On the third day after the search of Heath Hall, Lucy came and sat on my bed. I felt a little better, was sitting up and sipping a dram of our good Scotch whisky, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask my Lucy where on earth she had learned all those Bible verses? Was she a secret Protestant? Would she tell me the truth if she was?

“You are a learned woman, Lucy,” I said. “I am well aware of that. I am never surprised to hear you quote Shakespeare…or Molière or even Dante on occasion. But…Holy Scripture?”

Lucy flushed and stared downward at her knitting so that her face was hidden by her prim, spare little white bonnet.

“Lucy?” I said.

She then told me a story I had never heard before. When she was a companion/governess in one of the houses where she had stayed for a time, the eldest son of the household, a young man of nineteen or twenty, quietly converted from the Roman Church to the Church of England and then to one of the Dissenters’ sects.

“He seemed to feel that I, young as I was,” she said, “was a ripe target for his proselytizing, where his family members were not. He knew I could not readily escape him…and he also suspected…that which was true…”

She paused and seemed even more intent on her handwork.

“Yes?” I said impatiently.

“…that I had fallen into an overwhelming longing for him, as young girls do.”

“Lucy!” I cried, as startled as if she had told me she once roamed England with a troupe of roving players, playing Desdemona one night and Juliet’s Nurse the next. This was not the cool Lucy I had always known, unruffled by even the most extraordinary human dramas, unmoved by the customary human passions.

Now she looked at me with a little flash of anger, so rosy that I could see that she must have once been almost pretty.

“Oh?” said I. “In what other ways did he take advantage of your youthful worship?”

“None,” she declared. She laughed, a soft sound between a wry giggle and a cough. “More’s the pity. You see, his longing to save my soul was sincere.”

I did not ask what she meant by “more’s the pity,” though I found that too surprised me and left my fond image of my straitlaced friend a little frayed around the edges.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did his parents find you out?”

“No, he left England. He went to Germany to study with the Protestant theologians. The children I was teaching were nearly grown, and I moved on. I never heard what became of him. But some of the verses he taught me have stayed with me to this day—and done me no harm.”

She recited with a slight smirk that was speedily gone: “‘O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: because His mercy endureth forever…’ Psalms 118:1.”

We moved on to other topics, but that story of her early, unrequited love in the end rounded and deepened my view of Lucy a little and reminded me that she did not merely exist for my convenience but had had her own secret desires and dreams. I wondered if her womanly longings would cause her to leave us in time—or if her flights of sentiment were all in the past.

Lucy Dunstable had first come to our family twenty-five years earlier, when we were living in our town house at Lincoln’s Inn Field in London, awaiting the coronation of King James II. My parents had served James and his queen, Mary Beatrice, when he was the Duke of York and heir to his brother Charles’ throne. They would be powerful advisors in his new court.

Lucy was my mother’s distant cousin who came to teach us four sisters (Marged, Aelwen, Glynis and me) the intricacies of French, Italian, embroidery, music, and dancing. I can still hear her in my mind admonishing us: “The gavotte requires intricate leaps and jumps, but you may not land flatfooted with full force as if you have just fallen out of an apple tree. And if you make a mistake in the pattern—or, God forbid, twist your ankle in the landing—your expression must betray nothing. You catch up in the steps, or you limp gracefully to the nearest chair, but you are always in perfect command of yourself.”

Lucy must have been quite young then, though she always conducted herself with an air of authority. I was only thirteen. To me, she seemed to be of a great age, lean as a rail and pinning her reddish hair up severely in tight coils rather than teasing and plumping it around wire frames into the stylized ringlets of the day. She was not a pretty woman but neither was she homely. She had clean, spare features with a little droop at the corners of her mouth. She was not unkind but a reserved soul, disappointed early in life by her lack of a dowry. Instead of a husband and children, she had acquired an impeccable command of the French and Italian tongues.

Lucy had given me a greater gift than dancing and French though—a love of books, especially of Shakespeare and John Donne and the Cavalier poets. I was an indifferent seamstress but, under Lucy’s tutelage, was rarely without a book, slipped into the pocket of my petticoat—a habit that has continued to this day. Books opened new worlds to me and saved me from being like many of the noblewomen around me, ruminating only on menus and furnishings and fashion and society gossip.

