Henry looked at Gilroy as though half suspecting he was mad. “No.”

“Never? Think now, very carefully. You never saw his son?”

“Can’t say I kent he ever had one.”

“So if someone had claimed that Lily married onto Colonel Graeme’s son while she was living here, what would you say to that?”

The answer Henry gave was a surprise. He laughed. A true, deep laugh that changed his features. Made them young. “I’d say whoever claimed that had been drinking.”

“Why?”

“Because if anybody else had even tried to look at Lily while she lived here,” he said, “Matthew would have murdered him, that’s why.”

I could see Gilroy thinking backward. “Matthew…that was your lost brother, yes? The one that ran away?”

“Aye, well. He came back when it suited him,” said Henry. “The point is, once he did, Lily’d have never seen another man. She was Matthew’s lass, for then and always.”

Gilroy said, “I see. And what was Matthew’s trade? What did he do?”

The pause stretched long. “My brother Matthew was whatever ye had need of him to be, except dependable. And if ye have a mind to ask me where he is, ye’ll waste your time, because I cannot answer ye.” He glanced at me, and something that he saw in my expression must have warned him that what he’d just told us hadn’t been of help to Lily Aitcheson, because he frowned and told us both, “Don’t let me keep ye, gentlemen. I’ve blethered on enough, and there’s naught else that I can tell ye.”

It had not been the most gracious nor most comfortable of interviews, but still I felt a sense of loss when we had been dismissed from what small warmth remained within that house, and stood instead upon the stones of Riddell’s Close at the full mercy of the bitter wind. I was grateful for that wind. We could not talk above it, so we rode in silence back to Edinburgh and I was spared the need to hide the way those words of Henry’s had affected me, when he’d revealed that Lily had been Matthew’s lass.

For then and always, he had said. There was no way that Henry could have known Lily’s mind, nor yet her heart. The fact that she’d once loved his brother did not mean she had not loved James Graeme, too, and married him. And I, of course, had no right to feel jealousy. No right at all.

And yet, it had affected me.

For Gilroy, it would only be more reason to suspect her of attempting to deceive us, even though she’d plainly told us she and James had kept their marriage secret from most people. Henry very well might not have known.

It was true she had not told us anything of Matthew Browne, but then we had not asked her, and the act of leaving spaces in one’s narrative is not the same as telling lies.

Or so I told myself.