And when the soldiers turned away, although she let her breath out in relief, she could not help but think that Matthew’s face looked disappointed.
*
Archie showed his disappointment, too, at having been deprived of any chance to use his influence in setting things to rights.
“I could have saved him,” said Archie. “The players at the table might have changed, but they do like their silver just as well as in the former government.”
Barbara said he should be glad he got to keep his silver this time, and he grudgingly agreed. But Lily knew it galled him, losing the advantage over Matthew that he might have gained by paying to settle his troubles.
With Archie, so Matthew had told her, there’s always a price.
Walter pointed out, “He didn’t need saving. No point arresting a man when half the town was there to witness that your soldier struck him first, and that what followed was no more than self-defense. I’m told the soldiers had been ordered only to recruit men from their regiments to go to fight in Flanders, not to press our local lads into forced service. And besides,” he added, “Henry is not yet of age for them to take. So they were three times in the wrong, and could do naught else but let Matthew walk a free man.”
Simon drily said he doubted that the soldiers would have left the Shore alive if they’d done otherwise. “I hear the crowd was not a very friendly one.”
“Well,” Barbara said, “how many of our lads have they now pressed, when they’ve been telt to stop? And I did hear they killed two men who did resist them. I thank God for putting Matthew where he was so that he could save Henry.”
Afterward, as they were scouring pots together in the kitchen, Barbara studied Lily’s downturned face. “It frightened ye to see that in him, didn’t it?”
Lily hesitated. Then she nodded. “It was like that day with Simon.”
Barbara understood. “It’s a thing that lies within them both. The difference is,” she said, “that Matthew kens the way to put it in his pocket and control it. He’d not harm ye.”
Lily was not sure.
Her heart still wanted him, and when he was close by her eyes still followed him, but now her mind put up a small, protective wall that made her more reserved. If Matthew noticed, he said nothing. He was busy with his work, and rarely came to Riddell’s Close. Nor did he often come to church.
The battle for their South Leith church had ended very bitterly, with Mr. Kay denied his last appeals, and final judgment coming down from his superiors in Edinburgh that he would have to yield his living to the Presbyterians, who now possessed the only legal church in Leith.
So now, in this new year, they found their roles again reversed, as they’d once been in the old Covenanting days—Episcopalians cast out, and Presbyterians triumphant.
It was not a pleasant change. Every Sabbath now, the searchers went throughout the parish with a zeal that none had seen before. They leapt back fences, entered houses when they did not get an answer to their knocking, searched in every nook and hiding place, to seek out those who were not at the service, or those who would break the Sabbath in unsanctioned ways by doing work.
Maggie started having nightmares.
Walter, for his conscience, now refused to go to church, and joined the Leithers who did walk upon the Links instead each Sabbath, and because his strength lay in his mind and not his arm, his elder brothers walked the Links beside him to protect him. Some weeks Simon went, and some weeks Matthew, and some both together.
Archie had no great regard for Presbyterians and only went to church himself to stay on their right side so he could keep his business flourishing, but by midsummer he was losing patience. “Walter’s costing me a fortune in his fines,” he said to Barbara. “Simon, too. I should just send him to the Bass if he’s a mind to be a Jacobite.”
Barbara laughed. She had a way of smoothing over Archie’s temper. “Ye’ll not send him to the Bass, don’t talk so foolish. There’s no profit in it.”
The Bass rock lay not far around the headland of the firth—a small and stony island with a castle fortress that for long years had proved useful as a prison. At the revolution, King William’s forces had made the fatal error of imprisoning four Jacobites within the castle, and when a supply ship came and all the soldiers were distracted, those four prisoners, in one gallant effort, seized the castle for themselves and sent the soldiers off the Bass in the supply ship.
Word had spread throughout the country, and to France. More men had joined the four, and through these past few years, the Bass—the final piece of Scotland where King James’s men still held out undefeated—had weathered a blockade by English ships sent by King William who could not abide to see them so defiant. Yet supplies crept through, with help from those on shore. Lily suspected there were several cellars here in Leith from which provisions for the Bass were loaded under cover of the night into small boats that could be rowed across beneath the notice of the English ships—a risky venture, and with very little profit to be made, as Barbara pointed out.