In fact, our mutual love of books eventually became one of the close bonds between Gavin and myself. He too loved the Cavalier poets and Donne, and, as for Shakespeare, the first gift Gavin ever gave me was a new edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

When William of Orange invaded England and my family escaped to France with the queen and infant prince, I thought I had lost Lucy forever. But she came to me in Paris and remained my closest companion and a substitute of sorts for the loss of my dearest sister Glynis to a convent in Bruges.

It was Lucy who had the idea of telling the children, who could not help but see some of the wreck MacGurk had made, that “naughty men” had come into our home but had been made to go away. Nine-year old Gareth accepted that brief explanation for the broken crockery and garments on the floor and went straight to the kitchen to see what Ainslie our cook was preparing that smelled so irresistibly of baked apples.

Moira, only five, lingered and looked up at me with her deep gaze and a single tear resting on one pink cheek. “But, ma mère…” she said, (Lucy had taught the children a little French) “what if the bad men come back?”

“That will not happen,” I told her with an assurance I did not feel.

It tore my heart but also gave me enormous anger that such young children must know the sensation of being in danger. How I loathed our persecutors. I wished them all imprisoned in a dank cell where there was nothing but an enormous Bible…with all of its pages pasted together so it could not be read.

Lucy and I were both starkly aware that Gavin would be returning soon. We had to decide what to tell him. I was emerging from my torpor enough to be overcome with fear as to what he might do—and the harm that might come to him—if we told him the truth.

I tried to remember when I had last seen him most enraged. Was it when the young daughter of one of our tenants was abducted by a village lout and forced into a mummery of an overnight “wedding”? I remembered Gavin’s anger when he heard the story, and how quickly he had organized servants and tenants to search for the girl. They found the poor child in a low inn, half-clothed on a dirty straw mattress, weeping uncontrollably.

Rather than force her to stay with the villain who had taken her, as another lord might have done, Gavin had the kidnapper beaten and banished and the girl returned to her parents. The Blessed Virgin must have heard her prayers because the girl did not bear a child. A year later, she married the boy she truly fancied and no more word was spoken about her ordeal. We helped to fit out a neat cottage for the two of them.

But this situation was much worse. Gavin’s wife and home had been assaulted and his children endangered. I imagined his comely face darkened with rage as I had never seen it. As I lay in bed, I could foresee Gavin pleading for a justice which he would not be granted, not here in the Scottish Lowlands, overrun as it was with Covenanters. If he was denied justice, what would he do?

We could not hide the fact that something had happened. Gavin would certainly observe my injuries. In any case, if we did not tell him, we could not be sure that one of our tenants or a neighbor would not mention what he had heard of rumors and gossip, if only to offer sympathy.

“I must tell him the whole story,” I finally said to Lucy. “I have no choice. I cannot deceive him in something as important as this, even to save him from himself. If I don’t and he finds out elsewhere, the fabric of our marriage may never be mended.”

“You must tell,” she said, “but perhaps you can modify it a bit, trim off the worst of the rough edges?”

“Oh, but, Lucy, I am so afraid for him.”

How it broke my heart to see my husband arrive the next day during a rainstorm, bursting through the front door and flinging his hat and cloak off with his usual vigor, spraying raindrops in all directions, full of smiles with his pleasure at seeing us. He came straight to me and lifted me off the floor in a sodden embrace, which normally would have pleased me. I smiled up at him…but then winced at the sharp pain in my back.

He gently set me down, looked at me with a quizzical raised eyebrow and then noticed that the entire family was sitting stock still and staring at him. Lucy’s blue eyes, the pale blue eyes of our very blonde Gareth, and the deep, dark eyes of Moira—her father’s eyes—all these were trained on Gavin.

Alistair of Wamphray, Gavin’s cousin and business agent, was also present. He too knew what had happened at Heath Hall. Normally he would have eagerly leapt up to welcome Gavin, but on this day he was very carefully studying a ledger on his lap and offered no greeting when Gavin came in. That may have been the telltale giveaway.

“Tell me quickly,” said Gavin, no longer smiling. “What has happened?”

“First you must sit and have a homecoming dram,” I replied, hands folded in as near a posture of calm as I could manage, though my voice shook a little, much to my disgust. “As you can see, we are all here and well, so you need not fear the worst.”

“I will not sit or drink,” he said, “until you tell me.”

