*
Barbara saw before anyone else did.
She told Lily, “Best not let Archie see that ye like Matthew.”
They were in the kitchen and Lily was glad of the heat from the hearth since it gave an excuse for the warmth that rose instantly into her cheeks. “Ye’re seeing things.”
“Aye, I ken fine what I’m seeing. Ye might as well hand him your heart and be done with it.”
Lily knew there was no point in denying it. “If I did, he wouldn’t take it,” she said, certain. “He doesn’t look at me in the same way.”
Barbara reached to touch Lily’s cheek. “I see the way that he looks at ye.”
Lily stopped work for a moment and, turning her head, looked at Barbara, who told her, “They put Matthew into my arms when he was but a few days old, and I can tell when there’s something he wants—sometimes even before he has reasoned it out for himself. Give him time. Matthew doesn’t trust easily. And he’ll be trying to keep ye from harm. Which is why, as I say, ye should guard how ye’re feeling from Archie.”
Lily was very aware of the tension that stretched between Archie and Matthew when they were together, but hearing this warning from Barbara now made her take notice. Barbara did not make such comments lightly.
Taking a firmer grip on her knife, Lily went back to her chopping. “Why? What would Archie do?”
She had become accustomed to the pattern of their talks and knew that pauses were to be expected, but when she had finished with the carrot and an onion and scraped both into the broth that simmered on the hearth, and still no answer came, she turned again in puzzlement.
Barbara seemed to be thinking, her gaze fixed on the fire while with an absent touch she twisted the plain, narrow band of silver that she wore upon her finger as a wedding ring.
Suddenly she said to Lily, “Leave that now, and come with me.”
The lovely back parlor was Barbara’s domain, and with the door closed behind them nobody would dare intrude. They could speak privately.
The bedstead lay concealed behind its curtains. Barbara drew the chairs around to make a cozy pairing so they faced each other close before the fireplace and the painting of the sea at sunrise.
Barbara breathed deeply. “When I was sixteen, as ye are now, I met a young man who was…well, ye might say he was my Matthew. In all my life I had never met anyone like him, ye ken? Just a mariner. Nobody grand or important,” she said, “but to me, he was everything.” This pause was shorter, as she gazed up at the painting. “I was in love, and I was careless, and I fell with child. I was so frightened, Lily, I can feel it still, here like a fist around my heart. I had no parents, they were gone, and I felt certain that my mariner would leave and find another lass. But no, he wished to marry me.” Her faint smile was a window, briefly opened, to her younger self, when life was full of promise. Barbara turned her hand to show the silver ring. “He gave me this, to seal his pledge, and promised we’d be married when he did return from his next voyage. But his ship…well, he did not return. There was a storm, ye see.” The breath she drew this time was less than steady, and it held regret. “So there I was, alone and with a bairn inside me, and ye ken what the church does when they discover that.”
Lily said, “Aye.” She’d seen enough young women made to stand in misery upon the place of penitence, to be shamed there in public by the minister in front of all the congregation.
Barbara said, “Then Archie comes along and says that he can fix it all, and make my problem go away. And, God forgive me, I agreed upon his terms.”
Archie, she told Lily, had been as good as his word. He’d sent her to a woman in the Canongate—the same woman who’d later cared for Barbara’s sister Margaret when it had come time for her confinement—and she’d stayed there till the bairn was born. “Then I came down with all the proper documents to say that I’d been married onto Archie up at Edinburgh, and our bairn baptized, and we presented all of this to Mr. Cant and did receive his blessing.”
Lily was not sure she’d heard right. “Mr. Cant?”
“Aye. He was minister at South Leith then. He moved on to the Trinity Church up in town, but not afore he gave me my four boys.”
Lily, in memory, saw the smiling face of Mr. Cant, and minded how he’d been so kind that day at Colonel Graeme’s when he’d bought her kitten. Strange how life wove threads among the people that you met, and bound them into unforeseen designs.