“Fair enough.” Mr. Bell stood, and carried his cup to her. “So you would have me risk fifty pounds Scots on my faith in a lad who may well not deserve it.”

“He does.” Lily looked at him earnestly. “I’d tell the magistrates so, but I’m too young to swear an oath.”

Mr. Bell’s eyes softened as he looked down at her uplifted features. “And I’m an old fool.”

That surprised her. “Ye’re not old.”

The smile lines around his eyes deepened. “No?”

“No. Ye are…” Lily searched hard for a word that would suit him. “Distinguished.”

“I shall have my wife lend you her spectacles,” he said. But he looked pleased. “All right, then, since you are so excellent a witness I shall trust you, Lily, and unlike the magistrates I will not take your age into account. How old are you, exactly?”

“I’ll be ten on Saturday.”

“This Saturday? The sixth?” His eyebrows lifted when she told him it was so. “That is a most important birthday, ten years old, for when you’ve passed it you will no more be a child but a young lady. No, your magistrates themselves would tell you this is true,” he reassured her skepticism. “Therefore we must celebrate it in a special way.”

Behind them, from the doorway, Marion asked, “Celebrate what?”

Lily said, “I am having a birthday, and—”

“We could go skating!” Excitedly, Marion told Mr. Bell, “We have all those skates you made year before last, and we’ve not used them once yet this winter, and it has been ages since we’ve been to Duddingston. Lily, have you ever been? There, you see? We must take her to Duddingston Loch!”

Lily wanted to go, but she tried to explain such a thing was impossible. “Saturday I have a half day and Jean is expecting me home and my sister will not soon forgive me,” she said, “if I don’t spend my birthday with them.”

Marion posed the solution. “We’ll bring them along with us. Couldn’t we, Father?”

Mr. Bell looked at both girls with indulgence. “Of course we could. I’ll speak to Corporal Morison. I’m off to find him now, in fact, to see if he’ll be witness to a bond for my apprentice, who I’m told did nothing wrong.”

And with a smile and wink at Lily, he went out.

* * *

The day began brightly enough.

It was difficult to fathom that their hired coach could carry them to Duddingston in no more than an hour. It seemed so distant from the town, though Lily only had to gaze up at the high crags rising as a backdrop in their winter shades of mottled green and gold and grey beneath a cobweb cloak of snow, to realize those belonged to Arthur’s Seat, which lay within the royal park of Holyrood. Were she to climb it and go down the other side, she’d find the palace and the abbey church still standing at the bottom of the Canongate. Another world.