“Couldn’t tell ye.” The fire had burned low and the coals needed stirring but I knew Henry’s pride would not welcome my help, so I sat in my chair on my side of the study and watched him lean forward and take up the poker himself. His attention on that, he reminded us he’d told us all he could about his family.
Gilroy said, “But you seemed very close, in those days.”
Henry’s breath escaped through tightened lips. “Have ye a mother?”
“Aye.”
“And is she living?”
“Aye.”
“Ours died,” said Henry, sitting back into his chair, as if no other answer need be given. But at length he gave one. “If ye’ve ever watched a wheelwright at his work, ye ken he does it from the center out. Well, Archie was our nave, like, at the center, and the rest of us were spokes, but we had Barbara to encircle us, to bind us all together. Make us function as a unit. When she died”—he made a motion with his hands—“it was like this, ye ken? It all just came apart.” For that one moment it was possible to see the man he had once been, before the world had made him hard. And then he sniffed and said, “Mind, we were older then. We had our work.”
There seemed to be no sentiment in Gilroy. He did not say he was sorry for the death of Barbara Malcolm, but instead went straight to facts. “What work did Walter do?”
“He was a maltman,” Henry said, “until he grew too fond of drink himself and one night fell into the harbor on his way home from a tavern.”
I had wanted to ask Henry how he had been injured, but till now I had not seen an opening. Now I attempted, casually, “And what was your trade?”
His eyes were guarded. “Me? I was a carter, Sergeant Williamson.”
“Hard work.”
“Aye. Even harder when the horse gets spooked and backs the cart up over ye.” His mouth curved, grimly. “Doctor said I ought to count my blessings that it didn’t break my spine. It broke near every other bone. Leastways it felt like it.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Why should ye be sorry? Ye weren’t here.” To Gilroy he said, “Leave me a receipt for those. I’ll want them back.”
His mind had not been broken by the accident at least. His sharpness showed in how he read the paper Gilroy wrote and handed him, acknowledging that we’d borrowed the copy books and would return them when we’d finished using them. Taking up his wooden stave from where he’d set it by his chair, Henry pushed himself with difficulty to his feet and filed the receipt on the writing table.
I stood, too, and would have been content to leave him then.
But Gilroy had another question. “You said Lily mentioned knowing Colonel Patrick Graeme, late of the town guard of Edinburgh. Did you ever see him at the house, or any of his family?”
Henry looked at Gilroy as though half suspecting he was mad. “No.”
“Never? Think now, very carefully. You never saw his son?”
“Can’t say I kent he ever had one.”
“So if someone had claimed that Lily married onto Colonel Graeme’s son while she was living here, what would you say to that?”
The answer Henry gave was a surprise. He laughed. A true, deep laugh that changed his features. Made them young. “I’d say whoever claimed that had been drinking.”
“Why?”
“Because if anybody else had even tried to look at Lily while she lived here,” he said, “Matthew would have murdered him, that’s why.”
I could see Gilroy thinking backward. “Matthew…that was your lost brother, yes? The one that ran away?”
“Aye, well. He came back when it suited him,” said Henry. “The point is, once he did, Lily’d have never seen another man. She was Matthew’s lass, for then and always.”
Gilroy said, “I see. And what was Matthew’s trade? What did he do?”
The pause stretched long. “My brother Matthew was whatever ye had need of him to be, except dependable. And if ye have a mind to ask me where he is, ye’ll waste your time, because I cannot answer ye.” He glanced at me, and something that he saw in my expression must have warned him that what he’d just told us hadn’t been of help to Lily Aitcheson, because he frowned and told us both, “Don’t let me keep ye, gentlemen. I’ve blethered on enough, and there’s naught else that I can tell ye.”
It had not been the most gracious nor most comfortable of interviews, but still I felt a sense of loss when we had been dismissed from what small warmth remained within that house, and stood instead upon the stones of Riddell’s Close at the full mercy of the bitter wind. I was grateful for that wind. We could not talk above it, so we rode in silence back to Edinburgh and I was spared the need to hide the way those words of Henry’s had affected me, when he’d revealed that Lily had been Matthew’s lass.