I could feel my grin, I couldn’t help it. “We’re not so mysterious,” I promised her. “We may play more roughly, and lead with our fists when words would do, but I assure you that our feelings are the same as yours and run as deep.”

Both women looked at me with softened eyes, and Helen asked me, “Truly?”

“Aye.” Deliberately I pulled my gaze from Lily’s and told Helen, “If you had a son, you’d no doubt find him a devoted one.”

“You give me hope,” she said. “If I could know they would all be like you, then I would happily have only sons.”

Lily smiled. “My husband’s mother had all boys, and was content.”

I saw my opening. “You also said your husband had a cousin, Margaret Graeme. What became of her?”

It was a gamble. Lily would be well aware she’d never mentioned Maggie to us during the inquiry—I could see her searching backward through her memory now, confirming this—which would have made her wonder why I’d asked the question in that way. I only hoped she’d realize I had phrased it so that she could speak of Maggie without having to reveal, in front of Helen, any details of her life in Leith. She need not mention Barbara Malcolm, nor the house in Riddell’s Close, nor any of the—

“You mean Maggie.” Lily met my gaze with level eyes that knew exactly what my game was, but her light tone betrayed nothing of the kind. “She teaches music at a school nearby for daughters of good families.”

That surprised me. “Music?”

“Yes. She is accomplished on the virginals, and also sings most sweetly.”

I was trying to imagine where young Maggie Graeme, with her background, would have learnt such arts as those, but I could think of no way to ask Lily without being indiscreet.

Helen said, “I have always wished that I could play as well as others do, but I have not the patience nor the ear for it, I fear.”

Lily commiserated, “Nor do I. But Maggie always loved to sing, and we did live for several years near Greenock with a kind woman who saw Maggie’s love of music and arranged for her to take her lessons at the great house there.”

I asked her, “Was that also where they had the garden?”

“Yes. It was an old one, and there were so many trees.” She said that with a wistfulness that puzzled me until I called to mind she’d spent her early years at play within the woods of Abercairney and Inchbrakie up in Perthshire, and as glad as she had been to come down here to join her father and the Graemes, trading open skies for ones framed always by a crowded line of rooftops would be difficult. It must have been a loss to leave the landscape of her childhood.

“It was a happy place,” she said. “But sadly, my employer died in March. It was not unexpected. She’d been ill for some time. And she’d very kindly written to a friend of hers who kept a school here, recommending Maggie as a teacher, so…” She spread her hands, a gesture that was all at once resigned and grateful. “It’s not been a terrible transition.”