There had been so many moments in my life when my survival had depended on my trusting to my instincts that I’d gained a great respect for them, and there was something now, not in the words that Robert Moray said, but in the way he said them, that set all my instincts on alert.

I didn’t think that what he’d told me was a lie, but any man could tell the truth and, by omitting details, still deceive.

And instinct warned me he was leaving out a detail, trusting I’d be unobservant and too ignorant to notice.

I asked him, in a tone I hoped was conversational, “You studied on the Continent? May I ask where?”

“In Holland, at the university of Utrecht.”

I made note of that. “Do you have family there?”

“I have relations, sir, in many places.”

“How long were you in Utrecht?”

“Three years.”

“And what were you studying?”

“The law.” He said it evenly. “The civil law, to be exact. Before being sent abroad, I had been bred here at Edinburgh to our Scots law and a knowledge in styles.”

I nodded in a neutral way to mask my irritation. Gilroy surely would have known how Robert Moray made his living, and it put me at a disadvantage, having had no warning I’d be trading words this morning with a lawyer.

With a smile, I matched his tone as nearly as I could. “Then you’ll not need me to explain to you the problem we are facing in this instance, where we have no valid proof of marriage, and no living witnesses. In such a case,” I asked him, “what procedure would you follow?”

“In honesty, I’d probably reject the claim. At least, were it a stranger,” he replied. “But if Lily says that she was married onto James…” He shrugged. “I’d do the same as ye are doing now: find people who were privy to the marriage and were willing to attest to it, to satisfy the men of the commission.”

“But you cannot help us.”

“No.”

Gilroy put in, “You do not think your cousin would have told your brother John?”

“Why John, particularly?”

Gilroy paused. He did it for a moment only, but I’d never seen him made to do it in a conversation, so it caught my interest.

Robert Moray said, “It’s only that my cousin was no closer to my brother John than he was to my brother Maurice, or my brother William, come to that, so why are ye concerned with John?”

Gilroy shrugged. “Would he have any knowledge of the marriage, do you think?”

“I think ye’d have to ask John.”

“Would you know where we could find him?”

Moray changed the angle of his head a fraction, as one does when light strikes something differently, although to me the shadows looked the same. He said to Gilroy, “On a battlefield in Flanders, I expect. Or on his way to one.”

Accepting he would get no more than this, Gilroy asked, “And your uncle, Colonel Patrick Graeme, is he still at Saint-Germain?”