“I have survived my grand adventure, as you see,” she reassured him.

Learning that her cousin was one of the commissioners for the Equivalent raised a question that had played within my mind since Robert Moray had first put it there this morning. “Did your cousin say why the commission decided to move Mrs. Graeme’s claim from their hands into ours?”

Helen said, “No, my cousin was not there, regrettably. I did, though, have a lovely visit with his wife. We dined, and talked. She’s well acquainted with the backgrounds of the families of the nobility and gentry, and it was from her I learned the details of your Robert Moray.”

She told me what she’d learnt. I had not known he had a young son, though I’d known of course that he was married. I had sent that letter to his wife by an express this evening, and my pocket was a pound Scots lighter for my effort, but I’d reasoned, had I been a prisoner with a wife, I would have wished to put her mind at peace as soon as possible.

I naturally said none of this to Helen.

She’d lost interest in the Morays and was speaking now about her cousin’s wife. “…a generous woman, and deserving of the happiness she has in life. I don’t believe she found such happiness in her first marriage, for her late husband had been married before as a young man, to a Frenchwoman, and half his heart was always held by his first love. Leastways, that’s how my cousin’s wife felt. As though she could be no more than a substitute, for he’d already found his matching half.” She very kindly caught herself, apparently remembering that I was not as widely read as she was, and explained, “That comes from Plato. His Symposium, in which he claims that every person has one—that we all were made originally whole, then sliced in half like flatfish, so we now must search the world for the one person who completes us.”

A matching half. It was a most romantic notion. My mind filled with memories of moments when my heart had overruled reason—a night that still lived in my dreams from my youth with the girl with the tumbling hair, and a day when I’d truly believed I had seen my own soul mirrored back to me in a girl’s eyes, both of them overlaid now by the steady, blue gaze of a widow who’d looked at me yesterday morning and quietly asked of me, “Shall we begin?”

MacDougall spat into the hearth. “That’s heathen nonsense.”

Helen asked, “Have you ever been married, MacDougall?”

“I have not.” He said it in a tone that implied that was a deliverance of sorts, which I privately agreed it was, for the woman. “But,” he added, “if God should send me a woman, she’d not be mistaking herself for a flatfish.” Straightening, he faced me with a challenge. “Were ye going to take your papers off the table at any time, or will I be serving ye breakfast tomorrow atop that confusion?”