“Ye might have warned me,” Lily said.

“It’s been coming on awhile, this feeling. Like it’s me that’s fastened in the traces of that cart and not the horse, and pulling every day that weight around behind me for no purpose.”

Lily took those words as though they were a slap, and looked away herself, and Matthew cursed himself and said, “You’re not a part of that. You’re not. You give me purpose. But the rest of it…” He still could not explain it.

Barbara did a better job that evening, while she worked alone with Lily in the kitchen. “Since he was a bairn,” she said, “he’s aye been on the move. Our Walter, if he had a book, he’d stay in one chair all the day if ye would let him, happy as ye please, but never Matthew. Some days I’d put Matthew down and turn my back and he’d be off so fast…” She smiled, remembering. “These past years he’s been working at a job that holds him tightly to one place. He needs the space to run.”

Lily could accept that. Even understand that. But she did not like to see him leave.

Matthew kissed her deeply, as the proof his feelings had not changed. “I will be back afore you have a chance to miss me.”

But that was impossible.

She could not help but think of Barbara’s mariner, who’d promised to return and then been stolen by the sea.

The weeks stretched with no word, and when word finally came in June it left her desolate. Captain Gordon’s ship was captured by a privateer from France, and ship and crew were now held in that kingdom at the port of Brest awaiting judgment from their admiralty.

There was more waiting. Maggie’s nightmares worsened, and the little girl held tightly to her doll and feared the darkness and though Lily tried to comfort her by keeping up the readings from the History of Don Quixote, it did little but make Maggie mind the part where Don Quixote freed the galley slaves, which only made her fear the more for Matthew and the captain, for she knew that France had galleys.

Henry held his worries in so deeply he fell ill, and when he was recovered and could move about the house again he pushed his chair back from the table one morning and said to Maggie and to Lily, “Let’s go see the ships.”

And that was how they happened to be at the Shore the day Matthew returned.

Maggie saw him first. She ran the whole length of the pier, with Dolly flying like a yellow flag behind her. Matthew caught her up and swung her round and held her tightly, but his head stayed up, his gaze fixed over all the crowd of people, straight along the Shore to Lily.

Somehow she could not make her legs move, and it took him an age to reach them. Henry nearly knocked him over in a fierce embrace, and Lily might have done the same had Matthew’s eyes not warned her in the instant before Archie’s voice said lightly, just behind her, “So ye’re back then.”