She shook her head. “I need to see that he gets it right now. It’s important.” And then, because she knew the guardsman could not leave his post while she could go wherever the captain was, she told a small lie. “I’m meant to deliver it straight to his own hand.”

The guardsman assessed her, but he seemed to have trouble meeting and holding her gaze. In the end he stood, gave a short nod, and said, “Captain Graeme’s up at Patrick Steell’s house, at the sign of the Cross Keys. Do you know where that is?”

She nodded.

“Go there, give your message to him, and come straight back down, you hear? I will be watching for you.”

Lily ran the whole way up the High Street to the Cross Keys tavern, her breath making mist in the darkening air that clawed cold at her lungs. At the door of the tavern, a huddle of men stood and talked with their backs to her—men with fine hats and fine wigs and fine cloaks—but among them she recognized one set of sturdier shoulders.

She called, “Captain Graeme!”

He turned. The man nearest him turned, too, and Lily saw it was the Lord Provost, who had the charge of the town and who’d once said he’d rather be Lord Provost here than the Lord Mayor of London, since both did the same exact work for the same honor, only he was not surrounded by Englishmen.

No Englishmen surrounded the Lord Provost here this afternoon. The other men had Scottish voices. Marshalling them all to move inside the Cross Keys tavern, after Captain Graeme asked a moment’s leave to speak to Lily, the Lord Provost said, “I’ll wait for you inside then, with my magistrates. Do not be long—we need you to be with us and in readiness in case this night brings new disorders.”

Left alone outside with Lily, Captain Graeme crouched to her own level and arranged her plaid more snugly round her head and shoulders. “It is cold,” he told her. “Now, what brings ye out when there’s such trouble in the town?”

It was the trouble, she explained, that brought her out to him. She told him what she’d overheard. He listened to her carefully.

“Ye did not see this other lad? The one who spoke to Mr. Bell’s apprentice?”

“No. But the apprentice will ken who he is, if ye do ask him.”

“I intend to ask him,” Captain Graeme said, and something in his tone made Lily blink in sudden realization.

“Ye’ll not punish him, because of what I telt ye? Please don’t punish him.” Her mouth began to tremble. “He did nothing wrong.”

Captain Graeme hugged her shoulders briefly with his hands, and met her gaze with eyes that seemed to understand her struggles to not lose her faith in justice.

“It’s a lesson life does teach us all, in time,” he said. “Ye cannot always judge a man’s heart by the way he looks. Sometimes the people ye best trust may disappoint ye.”