Lily heard metal scrape over the worn stone threshold. “Ye can hold his sword,” Baillie Spense said. “He’ll be in the Tolbooth.” And he told Jean something, quietly, that made her answer, “No!” and nearly fall against the doorframe so that he was forced to hold her up a moment.
“No,” she said again.
He said, “I’m sorry,” and he closed the door, and left them there in darkness.
Lily shivered as the sound of wailing filled the house a second time, but this time it was not the baby crying. It was Jean.
*
Once, Lily had been taken by a fever that had caught her brain and twisted time till everything was wrong, so sometimes things moved past her in a fog, and sometimes single moments rose up piercingly and sharp, like pins pricked through a silken fabric that was spilling on the ground in bright confusion.
The next few days felt just like that.
She held the kitten on her lap and soothed and sang to Bessie and she held the baby while Jean talked to all the people who came by. Some women came with food, and other women came with gossip—Jean would chase them off, or keep them in a corner, talking low, so Lily couldn’t hear. Three men came, too, at different times—friends of her father’s, from the town guard. One, whose name was Morison, stayed with them some nights, sleeping sitting upright in a chair beside the door. “To see ye’ll not have trouble,” he told Jean.
One morning Captain Graeme came, and he had Robin Moray with him. Robin looked like a young man now, even taller than his uncle. He stood quietly aside and let the others speak, but Lily noticed that his eyes were watchful. He was going to be a student of the law, Lily remembered. He was going to be a lawyer. Maybe then he’d help her father, because from what she was hearing, there were judges and the courts involved.
Jean shook her head. To the captain, she said, “He was plainly provoked. Watson called him a rascal, and other bad language besides. There are witnesses.”
“Not all the witnesses will take the part of a man of my guard.”
Jean had tears on her face. She wept often, these past few days. “What will I do? Captain, what will I do with the bairns? I can’t—”
“Hush, now.” He folded her into his arms. “Be brave.”
“I’m not brave.” Jean’s voice sounded small, muffled against Captain Graeme’s strong shoulder. “I can’t be.”
“Ye must be,” he said. “For the bairns.”
Bessie tugged at Captain Graeme’s leg and asked him, “Is my daddie well?”
Jean straightened from the captain’s arms and wiped her eyes. “Of course he is,” she answered Bessie. “And we’ll keep him so.”
“Why does he not come home? I want to see him now.”
Jean said, “We all do wish to see him, but he’s where we cannot visit.”
Lily knew that was not true. They’d said her father was now in the Tolbooth, and she knew that people in the Tolbooth, whether prisoners or soldiers, could have others come to visit them, but she knew it was impolite to contradict her elders. She said nothing.
Looking up, she found that Robin was now watching her. “What is the name of your kitten?” he asked.
“I’ve not named her yet.”
“It’s a boy kitten,” said Robin.
She gave him no answer, because in that curious way, time had twisted, and Robin was gone again, and in his place stood the soldier named Morison, looking out into the close.
Jean said, “She’s a bitter, vengeful woman. Others lose their husbands, and her man was in the wrong.”
“The captain did the best he could with her,” was Morison’s reply. “He offered money—a fair sum, I’m told, if she would let the matter drop, but she was having none of it. I’m sorry, Jean.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Jean rubbed her eyes. “Is it a good thing that the Earl of Errol now does have the judging of it, do ye think?”
“I cannot say. I ken the captain hopes the earl will be a fairer judge than would the Magistrates, but we will see. There’s little justice in the world for such as us.” A hard wind gusted through the close, and raised the dust in dancing swirls. “A good day,” he told Jean, “to be indoors.”
Lily was kept indoors now every day, and not allowed to go meet Jamie after school. “There’s too much danger in the streets,” was all that Jean would tell her. Lily looked toward the wall, to where her father’s sword hung in its sword belt, waiting on the peg, and thought she understood.