“My uncle is a man of action. I would never hazard to presume where he might be at any moment.”

Some men, I reasoned, fought with blades and pistols. Others did their parrying with words, and were as skilled as any swordsman.

Even Gilroy seemed to realize he was never going to get the best of Robert Moray, for at last he turned instead to Mrs. Graeme. “We have concentrated so far on your husband’s friends and his relations, madam, but not on your own.”

Again I saw that very subtle setting of her shoulders, as though she were bracing herself against some inevitable test. “I have already promised you that no one knew of our marriage.”

“Not even your mother?”

“My mother was dead,” she told Gilroy.

“I see. I am sorry,” he said. “And your father?”

Robert Moray broke in. “Is this relevant? Lily has said—”

“It’s all right, Robin.” Looking directly at Gilroy, she told him, “My father was also dead, when I was married. Would you wish to know how he died? Would you wish to know why Jamie’s mother would think me unsuitable?”

Moray leaned over and covered her tightly linked hands with his own. I could see her drawing strength from both his gesture and its comfort, and I envied Robert Moray that he had the freedom, in this room, to offer it where I could not.

His voice turned gentle. “Lily.”

She was resolute. “No, Robin. I will tell them.”

Chapter 5

Monday, 8 June, 1685

Her grandmother’s worries that Jamie would no longer have time for Lily when she came to live with her father had not come to pass.

If anything, they’d had the freedom to see one another more frequently these past two years, with her father serving Jamie’s in the Edinburgh town guard.

Long before her birth, from the first days her father had been made a soldier, he’d served Jamie’s father. That had been what took him north to Perthshire, to the home of Jamie’s family at Inchbrakie, where her mother—as her father had admitted once to Lily—stole his breath and heart together, so there’d been no choice left to him but to marry her.

She only knew her mother through those memories of her father’s and her grandmother’s, and through the stories shared with her by others who remembered. Like the old Laird of Inchbrakie, who one day had looked at Lily in the sunlight near the window in the drawing room, and smiled, and said, “You have the very color of her eyes.” And Lily’s heart had felt sublimely full.

She could not call to mind a certain image of her mother, having only been three years of age when sudden illness and a fever stilled her mother’s heart forever, leaving but a carved name on a small stone in the churchyard, that gave very little comfort.

Her father had decided.

“She should have a home,” was what he’d told her grandmother, from all accounts, his jaw set tight against his own emotions. It was not his wish to make such an arrangement—and indeed he made his visits when he could, and wrote her letters, and sent little gifts, that she would not forget him—but “a soldier’s life alone is not a settled one, and no life for a bairn, and I would have her know the safety of a home, where she is loved.”