“It is still readable. Besides, it has good information on the use of witnesses and oaths, which I can use to educate myself.”
Something betrayed me in my tone, because her eyes grew sympathetic. “A man’s worth is not measured, Adam, by his education. What has happened in your inquiry today that you think otherwise?”
I had not spoken of the morning’s interview with Helen yet. She had dined out with friends, and had retired to rest on her return, so I had supped alone tonight and gone out for my walk, and this was now the first occasion I had found to tell her what had happened when we’d taken Mrs. Graeme to meet Robert Moray in his prison chamber at the castle.
I did not share everything. I did not tell her Mrs. Graeme’s private history, for as much as I liked Helen I recalled her judgment of Lord Grange’s wife, whose father had been hanged for murder. “The stain of an act like that cannot be easily washed from a bloodline,” so Helen had told me, and while I believed her wrong, I knew she’d alter the way that she viewed Mrs. Graeme if she knew the whole of the story. Instead, I described Robert Moray, and how I thought him impressively clever.
Helen’s shrug was elegant. “Cleverness alone is not a mark of virtue. My father was a writer to the signet, and the men he moved among were men of knowledge, some of whom you’d no doubt count as clever—but that did not make them good men.”
I thought of the tale I’d heard that morning—Mrs. Graeme as a wee girl asking Captain Graeme how she was to know which men were good, and his reply that she would know them by their actions, if she watched what someone did when it would gain him nothing, and when none was there but her to see him do it. “Then ye’ll ken his truest heart,” the captain had assured her.
And I thought of how she’d later watched the corporal through the window when he did not know she saw him, and how she’d then told her stepmother the corporal was a good man.
Helen asked, “What is it?”
“Sorry?”
“You seem far away.”
I had been far away, in fact, by many years. “I was but committing your words to my memory,” I told her, and covered my slip with a smile.
“Oh.” She looked pleased. “Well, they’re true. Robert Moray may have the advantage of his birth and breeding but the defects of his family’s faith and politics will always count against him.” To my questioning look she explained, “They are Episcopalian, and Jacobites, and keep to their own kind.”
I had come to strike a bargain in my life with God, in which He left me fairly to my own devices in return for my assurance I would do my best to keep my feet upon the path He had laid out for me. I’d fought too many men of different faiths to think that men were any different when they bled, or that the God they prayed to at the end was truly different from my own.
But Helen Turnbull, being younger and not having seen what I had seen of life, apparently was stricter in her views, and saw the world divided. I did not dispute with her. I said only, in a light tone, “You seem very well informed.”
“You and Gilroy have your own investigations. I have mine.” She smiled. “After you left this morning, I decided that I ought to pay a call upon Sir Andrew Hume, my cousin. And before you tell me I should not be going out in my condition, you may spare yourself the effort. I’ve already had a lecture from MacDougall.”
Her manservant, just entering the room, looked over at the mention of his name and took the liberty to answer. “’Tis a risk ye should not take. There are yet tumults in the streets. Ye might take fright, and then the bairn would bear the mark of what had frighted ye. Aside from which, ye’re vulnerable to witchcraft at this time.”
If anything was giving her a fright, it was MacDougall. I could see the smallest waver of uncertainty unsettle Helen’s features, and I sought to lay her doubts to rest.
I teased her, “Were there any witches at your cousin’s home?”
It worked. Her smile returned. “I don’t believe so, although I did not examine all his servants. I see him but rarely,” she confessed. “His father is the Earl of Marchmont, so they move in social circles higher than my own. But since my cousin also sits as one of the commissioners in charge of the Equivalent, I thought it only right that I should thank him for this favor they have shown us in the case of Mrs. Graeme’s claim.”
MacDougall, bent at the hearth and busy banking up the fire with ashes for the night, remarked that Helen could have thanked her cousin in a letter and thus saved herself the need to venture out into the streets.