With skating done, they climbed the bank and walked the little distance to a large and ancient inn within the village, where they had their dinner—Mr. Bell and Mrs. Bell and Marion and Lily sitting all together as if they were of one family, and the landlord serving Lily as though she deserved that honor, when in truth it was her daily custom to be in his place, bringing full plates and clearing empty ones away.

The men who sat beside them at the table were a jovial group. The landlord seemed to know them well. Before he served their food he brought to show them, with great ceremony, an elaborate snuffbox set into a ram’s head trimmed with silver and with jeweled eyes, that a former king had gifted to a former landlord many years ago.

The men did drink a toast to it, and to that king’s health and their own, and this led them to talk of the days when King James had come to live a few years since at Holyrood, when he was still the Duke of York and Albany, sent north to manage government affairs.

“I’d never speak ill of our late king,” said one of the men, “but King James is more a Scotsman than his brother ever was. And he’s by far a better athlete. I did see him more than once myself at play at games of curling, right here on this loch.”

“He was more often at Leith Links,” another said, with a quick nod toward a window in the opposite direction to the loch. “He much preferred the golf.”

A third man countered, “He preferred Leith Links because it brought him closer by the sea. The king does like his ships.”

Lily could understand the way the king felt. Ships were always on their way to somewhere interesting. Besides, the king had served for years as Lord High Admiral of the navy, so it would be natural for him to favor waves and sails and sky and open shorelines over lochs that, although lovely, held him inland and confined.

With dinner done, there was one more surprise awaiting her when Mr. Bell announced, “It will be dark soon. Shall we take a room, and stay the night?”

Lily had only once before stayed at an inn, when she was coming from Inchbrakie, and she’d been too tired then to have much memory of it, but she knew it had not been like this. The beds had not been soft with feathers, nor the bedsteads finely paneled. There had been no windows overlooking the inn’s courtyard where the clopping horses came and went between the side lane and the stables.

Marion and Lily pressed their faces to the window for a while and watched those horses, and they waved to Mr. Bell when he passed by below them on his way to take an evening walk around the village before sleeping.

But soon sleep was tugging at them, too, and following the lead of Mrs. Bell they climbed into their own bed in the chamber and, as she had done, drew their bed-hangings round to block the drafts, and that was all that Lily knew until she was awakened by a light touch on her shoulder.