“Ye did promise to let her alone.”

Archie’s answer was equally sharp. “The lass wishes to learn. She is clever.”

“Aye, that’s what ye said about Matthew.”

The pause was unpleasant. Then Archie said, “Matthew was always impatient.”

“And whose fault is that? They are bairns, Archie. Let them be such.”

Barbara didn’t slam doors. But the latches clicked firmly as she left the chamber next door and came into their own.

Lily lay in the bed, watching Barbara and thinking of what she’d just said. It made Lily think of her grandmother telling folk up at Inchbrakie, who thought Lily ought to work more and play less, that they ought to let her keep her childhood; and how Lily thought that was silly, because surely no one could take it. Yet hers had been taken that day in the Trinity Churchyard. She wasn’t a bairn anymore.

Barbara slid into bed.

Lily said, “Barbara?”

“Aye?”

“I truly do wish to learn to write better.”

The sigh was a small one, admitting defeat. Barbara turned so her back rested warm against Lily’s. “All right, then,” she said.

* * *

Lily paid attention to her lessons and she practiced in her copy book, and by the start of the third summer, she was more advanced than all the boys.

“I’m taller than ye, anyway,” said Henry, claiming that small victory, even if he could not match her skills.

Simon was tallest, having shot up to the full height of a man seemingly overnight, though he was but fourteen. Walter, smaller and swift, would provoke him the way someone might bait a bear, stepping lightly to one side when Simon’s fists swung.

Barbara told Walter, “Ye’ll do that one time too often and wish that ye hadn’t.” To Simon, she added, “And ye needn’t dance to his piping. Ye do have a brain.”

Walter smirked at his brother. “His brain’s not that big.”

Simon’s hand moved so fast that they none of them saw it till Walter lay flat on the floor.

“See now, what did I tell ye?” said Barbara, and sighed as she helped Walter stand. “Shake hands and be done with it, that’s right. And try to behave, will ye? I’ve got a friend coming.”

When Barbara’s friends came to visit she saw them alone in the parlor which lay at the back of the house, with its own private door to the yard so that visitors could come and go without having to walk through the front rooms.

The parlor was always kept ready for guests. Chairs sat waiting to welcome them under a framed picture of a perpetual sunrise at sea. Should they wish to stay longer and spend the night, there was a bedstead against the far wall by the fireplace, with curtains drawn around it, but the friends who came to visit Barbara usually stayed no more than an hour or so and then departed. Sometimes they took ale or wine, but Barbara always saw to that herself, just as she always cleaned the parlor without needing Lily’s help. “There are too many things in this room,” she’d said once, “that are breakable.”