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.