By daylight, with her thoughts intact, her life and hopes and dreams intact, she might not have attempted it. She might not have been brave.

But at that moment, nothing mattered more to Lily than to free that one swan.

Cracks were forming on the ice now all around her, yet she did not stop but went on striking with the branch, and all the while the swan observed her with a sideways eye but fearlessly, as if it somehow knew she meant no harm.

The hood had fallen from her hand. She did not care. One final blow, and Lily felt at last a great piece of the ice dislodge and drift away.

“There now,” she told the swan. “Ye can go home.”

But where was she to go? Not to the inn, where Mr. Bell was surely waiting for her. Nor to the Bells’ house in the Canongate, where she would further fall into a life of sin and shame.

And never, ever home again. She would no more be welcome. “Whores don’t want for company,” so Jean had told the corporal, “but they can’t have mine.”

She left the branch upon the ice, and left the lantern on the shore, and climbed the bank and found herself upon the road and walking past the church without a thought of where she might be going.

At the crossroads, as she stood and huddled in her plaid, she heard the voice of Anna Moray telling her the story of the great Montrose: When all seemed black and lost, he did outwit them. He went north, and found a vessel on the coast to carry him to Norway…

She remembered that at dinner, when the man beside them had been speaking of King James and the Leith Links, he’d nodded in the opposite direction to the loch, so Lily turned in that direction now, and started walking.

Leith was to the north, and on the coast, and there were ships at Leith, and she could go to Norway like Montrose. Except she’d not make his mistake, once she was gone from here and safe.

She never would come back.

IV

You must forgive me if I do not share with you all of my thoughts as I stood in the Bells’ kitchen that evening, but remembering the trick of Robin Moray I did keep the window to my back—the same small window that a thieving lad had climbed through long ago—and let the fading light do what it could to mask my own reactions to what I was hearing.

It wasn’t all Marion’s story to tell.

Some of the parts that weren’t hers I learnt afterward, and some were told me by Lily, and some I did not need to be told at all—I could see with my own eyes the lock on her door, and the dog at her side, and the way she had dealt with her father, and judge for myself what might lie at the back of such caution.