Lily said, “You may be waiting a long time, considering the terms of peace.” The ink was barely dry upon the treaties lately signed to end the war with France, and one of the conditions that had been agreed to was that the French king should recognize King William as the rightful British monarch, and deny King James. This had come as a great blow to the Jacobites, and must have been an insult to King James as well, considering the French king was his cousin.

Gordon shrugged. “Peace rarely lasts, and treaties are but words on paper. King William is not well liked and has no children, so I’ll wager before long the throne will pass to Princess Anne,” he said. “And she’s a Stewart.”

Maggie was not interested in politics. “You did forget the two new ships at Burntisland.” She’d been obsessed with those ships since the first of them, the Caledonia, had slipped in upon the tide last week, resplendent in her show of red and gold and blue, the wind filling the sails on her three tall masts as she fired the forward-mounted cannon in her bow to hail the townspeople. When she had first been spotted in the firth, the word had spread, so there’d been time enough for Lily to bring Maggie to the pier to watch the great ship gliding past, and to hear that cannon, and to hear it answered by the booming guns of Edinburgh’s great castle, high atop its rock.

The second of the ships, arriving yesterday, might well have been the first one’s twin.

“Why are they both so big?” asked Maggie.

“Well,” said Captain Gordon, “those belong to our own African Company.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, in full it’s called ‘the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies,’ but that’s far too long to say in conversation, would you not agree? Aye, so would I. So then, our African Company is a brave new venture with an aim to raise our country to the level of the English and the Dutch—both of those countries have rich companies that trade to the East Indies and to even farther shores where there are markets for their goods. And,” he told Maggie, “they have colonies.”

She asked him, “What’s a colony?”

He had to think about the definition. “It’s a small piece of your own country that you plant in a far-off land” was what he finally settled on. “You build up towns, and farms, and roads, and people go to live there.”

“What if someone’s living there already?”

“If you have enough men, you could always take the land by force. That’s what the Dutch did at Batavia and their other colonies in the East Indies.”

Maggie disapproved. “That is not nice.”

“No, you’re right, it’s not.” The captain half smiled in the way men do when a child’s simple honesty reminds them of their conscience. “And our African Company agrees with you, which is why they plan to found a colony for Scotland on land that no other European nation has yet claimed, and if our settlers do find natives there, we must get their consent before we build.”