Marion and Lily pressed their faces to the window for a while and watched those horses, and they waved to Mr. Bell when he passed by below them on his way to take an evening walk around the village before sleeping.
But soon sleep was tugging at them, too, and following the lead of Mrs. Bell they climbed into their own bed in the chamber and, as she had done, drew their bed-hangings round to block the drafts, and that was all that Lily knew until she was awakened by a light touch on her shoulder.
It was dark, save for the moonlight slanting through the window glass in patterned squares upon the floor, but Mr. Bell whispered her name so she’d know it was only him and she should not be afraid. “I need you to come light me down to the stables.”
Half-wakened, she struggled to sit, trying not to wake Marion. “I will get dressed.”
“There is no need.” He held her plaid and hood in one hand. “With these, you’ll be warm enough. There will be none to see you in the stables, and we’ll not be long.”
She’d kept her stockings on in bed beneath her shift, for it was cold, and she was glad of that as she fastened on her shoes and wrapped the plaid warmly around her and tied on her blue hood and followed him.
Outside their chamber in the passage on a hook there hung a candle lantern like the one the robber boy had carried that night in the kitchen, a dark lantern with its metal door full open to let out the light, and a curved handle set into its side so that it could be carried. Mr. Bell removed it from the hook and handed it to Lily, and she walked beside him, lighting his way through the inn and out into the courtyard, where he spoke more freely, though his tone stayed hushed.
“I do believe I dropped my shop keys,” he said, “in the stables, and I will not sleep unless I find them.”
Lily helped him look. The horses lifted lazy heads above their stalls and watched while Mr. Bell, with Lily holding up the lantern for him, made a study of the stable floor until he reached a wooden bench and told her, “Set your lantern down a moment. Let us rest. It’s cold.”
He sat, and she sat next to him, and with one arm he drew her close as though to keep her warm, but his hand did not seek her shoulder. It went lower, underneath her plaid, and firmly cupped the small curve of her breast beneath her shift.
She froze in shock, and fear.
Without a word he turned to her and pressed his mouth to hers, lips moist against her own, tongue seeking entry.
Lily could not move.
He raised his head and smiled. “My bonny Lily, with your bonny hood that makes your eyes so blue. I will be gentle. I—”
But he was interrupted by the clatter of a horse’s hooves against the cobbles of the courtyard, and before Lily could fathom what was happening, he’d set her on her feet again and he was standing at her side, respectably.
The man who rode into the stables greeted him as if they were good friends of long acquaintance. “I did not expect to find you here,” the stranger said, “but we must wake the landlord, if he is not yet awake, and have him bring us wine and bread, for I have been too long over the water and have many tales to tell.”
“My lass will light us back,” said Mr. Bell, and Lily in a kind of stupor took the lantern in her hand again and did so, and when they had reached the inn’s door Mr. Bell took up her other hand and pressed a coin into her palm and said, “Now, run back up to bed,” and left her standing in the entry.
*
She did not go back to bed.
She did not afterward remember how she made her way down to the loch, but there she was, the lantern in her hand and in her other hand the coin that Mr. Bell had paid her, feeling now so warm against her skin she thought for certain it would burn her.
Jean said whores took money from a man for giving pleasure to him, and that it was wrong, and they were wicked.
“I’d chase her to the gutter where she does belong, and she could take her fancy clothes and false smiles there to try to turn men’s heads,” so Jean had said, and Lily thought of Mr. Bell and how he liked her velvet hood, and how he had remarked on it so many times, and how she’d often smiled at him, and how he must have somehow taken all that as an invitation to do what he did. Because why else would he have done it, unless somehow she’d invited him? Unless she were a whore?
The coin—she did not know what kind of coin it was—burned hotter still within her hand, and in a sudden movement Lily threw it out across the ice. The small, metallic clatter raised a movement to her left.
The swans.
They huddled ghostly pale on their unfrozen strip of water not far out from shore. Except one swan had ventured farther from the rest, and stealthily the night had closed new ice around it, holding it in place so it could not rejoin the others.