We sent the children upstairs with their nursemaid, and Lucy and I took turns offering an abbreviated account of the attack on Heath Hall. All this time Gavin stood very still and heard us out.

Then he looked at me with his brow knotted, and I noticed that the inner edge of just one of his heavy, dark eyebrows was beginning to turn gray. This will age him further, I thought.

My husband was no longer the radiant youth of twenty-three I had first met at the court of James II in exile in Paris. Yet I thought he was even more handsome than he had been then. His face was careworn and bronzed from his many hours on horseback or in the field with his tenants. But the indentations across his forehead, the laugh marks around his eyes, the leaner cheeks and graying stubble, gave him character.

He looked like what he was, a man of authority and determination who took his time in great matters, considering and analyzing before he made a move. But I also knew his love of his family and his allegiance to his heritage were intense beyond the norm. I feared he might be impulsive, even reckless, if either was threatened. This attack had threatened both.

“There is more,” he said, looking hard at me. That inescapable gaze was so like Moira’s. “You are hurt.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “One of the three men became very angry when they could not find a priest. He threw me against the wall and then to the floor. Lucy and McClaren forced him off. McClaren, bless him, beat him until the man ran blood all over.”

“Amid the feathers,” said Lucy. So we had to explain the ruined feather bed that had exploded all over us. It was an absurd image but no one smiled.

I had thought Gavin might lift his voice and demand to know where these miscreants—especially MacGurk—might be found, but at first he was too angry to say anything, so angry that his face paled and his lips turned white. My fear for him rose, when it seemed for a moment that he might break from his stillness, seize his hat and cloak, and leave us without another word to track down the men who had so insulted us.

Instead he embraced me with the lightest of touches, trembling slightly himself, and kissed the top of my head. I put my hand on his arm and urged him again to sit and drink and give thought to what action should be taken. This time he did as I asked. After he had downed two whiskies, though I could still see the slight tremor in his hands and could hear it in his voice, he began methodically, bless him, to gather the details of the damage that had been done.

“I will go to the magistrates at Dumfries. We will need to take down all the evidence. I will make a record of every mark on you,” he said, though he choked a bit on the word mark. “Lucy,” he went on, “please give me an inventory of every bed linen, every tablecloth, every garment, that was ripped or soiled. I will ask McClaren to review the tools stolen from the smithy, and I will talk to every servant who was here.”

At these words, I allowed myself to exhale and untwist the handkerchief I had knotted into a tiny, damp ball in my palm. He had not gone flying forth, sword in hand, to take immediate revenge on those who had attacked us. He was still my high-tempered Gavin, and I could see what his restraint was costing him, but he had realized in a flash that if he indulged himself in extravagant action, it could hurt us even more.

I also loved him the more because he thought of us, not just his own outrage. He gave me, and later the children, an extra round of embraces and kisses with thanks to God that we were all sound. He even kissed Lucy’s cheek and thanked her for her help and defense.

McClaren received a little purse full of Scottish merks and a warm clap on the back. The besom, somewhat battered from its dance on the back of Minister MacGurk, was put in a place of honor by the great fireplace, and a new one made for humbler household use.

It had taken me a little time to warm to McClaren when I first came to Scotland as a new-wed bride. He spoke very little and his face never betrayed what he might be thinking, much less how he might be feeling. He was a stout, solid man, so reserved that it ultimately gave me comfort because I believed he would be little prone to gossip about our private affairs in the local taverns. He had a square face and a solemn expression.

When, occasionally, Gavin would offer him a taste of whisky to celebrate some holiday, he would toss it down and flush slightly, but his essential solemnity did not waver. It had taken some time, but I had learned to appreciate his devotion to our family when it mattered. On that terrible night I had come to value his loyalty more than ever.

In the next few days we spoke at length with Alistair about how he and Gavin could best present claims for damages to the magistrates in Dumfries. But whenever we came to speak of MacGurk, my husband’s sweet face, usually so cheerful, became as wrathful as when he had first heard the news.

On one occasion, Gavin asked the stable boy to bring his fastest steed. Without a word to me, he leapt on it bareback and rode off at such speed that I feared for him. But, an hour later, he returned unhurt.

