I kept on walking, down into the High Street past St. Giles’s, and back up past Forrester’s Wynd, to see that all was well and quiet.

And I did not leave.

Chapter 8

Tuesday, 23 September, 1707

Helen eyed me with indulgence as I came in from my evening walk. “I see you’ve met our upstairs neighbor.”

“Yes. He looks exactly as a Latin master ought to look.”

“He is retired from teaching,” she reminded me, “though I’m afraid he still does talk as though he’s giving lectures. He kept you on the stair so long I contemplated coming to your rescue.”

I’d enjoyed my talk with the old man, and told her so. “He’s taking some books to the stationer’s to sell, and did allow me to relieve him of a couple of them.”

Helen smiled. “You and my husband share a common weakness. Come then, show me what you’ve bought.”

One of my new books she approved of—an illustrated study of the plants of the Americas that, while it was in French, was finely bound and large and full of neat, precise engravings. But my other choice, a good-sized volume of Lord Stair’s Institutions of the Laws of Scotland, she considered a poor bargain. “It is broken at the binding, with the pages coming loose.”

“It is still readable. Besides, it has good information on the use of witnesses and oaths, which I can use to educate myself.”

Something betrayed me in my tone, because her eyes grew sympathetic. “A man’s worth is not measured, Adam, by his education. What has happened in your inquiry today that you think otherwise?”

I had not spoken of the morning’s interview with Helen yet. She had dined out with friends, and had retired to rest on her return, so I had supped alone tonight and gone out for my walk, and this was now the first occasion I had found to tell her what had happened when we’d taken Mrs. Graeme to meet Robert Moray in his prison chamber at the castle.

I did not share everything. I did not tell her Mrs. Graeme’s private history, for as much as I liked Helen I recalled her judgment of Lord Grange’s wife, whose father had been hanged for murder. “The stain of an act like that cannot be easily washed from a bloodline,” so Helen had told me, and while I believed her wrong, I knew she’d alter the way that she viewed Mrs. Graeme if she knew the whole of the story. Instead, I described Robert Moray, and how I thought him impressively clever.

Helen’s shrug was elegant. “Cleverness alone is not a mark of virtue. My father was a writer to the signet, and the men he moved among were men of knowledge, some of whom you’d no doubt count as clever—but that did not make them good men.”

I thought of the tale I’d heard that morning—Mrs. Graeme as a wee girl asking Captain Graeme how she was to know which men were good, and his reply that she would know them by their actions, if she watched what someone did when it would gain him nothing, and when none was there but her to see him do it. “Then ye’ll ken his truest heart,” the captain had assured her.