And I thought of how she’d later watched the corporal through the window when he did not know she saw him, and how she’d then told her stepmother the corporal was a good man.

Helen asked, “What is it?”

“Sorry?”

“You seem far away.”

I had been far away, in fact, by many years. “I was but committing your words to my memory,” I told her, and covered my slip with a smile.

“Oh.” She looked pleased. “Well, they’re true. Robert Moray may have the advantage of his birth and breeding but the defects of his family’s faith and politics will always count against him.” To my questioning look she explained, “They are Episcopalian, and Jacobites, and keep to their own kind.”

I had come to strike a bargain in my life with God, in which He left me fairly to my own devices in return for my assurance I would do my best to keep my feet upon the path He had laid out for me. I’d fought too many men of different faiths to think that men were any different when they bled, or that the God they prayed to at the end was truly different from my own.

But Helen Turnbull, being younger and not having seen what I had seen of life, apparently was stricter in her views, and saw the world divided. I did not dispute with her. I said only, in a light tone, “You seem very well informed.”

“You and Gilroy have your own investigations. I have mine.” She smiled. “After you left this morning, I decided that I ought to pay a call upon Sir Andrew Hume, my cousin. And before you tell me I should not be going out in my condition, you may spare yourself the effort. I’ve already had a lecture from MacDougall.”

Her manservant, just entering the room, looked over at the mention of his name and took the liberty to answer. “’Tis a risk ye should not take. There are yet tumults in the streets. Ye might take fright, and then the bairn would bear the mark of what had frighted ye. Aside from which, ye’re vulnerable to witchcraft at this time.”

If anything was giving her a fright, it was MacDougall. I could see the smallest waver of uncertainty unsettle Helen’s features, and I sought to lay her doubts to rest.

I teased her, “Were there any witches at your cousin’s home?”

It worked. Her smile returned. “I don’t believe so, although I did not examine all his servants. I see him but rarely,” she confessed. “His father is the Earl of Marchmont, so they move in social circles higher than my own. But since my cousin also sits as one of the commissioners in charge of the Equivalent, I thought it only right that I should thank him for this favor they have shown us in the case of Mrs. Graeme’s claim.”

MacDougall, bent at the hearth and busy banking up the fire with ashes for the night, remarked that Helen could have thanked her cousin in a letter and thus saved herself the need to venture out into the streets.