He saw me standing in the doorway watching for him. He dismounted, handed the horse over to a stable boy, came to me and put his arm around me. His face was deeply flushed, but his expression had eased. He saw the tears of relief in my eyes, which I wiped away before they spilled.

“I have frightened you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have not ridden a horse in that way since I was a boy, and I promise you I will not do it again. Will you forgive me?”

“Only if you mean it. We have enough troubles and soon you will be off on your mission to the magistrates. I beg you, give me no unnecessary cause for more tears.”

“As you please, but…” he began, stopped, started again. “This was once my only way to cool my overheated brain and exhaust myself when I was angry.”

He could see I did not understand. He beckoned to me. I fetched my cloak and we walked out together along the allée that wandered under overarching trees from our front door to the ivy-covered gate marking the entry to our property. Halfway along, there was a very old stone bench, cracked and blackened, where we sometimes sat when we wanted to talk privately.

I spread my cloak around me, lifted my face to the cold, fresh air and tiny, spitting pellets of light rain, and then laid my head against his shoulder. He took my hand in his and tried to make me understand.

“After my mother died,” he murmured, “my father and I sometimes quarreled. If I knocked over a pitcher at table, or if my tutor criticized my lack of devotion to Latin, my father would furiously berate me as if my youthful mistakes were proof that I was not fit to manage the estate after him.

“Rather than attack him in kind, I used to ride off alone without waiting for an ostler to apply saddle or bridle. I was far too angry at my father to speak my thoughts aloud. I did not think he had been kind enough to the mother who was always kind to me.”

He went on. “I know you have said your parents loved each other through all that they suffered. But my father and mother were formal and dry towards each other. It was never a love match, and I think it cooled further when my mother bore no more children after my sister and I were born. He always wanted another son.

“My mother had her little dogs and her shopping expeditions to Edinburgh and London and the dignity of her title. My father had a barmaid at the Heath Arms and a ‘cousin’ he was fond of at Douglas Manor in Shawhead. But he was not a cruel man by nature. I think he brooded on his failures towards my mother after she died, and it made him irritable.”

“I am sorry for the distance between your parents,” I said. “Marriage is a very long game when there is no closeness of spirit.”

But, pitying the bereft boy he had been, I could not help but add, “I think your father was very lucky to have you for his heir instead of some careless young wastrel devoted to hunting, claret and compliant women.”

I was so relieved at the promise he had just given me to ride out no more without stirrups or reins that I felt inclined to tease him a little. I wagged a scolding finger at him: “You have mentioned this ‘barmaid’ and this ‘cousin’ of your father’s before, and I will remind you once again that no barmaids and no cousins will be permitted to interfere with this marriage.”

At that he laughed and responded as he always did.

“As if the comeliest barmaid or the rosiest ‘cousin’ could compare to you, who, in your tartan and brogues, would still outshine all of the Sun King’s favorites at Versailles!”

“How would you know!” I said, laughing with him, “You never saw the beauties at Louis XIV’s court.”

“No,” he agreed, taking my face in his hands and kissing me. “When I was in Paris, I was otherwise occupied, courting and marrying the famous beauty who appeared once at Versailles, awed all the courtiers with her exquisite dancing, and never was seen there again.”

The legend of my single appearance at Versailles had become greatly exaggerated over the years. My sister Marged had even written me that some believed that my dancing and the sparkling shoes I had borrowed to wear at Versailles, were the inspiration for Monsieur Perrault’s charming fairy tale about a mistreated girl, a fairy godmother, and a glass slipper.

My husband’s compliments always gave me a little thrill of pleasure, nonsensical as they were. Gavin had the idea that he had somehow carried off a treasure when he married me. I would not disabuse him of that fantasy, though I knew he had actually rescued a penniless refugee of twenty-seven with no prospects, who was entirely dependent on the dwindling largesse of an exiled king.

I was not sorry that I was living in the Scottish Lowlands with a beloved husband and children and no longer haunting the Grande Gallerie and the Salon de Mars of Versailles!

That night we sat by the fire with the children tucked away and Lucy up in her chamber with a new copy of Alexander Pope’s Pastorals.

I sat with a book in my lap, which always soothed me—rather than some poor piece of embroidery that seemed to cringe at every poke of my blundering needle. I have never been a seamstress. Often Gavin would also be reading, perhaps Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, one of his favorites. But this night he was too restless to read.

