Lily wondered whether she ought to tell Barbara Maggie’s father was a fugitive and no longer in Scotland, but in the end she did not bother giving her that news, for fear it might cause Barbara added worry. Nor was Archie ever likely to let Lily leave this house with Maggie, when he would not let her leave alone. Ye ken that I’ll not let that happen, she could hear him saying in his calm and even way, and Lily felt the walls close in more tightly still around her.

Barbara saw her face and smiled in sympathy and reassurance as she handed Lily back the strongbox to return to its place underneath the bed. “But Matthew will come home,” she said again. “I ken my sons. I ken their hearts. And he has given his into your keeping.”

Maybe so, but it appeared to Lily he had found a way to live without it then, for summer reached its end and Matthew did not come.

The autumn followed, endless rains that brought a harvest yet more devastating than the last, the crops so poor that people faced the falling darkness of the season with a rising sense of desperation. And still Matthew did not come.

In late October, with food scarce already, they awakened to a frost and snow as hard and cold as if it were the dead of winter.

Barbara had no gentlemen to visit her beyond that day. She grew thinner while her stomach swelled, and then her legs began to bloat as well, and Archie called the doctor in to bleed her. “I am sorry to be troublesome,” she told them.

Archie brushed the hair from her hot cheek, his mouth in a grim line. The next day he told Lily, “Away ye go to Walter’s house and watch the bairn awhile. His wife has work to do.”

Each time that she was sent to mind the bairn at Walter’s lodgings, Lily died a little more inside. The shame on Walter’s wife’s face as she slipped home from wherever Archie had arranged to send her was a sight that Lily could not bear to see, and in the evenings, back within the bedchamber upstairs at Riddell’s Close, Lily tucked Maggie more securely in the blankets than she used to do when settling her to bed, as though by doing that she’d somehow keep her safe.

And Lily lit the candle every night and set it in the window. Simon often looked for it, she knew. He’d told her this, although they so rarely saw Simon anymore that she could not be certain whether all her effort was for naught.

Still, it was something. One small light against the darkness. A little piece of hope that had no right to be so hopeful.

Were it not for hope, as Barbara said, the heart would break.

But Matthew did not come.

Chapter 33

Tuesday, 7 February, 1699

The bairn died first.

Still a month shy of his first birthday, he had caught a chill that soon turned to a fever and within the space of a few days he’d gone. And then Walter’s wife, weakened from grief and starvation, took ill with that same fever, and by the week’s end had followed her son to the grave.