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watched her as the melancholy oxcart procession left the presidio, skirted the town square at the foot of the hill and disappeared down the king’s road. She stood alone on the porch of the garrison church, her eyes downcast, her hands clasped together in that way of Spanish gentlewomen. He thought she was crying and wanted to go to her, which made him different from most of his sex, who tended to run from a woman’s tears. The difference was his profession; he knew he could comfort.
    But he hesitated. Depending on how long these matters took, he would be married to her in less than an hour. He knew it wasn’t the moment to be shy, but he wanted to give her room to grieve. Whether she wasmourning the loss of her father, or the upcoming loss of her freedom, he couldn’t have said.
    She couldn’t see him as he stood in the shadows by his quarters off the hospital, so he watched her, touched by her air of calm, when he suspected she was feeling anything but. After a moment, she raised her eyes from their contemplation of the tile and dabbed at them with a lace handkerchief that looked like one of the items he had bought back for her at yesterday’s auction.
    Her quiet beauty took his breath away, as he wondered just when, in the past years of knowing her, she had turned into such a lovely lady. While it was true she was much slimmer than Cora McClean, his faithless fiancée, she had a figure that was beginning to make him warm under his shirt.
    She stood alone, without a friend in sight. He watched as she looked heavenward, as though seeking aid. Seeing none, she sighed—he couldn’t hear her, but her breast rose and fell eloquently. Then she squared her shoulders and straightened her back, as if preparing herself for another ordeal: the ordeal of marriage to a stranded surgeon in the Royal Navy, because not one of her own would take her in.
    â€œI won’t be so bad,” Thomas whispered. “I promise you, lass.”
    If Ralph Gooding hadn’t insisted on being carried across the courtyard on a stretcher, there would have been no guests at their wedding. The effort made Gooding’s fevered cheeks even brighter. When Thomas rose and took a step toward him, the carpenter shook his head.
    â€œAs you were, laddie,” he managed to say, with atouch of his humor that even consumption couldn’t steal away.
    Thomas nodded and resumed his place at the altar on his knees beside his bride. He had brushed his uniform into submission, but he had lost weight and now it hung on him. Lately, he had been going about in Spanish trousers and linen shirts, and the worn blue wool felt almost alien. Laura had changed into another dress, one not so wrinkled and smelling of the dungeon, but plain and dark green with a crocheted collar. She had coiled her pretty hair around her head like a coronet. He wondered how long it actually was and grew a little warm, thinking that he might actually find out in a few hours. Her black-lace mantilla hid her hair, but not her face, and certainly not her frightened eyes.
    He had a ring, a little silver bauble given in payment several years ago by a fisherman after he extracted a hook from the man’s lip. Thomas was too cynical to believe the man’s tale of treasure from a Spanish galleon of the Philippines trade, but it was a pretty ring so he had kept it, rather than bartering it for something else.
    This was the ring he slid on Laura’s finger, surprising them both because it fit. For the only time in the ceremony, she looked him in the eye and smiled slightly, before dropping her gaze to the tile floor again.
    The service was in Latin, of course, and Thomas had no idea what Father Hilario was saying. He supposed it was something about loving, honoring and obeying. He imagined his ancestors looking down on the two of them with Presbyterian disapproval, but it bothered him less than he would have thought. They were dead and he was not, and they