“But you are hoping that I'll go off to Europe.”

“Some part of me hopes for that, yes. But another part hopes just as sincerely that you will not. I do like Simon, and I respect him. I think he would be a good husband to you.”

“If I marry, what happens to the money?”

A smile flickered in the gray of her mother's eyes, touched the corner of her mouth. “It is yours, whatever you decide. It will give you some measure of security. A married woman should have that, though the law doesn't see it thus.”

“And my father agrees with this?”

“Haven't you guessed?” Lily's mother asked. “It was your father's idea to start with.”

Such a clever husband, Elizabeth thought, who could find a way to put a wife's worries to rest and secure their daughter's future in such a simple, elegant way.

Now, sitting at the table while Lily wiped the few dishes, Elizabeth found herself smiling, pleased with him and herself too, and most of all with Lily, who had taken this offer in the spirit it was meant. No doubt there would be many more days of uncertainty in which she would question herself closely, but for the moment Elizabeth felt truly peaceful.

Of course, it remained to be seen how Simon would react. She had set him many small tests in the weeks since he came to Paradise, all of which he had met with a curious combination of intelligence and thoughtfulness and something she could only call native intuition. This newest test would tell most about him.

Most men would take offense; certainly men raised as he had been. In that world, the laird's word was law and women made a place for themselves in the shadows. Simon might be outraged at the idea that Lily would want to make her way in the world without his protection or the protection of any man at all.

Over the years Elizabeth had come to the conclusion that even reasonable men had a good dose of the apostle Paul brewing in their bellies, and needed very little provocation to spew him forth.

Her own husband, her calm and reasonable and unflappable Nathaniel, confronted with a similar charge so many years ago, had balked like a mule. Offended, yes, and threatened, and those two things together had loosened the tight control he kept on his temper. In the hours before they were wed they had argued so intensely that she remembered much of it word for word all these years later. Damn your father and damn your aunt Merriweather and most of all goddamn to everlasting hell your know-it-all Mrs. Wollstonecraft.

She had wondered many times if her aunt Merriweather had ever known the chaos that had been wrought with her gift of independence. Most probably not; she had been far away in England, with no real understanding of the place where Elizabeth had chosen to make a life for herself or the challenges she faced.

Now, watching her own daughter, Elizabeth knew exactly what she had started. Lily must go to Simon with this newest challenge, and they would work it out between them. Or they would not. She had a sense that Simon would see this newest and most serious challenge to his courtship as a puzzle to be solved, and if he trod lightly—if Lily understood well enough how to let him do that—they would come to an agreement.

“He's the kind of man who won't swaddle her,” Nathaniel had said, when they were talking this whole delicate business through. “He'll make sure she has what she needs and then he'll stand back and wait his turn.”

Elizabeth trusted her husband's intuitions, but more than that, she knew he was talking about more than food and clothing and a sound roof over Lily's head.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. Elizabeth got up from the table.

She said, “I'm away to take my nap, now, Lily. Please make my excuses to your Simon.”

Chapter 36

With the arrival of the warmer weather the war woke like a bad-tempered bear, and with that, Hannah began to dream more and more of Strikes-the-Sky. Quiet dreams that left more questions than they raised, and stayed with her and followed her through the day as she went about her work.

Her husband never said very much to her, or if he did the memory of the words themselves faded in the morning light. It was a mystery and frustrating; if he had things to tell her she wished he would do it. She had questions she wanted to ask him; mostly, she wondered about the boy, who never showed himself.

When she mentioned the dreams to Jennet, she got a thoughtful silence in response.

“I never dream of Ewan,” her cousin said finally, a little wistfully. “The truth be told, I can hardly remember his face. It was all so long ago, a hundred years at least, in a faraway place where fairies romp in the wood.”

“That's a fine state of affairs,” Hannah said. “Your husband has disappeared altogether and mine is around every corner.”

“If I were still at Carryckcastle no doubt it would be the same for me,” Jennet said. “I ran away from everything familiar, but you're back in the middle of it all.”

That was a fine bit of reasoning, and Hannah had to agree that it made sense. She hadn't ever thought to find herself anywhere near any war, ever again, but now they often woke to the distant stuttering of artillery fire. Traffic on the river grew more frantic day by day: boats and ships, canoes and barges and bateaux of every size, all bearing supplies or troops or munitions, soldiers and sailors swarming like ants before a storm. Wounded men were brought to the garrison over land and water both, though most of these Hannah never saw. To her the garrison hospital was as big a mystery as ever; she had never been invited inside, and what she knew of the doctors who worked there she had second- and thirdhand from guards and the other women in the followers' camp.