“I’m happy where I am.” Lily kept her focus on the stocking she was mending. “Anyway, I’ll hear the whole report from Maggie, when she does return.”

Lily had not said anything to Barbara of the devil’s bargain she had struck with Archie—that weight was her own to carry—but it scarcely mattered. Barbara always sensed when something in the household was awry.

The chair where Lily sat was drawn up close beside the bed and Barbara had to roll her head against the bolster for a closer view of Lily’s features. Lily tried pretending that she did not feel the scrutiny.

The older woman gently told her, “I ken ye’re not happy. I would warrant he’s not, either. Hold your faith, and he’ll come back to ye.”

She spoke of Matthew, plainly. Savagely the needle stabbed at Lily’s finger and she missed a stitch. “Who is it says I wish him to?”

But Barbara wasn’t fooled. “It was real, the love ye had for one another. It was real, and it was true.” A pause, and then a tiny flash of silver as she reached across to set her simple wedding ring atop the stocking Lily had been mending. “Keep that with ye, so ye’ll not forget.”

Stunned, Lily looked up from her work. “I cannot take your ring.”

“Ye can. ’Tis mine to give, and I will have no argument. For years it has reminded me I was well loved, and it can mind ye of the same till Matthew comes again to give ye proof.” She smiled. “I hope I will be here to see that day. But if I’m not, will ye do me one favor?”

Lily answered without hesitation. “Anything.”

“Take Maggie with ye, when ye leave here. She would have a better life with ye and Matthew than she would left here in Riddell’s Close.”

Of that much, Lily was completely certain, so it was an easy promise. But it still felt hollow. “And if Matthew never does come home?”

“He will.” Barbara, while remaining firm on that point, did allow for a contingency. “Could ye please fetch my strongbox?”

Barbara kept her strongbox underneath the bedstead. It was Spanish made, of lovely dark wood and the size of a large, heavy book, ornately bound with strips of iron.

Lily slipped the silver ring onto her finger, set her mending to the side, and bent low to retrieve the strongbox. When she straightened with it, Barbara had the key.

“I keep the letters Maggie’s father sent in here,” she said, and opening the box she showed to Lily a tight bundle of those letters, tied with string. “He wrote more often in the year afore he married, but he still wrote after that, each time he sent the payment for her keep, to see that she was well. That she was happy.” Barbara touched the letters lightly. “I have saved them for her, because it is very plain from how he writes that he is proud to claim her as his daughter, and ’tis plainer still that she’d be welcomed if she turned up at his door. If Matthew does not come, and I am gone, ye can take Maggie to her people up in Perthshire. They were once your people also, were they not? Well then.” She closed the box again and locked it. Slid the key beneath the bolster. “This is where I always keep the key, and ye ken where I keep the strongbox. If that time comes, take those letters with ye, for they’ll prove to young Patrick Graeme Maggie is his daughter.”