Dr. Pitcairn’s claret might have had a loosening effect on Gilroy’s tongue for all that, since I’d never known him to be so free in his speech.

I looked at him. “And which rumor is true?”

He shrugged in turn. “I could not tell you. I’m not paid to know the truth of what I hear.”

“I understood that you were being paid to do exactly that, for our inquiry.”

I had nearly made him smile, but he resisted it. “That minds me,” he said, taking papers from his pocket and unfolding them between us on the table. “Let me show you what I learned today at Leith.”

“You’re sure you wish to do this here? I thought you said the walls have ears.”

His glance was withering. “I doubt the Duke of Hamilton will much concern himself with proof of Mrs. Graeme’s marriage.”

The topmost page was filled from edge to edge with penciled handwriting, and so I filled my cup again with wine in preparation for the details that would come.

Gilroy began. “On the certificate, the two witnesses we have are Walter Browne and Barbara Malcolm. When I wrote the first time to the clerk of session for the parish of South Leith, he searched and sent me proof that both were dead. Today I was allowed to search the records for myself, and while I found no more for Barbara Malcolm, in the record of the death for Walter Browne it said he’d died when in his twenty-seventh year and was the son of Archibald, a local notary, so I began there. Twenty-seven years before his death, I found only three lads baptized by the name of Walter. And of those three there was but one,” he said, “whose sponsor was Archibald Browne. But the child was a foundling. Not Archibald’s son, but the son of a woman unknown who had left him exposed in the churchyard.”

I could not help but step in to defend the dead man’s honor. “How is that important? Walter Browne could hardly choose his form of birth, and being born a foundling surely does not make him an invalid witness to the marriage?”

Gilroy granted it did not. “But there is something larger here that I may have uncovered. In the register of births, there were four foundlings baptized in the space of four years, all lads, all sponsored by this same Archibald Browne. The clerk of session could not tell me anything about them, since these records dated from the time before the revolution, when the church was still Episcopalian, so I bid him good day and went to have a conversation with the stabler in the Kirkgate.”

I was unprepared for that. “The stabler?”

“Aye. He is an old man with a keen, observant eye.”

“And how did you gain his acquaintance?”

Gilroy drank long, and studied me above his cup as though deciding how much of himself to open to my scrutiny. “My father kept the stables of a rich man who would enter every year a horse or two to run at Leith. I came each spring to help my father and to watch the races, as a lad. It gained me many such acquaintances.” With that established, he went on, “The stabler did remember when those foundling lads were given to the notary to raise. He also said the minister at South Leith church in those days was the Reverend Mr. Cant. You may remember him.”