She laid her hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “She is very, very good. I fear she’s passed beyond the limits of my own ability. There is a lady who retired locally who once performed at London, and at Paris. I should like to bring her in, if you are willing, to continue Margaret’s lessons.”

Maggie’s flush of pride was drowned beneath a cold wave of reality. She knew a private music teacher would be something they could not afford.

As though she understood that, Lady Cartsburn carried on, to Lily, “I am told by Mrs. Reid that you’ve a lovely writing hand. I wish my girls to learn their letters well. I wonder, do you think we could arrive at some sort of arrangement? An exchange?”

Lily nodded, as though words were not available.

Against the gate, a spider’s web was blowing loose, and in its strands a small white moth had caught its feet and could not flutter free. Maggie did not think she’d have noticed it at all if Lady Cartsburn had not gently reached to break the web and loose the moth and set it high up on the facing wall where the returning spider would not be a threat.

“Sometimes,” said Lady Cartsburn, “I believe God gives us gifts that carry us to places where we might not otherwise have gone, if we are able but to use them.”

Even young as she was then, Maggie believed she understood what Lady Cartsburn meant—she meant that Maggie’s love of music and her skill at playing it might one day lift her higher than a common life. Beyond the confines of the world of Riddell’s Close and Crawfurdsdyke, to worlds she might not otherwise have known.

“Perhaps,” said Maggie later on that night, as Lily tucked her into bed, “my music’s meant to be my ship, and not the Rising Sun. Perhaps it is my music that will carry me to new worlds of adventure.”

Lily’s kiss, soft on her brow in the same way it had been each night Maggie could recall, came with the same promise. “There, that’s to sweeten your dreams.”

Maggie’s dreams were sweet.

She went on dreaming, and learning, and working hard.

Until the day Mrs. Reid was struck down by a sudden fit, and in an instant, their world changed.

Outside the church, Lady Cartsburn approached Lily.

“I understand that Mrs. Reid did leave you money.” Lady Cartsburn’s voice was kind. “The house, of course, was not her own to leave, but we’d be pleased to have you stay on as our tenant. Though there is another course you might consider.” With a glance and smile at Maggie, she went on, “I have a friend who has a school for girls at Edinburgh, and she’s in need of a young lady of good temperament, she tells me, to teach music. I’d be glad to write a letter to her, recommending Margaret.”

And so then, as Lily promised, there at last had been a ship for them, of sorts, if not the one they’d planned to sail upon, and not exactly shaped with prow and masts and sails. But even so, a ship, if one looked hard enough to notice, and they’d had the sense this time to leave the pier and climb aboard.