“Because,” she said, as patiently as if she had been speaking to a child, “the Earl of Seafield was opposed to the whole venture. He made no secret of the fact, and I remember when the mob here broke his window for it. You must surely—” She paused then, as she realized, “but of course you’d not remember that. It happened when you were yourself in Darien, or else when you were on your way home to New York.”

I had not known her long, but I was learning how to judge the tones of Helen’s voice, and from how she dropped the words “New York” so very casually and left them there the way an angler baits a hook and line, I knew she’d spoken them with purpose. I’d never told her any of the details of my upbringing, and she’d been sitting too far down the table to have heard my conversation with the doctor and his daughter over dinner, so I made a guess and said, “I see you’ve talked to Mistress Young.”

“I have indeed. She came to sit beside me in the drawing room, and we had a most pleasant conversation. She asked me if I knew how long you mean to stay in town, and I replied my plan is to persuade you not to leave.” She smiled. “I do confess, I would not have imagined you were raised in the Americas, from how you speak. Your voice is purely Scottish.”

“I was just shy of my twelfth birthday when I first went to America. I had Scots around me there,” I said, “and more Scots still at Darien. I’ve had no chance to lose my way of speaking.”

Helen thought on this. “Is that where you first met my husband? At New York, before he went the second time to Darien?”

“Yes.”

“I should like to hear that story. Maybe,” she said, as her eyes turned teasing, “I should ask your Mistress Young around to dinner one day, so that she can tell it to me.”

I did not take that bait, either, although I did grant her a slight smile. “There’s none who knows that tale except your husband and myself, and he would tell it better.”

Whatever argument she might have made was silenced then by the arrival of two of the earl’s men bearing a sedan chair, all enclosed and brightly painted with glass windows at the sides, a half-glassed door, and deeply cushioned seat. The two men set the chair down next to Helen, and the man in front—a tall, broad man whose accent could come only from the Highlands—told her, “If ye please, the earl says it would not be fitting for a guest of his so big with child to walk when we can carry ye.”

A thoughtful gesture from our host, whose friends had just been urging him to torture Robert Moray’s wife or throw her in a dungeon, and who had himself invited me to dinner in the hopes I’d tell him something that might let him place a noose round Moray’s neck.