Lily found the sight this afternoon so all absorbing that she did not notice anyone approaching until Maggie gave a happy cry, tugged free of Henry’s hand, and took off running back along the pier.
“Mind how you go,” was Matthew’s warning, “else you’ll end up in the water, and I’ll have to borrow someone’s net to fish you out again.”
Maggie ignored him and stretched up both hands and asked him for his hat.
“Na, na,” he said, “you’ll not be wanting it the day. I’ve made it dirty.” But he gave her both his gloves, which made her satisfied, and holding her hands high she toddled proudly back to Henry.
Henry asked his brother, “Are the rest of them gone home?”
“Aye. And you’d do well to stay out here awhile longer, till their tempers cool. Our Walter proved himself to be a better shot than Simon, and it may end in a greater war than what these fools are sailing to.” He nodded at the English ships, and pulled his hat brim lower as a shield against the sunlight. “The word today was that King James’s men have landed already in England.”
Lily knew that, if they had, then Colonel Graeme was among those forces. Looking up at Matthew she asked, “Do ye think it’s true?”
He shrugged. “The story changes day to day. But I will grant he never seems to rest, King James. No matter how much parliament would wish to say that he gave up his crown, they cannot say he’s ever given up the fight to claim it back.”
Lily said, a shade defensively, “Why should he?”
Matthew turned his head, and angled a look down at her that seemed intrigued. “He may do what he likes. But in my view he’d have done better to have stayed in Scotland and fought here, not run away to France.”
Lily, in disagreement with his view of how King James had managed things, remembered Colonel Graeme’s teachings and applied them now in trying to explain. “He did not run away. ’Twas like a stalemate in a game of chess—he’d reached the end of play upon this board and saw no move that he could make that would not harm his people, so he did retreat and his opponent claimed the victory, but King James did lose a battle, not the war. Retreat means only that,” she said, “and he is yet alive.”
She watched while Matthew’s eyes warmed with a light she’d never seen before. He said, “You are a strategist.”
She could not hold that look for long. A breath, a blink, and then its force was broken and once more her gaze was focused on the moving sails. “I did have a good teacher.”
“And I think you’re secretly a Jacobite,” he said. “Like Walter.”
She did not confess to it, but held her silence, which seemed only to intrigue him more. He gave a quiet laugh, and Lily was the only one to hear it, because Henry had moved off with Maggie down the pier.
“What other secrets are you keeping?” Matthew asked.
She turned her head again at that, and braved those brown eyes. “Not as many as the rest of ye.”
“What are you on about?”
Lily asked, “Where is the house in the Paunchmarket?”
Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “How did you hear about—？”
“Barbara. But she wouldn’t go into details. And none of your brothers will, either.” She looked at him levelly. “I’m not so feeble that I’ll faint. I’d rather folk were honest.”
Matthew studied her a heartbeat longer, then he called to Henry, “We’ll not be a minute, I’m just taking Lily for a walk.”
He slowed his long steps to her shorter ones and kept himself between her and the water.
Lily noticed. Having spent a lifetime walking in the company of boys and young men, first up at Inchbrakie and now here, she had grown used to trailing after them or hurrying her pace. Not that she minded, but she found she liked this touch of grown-up chivalry.
The Paunchmarket curved from the Shore up to Tolbooth Wynd, holding a mix of old, elegant mansions and rougher new houses that rose tall against the late-afternoon sky. Here at its mouth, where it emptied out into the Shore, it was broad, but a short distance in it grew narrow and curved out of sight.
Matthew did not lead her into it. From where they stood upon the Shore, he nodded. “There,” he told her. “Third along, with the green door.”
It was not what she’d envisioned. “It looks like an ordinary house.”
“So does the one you’re now living in.”
Lily accepted that as a fair point. She asked, “How many women are in there?”