Lily had questions, but she held them to herself because she’d noticed that beside the bed there was a newly empty place upon the wall. She swallowed down the hurtful words that tried to rise, knowing that Jean was struggling every day to make do with the money she had set aside—“against hard times, if they should come” had always been Jean’s reasoning if anyone had asked why she was saving pennies in days past, and Lily knew times were hard now. But still the empty place would need addressing, so she asked Jean, “Did ye sell my daddie’s sword?”
Jean looked stricken. “No. I’d never…” She looked briefly to the wall, then back at Lily, and when she spoke next her voice had calmed. “The damp here made it rust, so Corporal Morison has taken it for safekeeping. He knows the way to care for it. Wee James may wish to have it one day, for it still does carry honor.” Coming close, she smoothed the flying strands of Lily’s hair that had escaped their pins and curled about her cheek. “I’ll never sell it, Lily. I am not so desperate as all that, not with ye giving me your wages. And the ladies with the red booth in the Landmarket are paying me to knit them stockings they can sell on market days. We will be well.”
But it was now September and the colder days were coming and soon Bessie would be needing shoes, and Lily had these past weeks tried to better learn the price of household things, from clothes to coal. Without her father here, she knew, their winter would be difficult.
The booted footsteps sounding at that instant on the turnpike stair were so like his it made her heart jump hopefully. She’d turned before she knew she’d made the movement. But of course, it wasn’t him, and never would be.
Corporal Morison no longer stood on ceremony. Giving a brief knock, he did not wait for a reply but swung the door wide and ducked through the doorway of their lodgings. He made the room seem warmer with his cheerful ways. Like them, he had been in the market that morning, and carried a large, brown fish half-wrapped in paper.
“I’m not bringing charity,” he said to Jean, when she sent him a look. “It’s a Loch Leven trout. Oh, and these.” From his pocket, he drew out a handful of perfect, ripe plums. “Ye’d best eat them afore they turn rotten.”
Even had Jean been inclined to argue with him, it would have had no effect because he had already turned to give his full attention to the children. Bessie clambered on him as he sat, and perched upon his knee as if she were a lady riding sidesaddle and he, obligingly, held up a hand to be her reins and jounced and jigged her while reciting the rhyme he’d made up for her:
“Queen Bess rode north tae Inverness
Upon her dapple grey.
Her guardsmen all went tae their mess
And fetched the mare her hay.
The mare she liked the hay the best
And tossed the queen away!”
Here Bessie giggled as the corporal tossed her high into the air as though the “horse” had thrown her off. It had become their favorite game, and Bessie often made him do it over and over, but today the corporal set her gently on the floor and turned to Lily. “It’s good to see ye, lass. They’ve let ye out the day, I see.”
Jean said, “But we must have her back by suppertime. I would she had more time to rest, she looks too tired.”
“I’m not tired,” Lily told her, but Jean seemed to take no notice.
With a faint frown, Jean said to the corporal, “I’ve half a mind to bring her home again to live with us. The work’s too hard for one so young. What do you think?”
Corporal Morison looked steadily at Lily, who looked back at him. He said, “I think the lass kens her own mind.”
Lily decided that she liked him very much.
He said, “I did nearly forget, I have good news to tell ye. We captured your thieves in the small hours this morning. Two men and a lad, in the same clothes your housemaid described to our guardsmen, who caught them conducting their business in Hamilton’s Close.”
Jean thought it good news indeed. “It will be difficult for them to do their business from the Tolbooth.”
Corporal Morison agreed. “And still more difficult, I reckon, from the gallows.”
Lily frowned. She knew it was important to keep order in a town, and she had often heard her father say that laws and justice were things worth defending; but in her heart she could not help but feel that in her father’s case, justice had not been fair, which meant that not all men who lost their lives because of it deserved it.
She asked, “Will all of them be hanged?”