“In the old days when we were all good Catholics,” Gavin said, puffing intently on his pipe, “before that gorbellied knave Henry VIII decided to sell his soul to the Devil to get a son…I would simply have had one of my men horsewhip this MacGurk until there wasn’t enough flesh left on him to cover his bones.

“And who would have dared to complain? I am a lord and you are my lady. Or I would have taken him to the magistrate, told the story, and he would have been unceremoniously hanged after a brief proceeding.”

He placed his pipe on the table at his elbow, leaned forward and took both my hands in his and squeezed them gently. He had thrown off his peruke, but his own short auburn curls fell against his face on either side, a few strands of silver catching the light, and threw his features into partial shadow. His dark eyes glinted angrily.

“But nowadays we must be careful because the heathens and the fanaticals have taken over my dear land, and we are the strangers here. So I am going to follow the law precisely and hope that the law at least is still our friend.”

As he sat back again and crossed one long leg over the other, picking up his pipe once more, he mused aloud, “Once we all believed the same Truth. You would think all these advocates for the Bible and every man his own pope, would see that, in the splintering of religion lies the evidence of its delusion. How are we mere humans to find our way to truth through this motley maze of sects and factions?”

“In all this confusion,” I said. “It is even more important for us to cling to our ancient wisdom and belief and teach our children to do the same.” I was at least to that degree my mother’s daughter, though I have never achieved her utter certainty in her faith. I believe when I can because I must. Else what is all this suffering for?

Through all I cling to the Blessed Virgin because she understands the lot of women and, though she can be stern, she is always Love and Mercy. But I must admit I have wondered what her honest thoughts are of the many ways in which men subject women to their will and cause them pain.

I do not believe, as the priests would have us, that Mary was sublime because of her purity and her docile submission to suffering. I believe Mary must have been a strong woman indeed to keep her remarkable son Jesus alive and safe for thirty-three years. I glimpse ferocity just beneath the surface of that meek expression. Her eyes are downcast because she will not show us her strength and her anger. The Mary we see in images made by men is not the Mary who was.

Within a week, Gavin had compiled everything he had learned about the late-night attack on Heath Hall into a detailed report. Before he left, he arranged for more of our menservants to spend the night in the house for the time being for our greater safety.

Taking along Alistair of Wamphray, who had calculated and totaled the value of all the items the preachers had despoiled, my husband planned to go first to Dumfries and then on to Edinburgh, if necessary, in their search for justice.

Alistair had become much more presentable than he had been when I first came to Scotland. The first time I ever saw him, he was emerging from my husband’s little library in a rush, mopping his brow with an oversized handkerchief and pushing his wire spectacles up on his short nose. Startled at the sight of me, the new bride, he had dropped the large leather ledger he was carrying. His papers flew up and landed everywhere—one in the butter dish on the table and several in the fireplace which, fortunately for him, was not lit.

He wore no wig and his hair was as unkempt, thin and colorless as an overblown dandelion. He was scrupulously clean—even his fingernails devoid of a speck of dirt—and yet entirely disordered with buttons undone and one cuff hanging by a few threads. He tended to fluttery gestures with arms akimbo, but, when he did not stutter, I found he often had something intelligent to say.

On this day of their departure to see the magistrates, I saw that Alistair now wore a small wig pulled back with a black ribbon (a new style which was beginning to replace the heavy peruke). His clothes were neat—no dangling buttons or cuffs, no twisted cravat. He seemed a bit calmer, as well, and hardly stuttered at all anymore.

I noticed without paying much attention that Lucy and Alistair exchanged a glance that seemed to contain some personal meaning between them, just before Alistair mounted his horse. They sometimes appeared to communicate without words, to express paragraphs with a quick nod and a smile. It pleased me that these two people, who were so important in our lives, got along well. But I was too worried about Gavin at the time to think what this might mean.

I could spare few thoughts for Alistair while I was admiring my husband who always looked so imposing on horseback in his glossy black boots and voluminous dark green cloak. Sometimes for fun I called him “Chiron” after the centaur who tutored Hercules, Achilles and Jason. His brown cheeks always flushed russet out of sheer excitement when he was about to begin a journey by horseback.

The last thing I said to him before they rode off was, “I am safe and well, my dear. Now look to your own safety. I will not have my revenge bought by putting you in danger.”