But for now, I had control of the inquiry. Gilroy had not yet returned from Dundee. And with a few days more to plan, I could find Lily that safe passage from the chessboard that would let her make a safe retreat.

These thoughts and more were in my head as I came up the curved forestair of Caldow’s Land. I nodded a vague greeting at MacDougall as he let me in.

“What hour d’ye call this, then?” he demanded.

Helen, sitting at the breakfast table near the windows, told him in a cheerful voice, “He’s been with Captain Gordon, do not scold him so.” And then she added, “Come and join us, Adam. Gilroy was just telling me about his niece’s wedding.”

There he sat, inscrutable as ever, eyebrow raised a fraction as he judged my slightly rumpled clothing. As I took my seat, he said, “I’m far more interested in hearing how you’ve spent your week. I’m told by Mrs. Turnbull that you have found Maggie Graeme. Well done. When shall we arrange to speak to her?”

MacDougall poured my ale. It was the one time I’d been grateful for him.

Helen put in, “Did not Mrs. Graeme tell us that her husband’s cousin had her day off work on Mondays?”

“Yes.” It satisfied me to hear my voice sounding wholly natural. “I think that Monday would do well.”

Agreeing, Helen said, “Then you would have her testimony written up in time.”

I asked, “In time for what?”

Gilroy passed me the bread, explaining, “Mrs. Turnbull’s had a letter from her husband.”

“Yes,” she told me. “He expects that he’ll be here on Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday morning at the latest. So you’ll soon be free to pass your duties on to him.” She smiled. “Will that not be a great relief?”

Relief was not the word I would have used. Within the space of a few minutes, my control upon the situation and the time in which I had to act had both become restricted.

But I only drank deep of my ale, avoiding Gilroy’s eyes, and said to Helen, “I do look forward to seeing him.”

Because, as Robert Moray had explained, not saying everything was not the same as lying.

Chapter 36

Monday, 6 October, 1707

Lately I’d been listening to Lily’s reminiscences, and Henry Browne’s, and those of Captain Gordon. I could picture Maggie Graeme only as a child.

This self-assured young lady who faced Gilroy and me now in Lily’s lodgings seemed to bear such small resemblance to the picture I’d imagined that I knew I had been staring. But I caught, from time to time, a trace of childish vulnerability in how she moved her head, or pleated folds into the fabric of her skirt while she was talking, or tried not to meet my eyes.

She’d grown to be a lovely woman, both by all the standards of society—her golden hair and charming features and melodic speaking voice—and by the smaller measures that revealed how she was raised, at first by Barbara Malcolm, then by Lily. Maggie’s manners were not in the least affected, they were natural. She did all things by reflex and because it was the proper thing to do, not because she wanted praise or any action in return. She thought before she spoke, and when she did speak it was with the expectation that what she said would be valued. And she always treated Lily with respect.