She let her dark eyes twinkle at the monk, and held her hands to him in greeting. “Father Graeme. ’Tis a happy turn of fate to meet you here.”

He smiled back. “Mrs. Ogilvie. Were you not lately in London?”

“I was. And my stomach does wish I had stayed there, and not crossed the channel at all,” she said, putting a hand on the front of her bodice with feeling. “I have never been so tossed about as I was in that packet-boat. Only our own light heads, I do believe, could have kept us from drowning, sir, in so prodigious a storm.” With a laugh quite as bright as the rest of her, she said, “It seems drowning is not the way God has ordained for my exit.”

The nearest of the Englishmen was staring at the monk, now, with bold eyes that sought to measure him. “And you were once a swordsman?”

Father Graeme smoothed his beard against his robe as he looked down. “Well, Mrs. Ogilvie mistakes her facts a little.” As he raised his eyes again he met the other’s look of satisfaction and, to Anna’s joy, extinguished it. “I carried a musket in all my campaigns, not a sword.”

“In Catalonia,” the Englishman repeated, as though disbelieving that fact, also.

“Aye.”

“And on whose side, sir, did you fight?”

For a moment Anna thought she glimpsed a flash of Colonel Graeme’s mischief-loving nature in the monk’s mild eyes, but it was gone before he answered, “On the side that God did choose to favor.” With a humble nod he asked them, “Do excuse me,” and releasing Anna’s shoulder moved alone along the bar to where the landlord now stood.

Anna held her place with the invisibility accorded children in such gatherings, and watched the woman and the men with open interest, noting how the men had straightened in their stances and appeared to be competing in their efforts to appear their very best for Mrs. Ogilvie.

The woman, if aware of it, pretended not to be, and merely asked them, “Are you both recovered from your passage over, also?”

“More or less,” the one man answered, looking round. “Where is your other fellow countryman and friend this day?”

“If you do refer to Captain Thomas Gordon,” she said lightly, with a roll of her expressive eyes, “he is no friend of mine. In fact, ’twas his fault I was nearly drowned in crossing, for he was in such a haste he would not wait, but did insist upon us going halves to hire that wretched packet-boat.”

“And Captain Gordon is his name?” the nearest of the Englishmen enquired. “Another soldier?”

Mrs. Ogilvie corrected him, “A sea-captain, till lately. Yet remove him from his wooden world, and truthfully he knows no more of travelling than does a child of six. ’Twas a relief,” she said, “to get him off my hands.”

“He left this morning?”

“Yes. He is in a prodigious hurry to be at Dunkirk,” she told the men, “by Saturday. I wish to God he may be so soon wanted.”