“It was a stalemate,” Captain Graeme told her. He had changed his clothes and was now in his uniform, and although she still heard the whispers and the murmurs from the shadows round them, she felt safe. “A stalemate means your king can make no move at all that does not put his life in danger, so he retreats, and his opponent claims the victory, but the king yet lives to fight another day.”
“But he has lost.”
The captain slanted a look down at her, and smiled. “To lose a single battle does not mean ye lose the war. And to retreat means only that. Surrendering is not within the nature of most kings.” He glanced up at the window of a house they were approaching, where someone had just begun to close the shutters, even though it was midday. “Nor in my own.”
Lily held more tightly to her coin, and Captain Graeme told her, “Never fear, lass. It’s a good town, this. Good people all around ye, if ye look for them.”
That was the very opposite of what her father had advised, but then her father had not lived to tell her how to know a lawless man, so she asked Captain Graeme now, “How do ye ken which men are good?”
“Not only men,” he said. “All people. And ye ken them by their actions, not by what ye might hear said of them. Ye watch what someone does when it will gain him nothing, Lily, and when none but ye is there to see him do it. Then ye’ll ken his truest heart.”
She thought about that, after he had handed her to Jean and she had watched him walk away from them with that same sure and even soldier’s stride that raised quick memories of her father.
And she thought about it later on that evening, while Jean worked to ready supper and wee James began to fuss, and Corporal Morison took up the bairn and walked with him, out in the fresh air of the close.
He stayed outside so long that Lily pressed her face against the window, looking for a glimpse of them, and saw the great, tall soldier making silly faces to her baby brother, so the bairn would laugh. There was no one around to see him doing it—or so he thought. There was just Corporal Morison and wee James in the close.
That night, when Lily went to bed, she murmured, “Jean?”
“Aye?”
“Corporal Morison’s a good man.”
Jean said nothing. Only kissed her, very softly, tucked the blankets warm around her, and the small, low-ceilinged chamber that held Lily’s family slumbered into darkness.
Chapter 7
Tuesday, 23 September, 1707
I was alone with Robert Moray.
He had engineered it neatly, asking Gilroy to take Mrs. Graeme up into the open air and daylight. “You can leave me pen and paper, though,” he’d said, “that I might write my wife, to let her know that I am well. She will be worried.”
Gilroy had complied, and Moray, thanking him, had told him, “Sergeant Williamson can wait to take the letter.”
So I’d waited.
It was plain that I intrigued him, but he was too much a gentleman to step beyond the common questions. As he inked the pen, he asked me, “Are ye married?”
“No.”
“I recommend it, though I am not sure my wife would do the same. I fear I rob her of her peaceful sleep, most nights.” He smiled. “I daresay working every day with Gilroy might have much the same effect upon ye.”
“You have known him long?”
“Let’s say I know him well enough to find him most predictable.”
“Yet he surprised you.”
“Did he?” Robert Moray glanced up from his letter. “When was that?”
“When he asked you about your brother John,” I said, “and then your uncle. You did seem surprised that he would ask about them. Why?”
He looked at me briefly, the same way he’d looked at Gilroy, then bent once again to his writing and said, “The more interesting question is, why did the commissioners decide on this inquiry? They could simply have dismissed it outright for a lack of evidence. Why go to all this trouble, and in private? You’ll agree it is unusual.”
I caught that ball and held it for a moment, not quite certain what to do with it. “Perhaps, but surely…what would anybody stand to gain by it?”
He looked at me. “At least ye have the wit to ask the question.”
In the pause that followed, I thought he might be about to give me his views on the matter. But he didn’t.
Sitting back, he asked, “How did ye come to be put at the head of this inquiry?”
I couldn’t tell if he was questioning my qualifications or simply being curious, but I reacted the same way I’d always done when challenged. Squaring my shoulders, I said, “Lord Grange employed my friend Lieutenant Turnbull for this post, but the lieutenant’s out of town. It was agreed, as a favor, that I should stand in as his surrogate.”