A terrible silence.

Even baby James stopped wailing, and began to sniffle as though somehow he had sensed the change.

The shouts began as though at a great distance, and the sound of running feet, and of a sudden it seemed the whole town was in their close, with voices rising steadily. A woman keened, and cursed, and called to Jean to come outdoors, but Jean stayed sitting in the bed, the blankets clenched within her fists.

When Lily looked at her, Jean told her, low, “Lie down, now. Wait until your daddie comes.”

Lily waited.

And at length there came a pounding at their door. Jean hesitated, but she rose and went to answer it. The man who stood outside held up a lanthorn, so that she could see his face and know that he was not a stranger.

“Baillie Spense?” Jean greeted him in some confusion. She was trying to look past him, Lily thought, into the close, but he was standing in her way.

Lily heard metal scrape over the worn stone threshold. “Ye can hold his sword,” Baillie Spense said. “He’ll be in the Tolbooth.” And he told Jean something, quietly, that made her answer, “No!” and nearly fall against the doorframe so that he was forced to hold her up a moment.

“No,” she said again.

He said, “I’m sorry,” and he closed the door, and left them there in darkness.

Lily shivered as the sound of wailing filled the house a second time, but this time it was not the baby crying. It was Jean.

* * *

Once, Lily had been taken by a fever that had caught her brain and twisted time till everything was wrong, so sometimes things moved past her in a fog, and sometimes single moments rose up piercingly and sharp, like pins pricked through a silken fabric that was spilling on the ground in bright confusion.

The next few days felt just like that.

She held the kitten on her lap and soothed and sang to Bessie and she held the baby while Jean talked to all the people who came by. Some women came with food, and other women came with gossip—Jean would chase them off, or keep them in a corner, talking low, so Lily couldn’t hear. Three men came, too, at different times—friends of her father’s, from the town guard. One, whose name was Morison, stayed with them some nights, sleeping sitting upright in a chair beside the door. “To see ye’ll not have trouble,” he told Jean.

One morning Captain Graeme came, and he had Robin Moray with him. Robin looked like a young man now, even taller than his uncle. He stood quietly aside and let the others speak, but Lily noticed that his eyes were watchful. He was going to be a student of the law, Lily remembered. He was going to be a lawyer. Maybe then he’d help her father, because from what she was hearing, there were judges and the courts involved.