I could not tell you now the words we echoed after Mr. Cant, nor yet the promises we made, but I can still see Lily’s eyes and feel the warm excitement of her kiss, and that was all the promise I did need.

Maggie and Gilroy were our witnesses.

As Gilroy took the pen in hand, Lily came up beside him and remarked, “We have a problem.”

Gilroy turned. “And what is that?”

Lily looked down at the certificate and sighed and said, “This marriage was irregular.”

His mouth turned upward at its corners. “I’ll sign a testificate to help you see it proved.” He signed his name, and Lily read it.

“I would not have thought you were a Richard. ’Tis a noble first name.”

“I am named for a nobleman,” Gilroy revealed. “Richard de Mornay, who once was my father’s employer and truest friend. He lost most of his fortune and family in Cromwell’s wars, and lost yet more in the year of the plague that came afterward—but it was then, when he could have easily guarded what little remained to him, that he risked all to give aid to my father and mother when they most had need of it. They were in love, you see. Had been for years. Yet my mother was then to be given in marriage to an aged man of cruel temperament, and there was nothing my father could do, so he thought. Until Richard de Mornay, he said to him, ‘Some days, the law does not step to the same drum as justice.’ And so on the day of the wedding, de Mornay attended and brought a fine horse as a gift for the bride, and distracted the bridegroom, allowing my mother to use that same horse to escape, with my father beside her. They married, and came north to Scotland, and I am the happy result.”

As with all of Gilroy’s speeches, he delivered it so levelly he might have been discussing legal documents, but still it was like cracking a grey stone to find a glistening interior with unexpected colors.

Lily looked emotional. “Is that why you’re helping us? Because your parents were given help, once, and you felt it a debt that you had to repay?”

Gilroy angled a thoughtful look down at her. “I felt my namesake’s example was one I should follow. When law does not step to the same drum as justice, you do what you can for your friends.”

It was my turn, at that, to be gripped with emotion, and pride that he’d call me his friend, for I did not think Gilroy would give many people that honor.

He was, to the end, an inscrutable man, and it pleased me to think Robert Moray, astute in so many ways, had been mistaken when he had thought Gilroy predictable.

Moray had said, “He’d not venture his neck for another man.”

Gilroy had proven him wrong.

“Never fear,” Gilroy assured me later on, when we were standing to the side and I warned him Lord Grange might not be best pleased to learn that his clerk had been at our wedding. “Lord Grange doesn’t know the half of what I do, and is the better for it. He has business of his own to keep him occupied.”