There was something I’d wanted to ask him. I asked him now. “Did Lord Grange know?”

“Know what?”

“The details of the scheme the Duke of Hamilton had plotted, to draw Colonel Graeme out into the open, using Lily.”

His eyebrow lifted. “I confess I cannot know Lord Grange’s mind, no more than I can know the workings of the duke’s,” he said. “I can but tell you I only began to think that such a scheme might be in play after you’d been invited to your dinner at the Earl of Seafield’s.”

I parried that with, “I suspected you might be in on the plot. You kept asking where John Moray was.”

“I had been instructed to.”

“By Lord Grange?”

He raised one shoulder in a shrug. “Lord Grange passed me my instructions. Who had written them, I cannot say. I did not think to question them until I realized that this inquiry was not what it appeared to be.”

“And then you knew why they were looking for John Moray.”

“Aye. And I stopped helping them.”

Our conversation ended then, for Maggie had begun to sing, and after two songs she grabbed Gilroy’s hands and dragged him in to join her, and as if he’d not surprised us all enough for one night, he sang us three verses of “I Love My Love in Secret” in a baritone that brought fair tears to Lily’s eyes.

As I stood alone with Gilroy at the door that night and bade farewell to him, I said, “You truly do have a romantic soul, and I am grateful for it, but you’ll want to keep it hidden well from Helen Turnbull, or she’ll make you the object of her matchmaking endeavors when she does return to town.”

He smiled faintly. “She can try. But she’d do well to read her Plato, and refresh her knowledge of his theory of the matching half.” To my blank look, he said, “The theory runs that all of us are halves of beings that were once whole, yes? Well, Plato reasons that some of those beings were male and female intertwined, androgynous, so when they were divided, you would have a man and woman searching for each other to be reunited. But he also claims that some of those original, whole beings were of one sex to begin with—wholly female, for example,” he explained. “Or wholly male.”

I took his meaning. “So, you’re saying…”

Gilroy fitted on his hat. “I am saying, Sergeant Williamson, if Helen Turnbull tries to see me wed to Violet Young, I wish her luck with that,” he said, “because my matching half is not a woman.”

I wasn’t shocked—I’d seen too much for such a thing to shock me—but his revelation did surprise me, for if he had made it to a different person, he’d have risked exposure and arrest. Perhaps he felt secure, because he knew my secrets, that I would not reveal his. But I preferred to think it was because I’d earned his trust, as he’d earned mine.