Today, though, they kept to Carrubber’s Close, where Lily had glimpsed the black-and-white kitten this morning.

“She was there,” Lily said, pointing. “Under the stones.”

Jamie bent to look. “How d’ye ken it’s a she?”

“I just do.”

“Well, she’s not there now.”

All down one side of the close they searched, carefully, and up the other, until Lily finally saw two tiny pointed ears poking up over the rim of a bucket. The bucket was, thankfully, empty of water or anything less pleasant, and it held only the kitten, who cowered inside upon Lily’s approach.

Jamie said, “Ye’ll get scratched.”

“I will not.” And she didn’t. The kitten came easily into her hands, in the end, with a few coaxing words and a gentling touch. There seemed no weight at all to the creature as Lily drew her apron up to wrap the folds of cloth around the kitten.

As she straightened, there were footsteps on the cobblestones behind them and a shadow fell across them all.

The shadow of a man, who said, “What’s this, now? Theft? And with the sun yet up?”

Jamie was unconcerned. He did not bother turning round, but told his father, “Lily’s found a cat.”

Lily did turn. She had no fear of Captain Graeme.

She’d always thought him taller than her father, until recently she’d seen them standing side by side and realized that for all her life her mind had played a trick on her—that it was something in the way the captain moved, or held himself, that made him seem the larger man. She guessed that quality was why they’d put him in command.

She had to tilt her face up, anyway, to tell him, “It’s a kitten.”

“Aye, I see that.” He had eyes like Jamie’s, clear and full of thoughts, set in a lean face that she’d seen be hard or charming, as he chose. With a soldier’s disregard for current fashion, he wore his own hair curling to his shoulders and a neatly-kept brown beard and, like her father, a town guardsman’s coat over his breeks and boots, crossed with his sword belt and with pistols at his waist. He bent to be at Lily’s level. “A wee kitten, surely too young to be taken from its mother.”

Lily said, “She has no mother.”

Captain Graeme looked at her a moment. “Does she not?” He touched her shoulder lightly with one hand, as though he understood. “Well then, it is fortunate indeed she has found you.”

It was not far around to Lily’s house in Kinloch’s Close, and Captain Graeme walked her home, with Jamie going on a step ahead of them, as usual. Occasionally Jamie, turning back to chide them for not going faster, or to tell them some new thing he had observed at school that day, failed to mind his steps. And so it was that Jamie near collided with the violer who lived within their close, and who reacted with impatience.

Captain Graeme calmed the moment, offered an apology, made Jamie do the same, and all shook hands; but Lily was a little frightened of the violer, and as they passed him by, she looked behind and saw him spit upon the ground where Captain Graeme had been standing.