“My lass will light us back,” said Mr. Bell, and Lily in a kind of stupor took the lantern in her hand again and did so, and when they had reached the inn’s door Mr. Bell took up her other hand and pressed a coin into her palm and said, “Now, run back up to bed,” and left her standing in the entry.

* * *

She did not go back to bed.

She did not afterward remember how she made her way down to the loch, but there she was, the lantern in her hand and in her other hand the coin that Mr. Bell had paid her, feeling now so warm against her skin she thought for certain it would burn her.

Jean said whores took money from a man for giving pleasure to him, and that it was wrong, and they were wicked.

“I’d chase her to the gutter where she does belong, and she could take her fancy clothes and false smiles there to try to turn men’s heads,” so Jean had said, and Lily thought of Mr. Bell and how he liked her velvet hood, and how he had remarked on it so many times, and how she’d often smiled at him, and how he must have somehow taken all that as an invitation to do what he did. Because why else would he have done it, unless somehow she’d invited him? Unless she were a whore?

The coin—she did not know what kind of coin it was—burned hotter still within her hand, and in a sudden movement Lily threw it out across the ice. The small, metallic clatter raised a movement to her left.

The swans.

They huddled ghostly pale on their unfrozen strip of water not far out from shore. Except one swan had ventured farther from the rest, and stealthily the night had closed new ice around it, holding it in place so it could not rejoin the others.

She did not remember setting down the lantern, but she must have done, because it was no longer in her hands. The moonlight was enough to see by, and it showed in front of her the branch that Corporal Morison had used to rescue Bessie, so she picked that up instead and dragged it after her as, keeping low upon the ice, she drew herself across to where the single swan was trapped.

The other swans moved to the farther limit of the narrow pool they’d managed to keep open, their reflections all the warning Lily had of where the ice gave way to the black water till her own hand touched the edge by accident and felt a rush of wet that chilled her fingers as the ice depressed beneath her touch.

In haste she snatched her hand back. Pulling off her hood, she dried her fingers before they could freeze, then kept the velvet wrapped around them for protection as she took the branch and struck a blow against the ice that held the swan a prisoner.