at work as he set out his papers on the scrutore, but he kept his eyes down as he started.
“Let me tell you what I’ve learnt of Matthew Browne. My friend the stabler nearly did not speak of him, because he says it’s one of the most tragic tales he knows.”
I felt the old house settle round us, all the beams and floorboards creaking with the weight of years as if it were a burden to be borne.
Gilroy went on, “The stabler holds it bad enough the foundling lads were brought to Riddell’s Close by Archie Browne not from compassion, but to be raised there as criminals. But this”—he handed me a two-paged document—“the stabler calls an even greater crime.”
It was the copy of a transcript from a trial, from autumn, 1685, for house-breaking and common theft.
“Matthew,” Gilroy told me, “would have been but twelve years old when he was put on trial for that. The two men tried with him were known and hardened thieves. The stabler could not say why Archie Browne had trusted Matthew to them in the first place, but there was some talk that Barbara Malcolm had been giving thought to taking all the boys and leaving Archie, and that Archie might have wanted Matthew to be caught and punished to show Barbara there would be a price to pay if she tried to break free.”