Lily felt a moment’s freedom that was quickly doused by her awareness of the quiet of the close and of the windows looking down on her, behind which might be any number of reproving eyes. She briskly began walking toward Tolbooth Wynd. She had not gone far when a familiar voice asked, “Where are you away to?”

Lily jumped a little, startled.

Matthew had been leaning in the narrow arching entrance to a passage between two of the old houses just across the close. She might have walked straight past him if he had not spoken.

“To the Links, to look for Walter,” she said. “What are ye doing lurking there?”

“Not lurking,” he corrected her. “And Walter isn’t at the Links. He’s gone to Mr. Kay’s house, for the private sermon there.”

“I see.” She did not wish to go to any sermon. Not today. But it would not be safe to walk alone. “Is Simon with him?”

“Aye.” He straightened from the wall. “But I can take you to the Links, if you are not afraid of me.”

She meant to tell him in a calm, collected tone, that she was not afraid, but when she met his eyes it all got jumbled somehow, and the words came out as they had done when she had been a child up at Inchbrakie: “I’m no feart.”

She’d missed his smile. She’d missed the way he lightly touched her back when they began to walk. Now, she got both.

Chapter 22

Sunday, 29 April, 1694

The Links were fairly empty, since no one could play the golf upon the Sabbath and the only people here were those who, like themselves, were not at church. The searchers could not catch them all, out here. The space was simply too broad, stretching for a mile or more with ample hills to hide behind and access to the town and sea.

She was, for once, glad of the care she had taken in dressing. She wore one of Barbara’s old gowns, Lily’s favorite—the same gown that Barbara had worn on the day Lily first came to live here, the brown one—made over to fit her, the sleeves turned up over her elbows to show the white ruffles of her linen shift underneath. She’d also, because she was hurrying, taken up Barbara’s old hat from the peg by the door in the place of her own, and not realized it until she’d settled it over her lace pinner and seen the edge of an ivory plume over the straw brim. It was a grand hat. Lily liked it immensely, though she hoped the plume would survive the strong winds that were rising this morning, out here on the Links.

It was one with her mood, that wind, wildly unsettled. The gulls sought to ride it in high, soaring circles, but even they wobbled and gave up the effort and aimed their flight over the sea. And however the sun might be trying to shine, the wind chased clouds in front of it so that the sky was a blanket of grey, dull and surly.