As if in reply, heavy footsteps were heard on the turnpike stair down below, climbing. They stopped at the lodging beneath theirs, and Lily heard a man’s voice and woman’s loud laughter and then a door closing, and Jean sent the corporal a pained look.

He grinned. “Ye’ll not have to endure it much longer,” he promised. “Come Martinmas this will all be at the back of ye.”

Lily looked from his face to Jean’s in surprise. Martinmas fell on November eleventh, and so was scant weeks away.

Seeing her face, Corporal Morison lifted his eyebrows at Jean. “Ye’ve not told her?”

Jean flushed. “No. I was meaning to, but I was waiting to find the right moment.”

The corporal looked round. “This would seem like one.”

Jean never liked to be rushed in a task. She came slowly across to them, head down as though she were thinking, and when she looked up Lily saw she was nervous.

Jean said, “Lily, I need to tell ye…that is, we’ve decided…that is, Corporal Morison’s asked me…” She broke off, and drying her hands on her apron reached out to take Lily’s hands lightly in hers.

She smiled. “How would ye like to come dance at my wedding?”

Chapter 11

Thursday, 29 October, 1685

Wealthy people, when they married, came in coaches to the church in all their finery and gave gifts to the minister and tossed coins to the poor and hosted private celebrations after, at their own expense.

Jean had no coach, and nothing finer than her calico to wear, but she was beautiful in Lily’s eyes as she stood in the Tron Kirk with Corporal Morison in his best guardsman’s coat and all their friends to bear them witness. And the corporal, though he was not wealthy, still did pay the minister, and coming from the church he stopped to give coins to the beggars who were waiting at the doors.

As for private celebrations, Jean said that the rich could keep them, and leave her a penny wedding.

Penny weddings—where the guests’ coins bought the food and drink, and often left the newly married couple a small profit—could be in or out of doors, depending on the time of year, and sometimes carried on for days. This one, arranged by Captain Graeme, was above a vintner’s in a large room with a timber floor that bounced and shook from all the dancing.

People came and went, a laughing, talking swirl and blend of faces, skirts, and shoulders, voices rising and then falling to the music from the fiddle and the drum.

Mrs. Graeme had brought her own maid to help care for wee James and for Bessie, which gave Lily freedom to sit on a barrel in the corner next to Jamie, out of everybody’s way, and have some time with him alone.

They seldom had this anymore. She missed it terribly, and it was hollowing her heart to find that she would have to learn the way of missing it this winter.