I could feel my jaw begin to set. “I can I assure you, I—”
“We are conducting an inquiry. She’s our subject. You’re attracted to her. She may try to use that,” Gilroy said, “to sway your judgment.”
No denial would have stood against those level eyes, so I did not deny it. But I did say, trying to hold back my irritation, “I don’t know what has made you so determined to assume the worst of Mrs. Graeme’s character.”
“I have my reasons.”
“Pray, what are they?”
For a moment, in the street, he faced me down in silence. Then he exhaled, hard.
And told me.
*
I must have been frowning, still, when I returned to the Turnbulls’ a short while later and stood at the windows, my back to the drawing room, looking down over the Landmarket, because Helen asked, “Is something wrong?”
I lied. “No.”
The man in the grey coat was back in his place at the entrance to Hamilton’s Close. No longer watching Lily now, but me. Or maybe, watching both of us.
Aiming for an idle tone, I asked, “What was the unrest in the street this morning?”
“A minor scuffle, but it blew up very quickly. It’s the Jacobites,” she said, “and all this talk of an invasion. It puts everyone on edge.”
“The Union has not helped.”
In surprise she asked, “You’re not against the Union?”
“I have no opinion of it. I’m a soldier. I do merely what I’m told, and take no part of politics.”
“That’s quite the safest course.” A pause, and then, “You’re sure there’s nothing wrong?”
I turned from the window. “No, all is well.”
“Good.” Her eyes were expectant. “And what did you think of my dinner?”
“Most pleasant.”
“She’d make a good match for you.”
I knew she meant Violet Young, so I made as noncommittal a sound in reply as I possibly could, then changed the topic to something more important. “Didn’t you say Mrs. Graeme came by because Gilroy had asked her to bring us her certificate of marriage?”
“Yes, that’s right. He said you had misplaced your copy, so you needed the original. I put it in the writing chamber,” Helen told me, “with the little books he brought from Leith.”
The copy books.
I glanced around. “Where is MacDougall?”
“I sent him out,” she said. “He is delivering a letter for me, to Sir Andrew Hume, my cousin.”
It took me a moment before I could place the name, given that two days had passed since she’d told me about him. “Your cousin who sits on the Commission of the Equivalent?”
“Yes. I thought it was best that I thank him directly for all of the trust the commission has put in my husband to lead this inquiry. With your help, of course. I did mention the same to his wife when I saw her on Tuesday, but one cannot always depend on a wife to pass on what was said, and MacDougall did tell me I could have as easily written a letter.” She shrugged. “It can do no harm.”
“No.” I was glad she had done it, not for the advancement it might offer Turnbull, but because it meant that MacDougall was not here and putting his nose into things that were none of his business. He did like to pry.
If he’d read the certificate, that would mean nothing. He’d learn little by it that he’d not already learnt from eavesdropping on our conversations. But knowing that he had been thumbing through Walter Browne’s copy book—I’d have disliked that. I would have felt I’d broken faith with the dead.
Even when I did it, carefully, sitting alone at the scrutore, it still seemed like an intrusion. I saw nothing in the pages of the copy book that struck me as unusual. I set it to the side.
The second copy book had not belonged to Walter. It was Lily’s.
This, I opened with some reverence, marking how the hand had altered from a childish scrawl to one more sure and strong. Sometimes when her attention wavered from her lessons, she had drawn small pictures in the margins—little houses, little birds, a ship with sails. And on a page toward the end, beneath a row of practiced flourishes, she’d drawn a tiny heart, crowned like the ones sold in the Luckenbooths, and signed her name above: Lilias Aitcheson. And in another hand below the heart was written: Matthew Browne.
I looked a long time at that heart, and felt my frown return as I remembered what Gilroy had told me in the street outside her lodgings.