Turnbull was looking from his wife to me. “What’s this?”

Helen explained, “Adam was hoping he might find himself a wife while he was here. I thought that Violet Young would suit him very well. I was apparently mistaken.”

“She was not my matching half,” was how I summed it up, which earned a smile from Helen.

“She was perfect. You were simply too particular.”

Someday, perhaps, I’d freely speak of how I’d met the woman who was made to be my matching half, and how I’d given her my heart, and how I’d let her go. But not today.

“If you’re not careful,” Helen carried on, “you will end up a lonely bachelor like your friend upstairs.”

I had enjoyed my visits with the Latin master these past several days, and rose to his defense. “He is not lonely. He has books.”

With understanding, Turnbull asked, “How many have you bought?”

“A few.”

To Helen, Turnbull said, “You should have seen the books that Adam brought to Caledonia. I thought the ship would sink, he had so many.”

“You did meet each other in New York, I understand.” I knew she had been waiting for the tale of how we’d met, and I could see her sitting forward in her chair as Turnbull nodded.

“That’s right. Adam helped us find another ship, when ours was not allowed to leave the harbor.”

She asked, “So then you had abandoned the first colony?”

He winced a little at her choice of words, but did not argue, and I did not blame him. There had been so much dispute among the colonists of that first voyage as to why they had not stayed to see it through, so many accusations thrown, so many differing accounts, and so much hatred heaped upon those men who had returned to Scotland only to be branded traitors, that he likely thought it best to let it lie.

He told her, “Yes. We’d parted ways when we left Caledonia, to start our voyage home. Our ship and one other wound up at New York. This was in August, ninety-nine. We did not know the company was fitting out a second fleet of ships to sail from Scotland.”

And that second fleet of ships, the Rising Sun among them, would have been the expedition that sailed from the Clyde that month—the same one Lily nearly joined with Maggie, before they’d learned of James Graeme’s death.

“We were unaware of this,” said Turnbull, as though he wished Helen to be very sure on that point. “But Captain Drummond—you’ll have heard me speak of him, he was one of the councilors of the colony—he was already keen to return. He disagreed with the reasons the others had given for leaving, and if he’d had his way, we’d have stopped in for provisions at New York, set down our sick men, taken on new ones, and gone straight back to Caledonia. But the governor of New York did not wish to help us.”