Our guard carried no candle down the winding turnpike stair, and so we followed him with caution in our single file, our footsteps ringing loudly on the stone.

There was a wooden door he had to pause to open at the bottom, where he called out simply, “Visitors tae see ye!”

Then he ducked aside to let us pass. There were more stone steps—several of them. Mrs. Graeme stumbled and I caught her elbow.

“Careful, now,” I said.

But she had already been caught and steadied at her other side by the tall gentleman who’d come across the narrow room to meet us.

There was daylight here, admitted by a single, small, square window set far back within its deep well in the thick wall of the tower. It revealed a room that, while unwelcoming, was neither dungeon nor a pit, but rather a spare room of stone with a high, vaulted ceiling and a plain chair and small, plain table and an even plainer bed of the variety a soldier might have used when on campaign. There was no fire.

Robert Moray—for I guessed it must be him, there being no one else within the chamber—thanked the guard in the reflexive way men do who have been raised with gentlemanly manners, and dismissed him with a nod as though the guard were no more than a servant bringing him expected guests.

The difference in our stations would have been apparent even without that. He was a man of fine appearance. Prisoner or no, he wore a handsome wig of long, brown, curling hair and although his confinement had affected the condition of his clothing, it could not disguise its quality. His coat alone would likely have been worth more than three of my own suits, and he wore it well and carelessly.

Not knowing how we’d be received, I had a speech prepared. I started, “Mr. Moray, I do offer my apologies for interrupting—”

“My God,” he said suddenly, still holding Mrs. Graeme’s elbow. Moving her a step into the light, he looked down at her face as his own slowly creased into a smile of unexpected pleasure. “Lily!”

* * *

Two things struck me, sitting in that prison chamber watching Robert Moray: one, that he had keenly watchful eyes that were forever weighing information and would not miss anything, and two, that he was not nearly as calm and at his ease as he would wish us to believe.

He was the eldest of us, past his middle thirties, and in height likely the tallest of us also, yet he’d felt the need to choose a seat that gave him an advantage. He had given the one chair to Mrs. Graeme, and invited Gilroy and myself to sit along the bed’s edge, while he half leaned and half sat against the corner of the table, facing us, the window to his back. This had the dual effect of making us look up at him, and making it more difficult to read his face against the light.