Nothing sets a brighter match to my imagination than learning about those whose lives have been largely forgotten, and when I discovered that my old friend Colonel Patrick Graeme—whose footprints I’d traced through two of my own novels—had a son who’d sailed on the first voyage to the ill-fated Scots colony, I knew I had a book to write.
I thought, at the beginning, it would be a grand tale of adventure, telling what had happened to the colonists at Darien—but in the execution, all was changed.
Other characters rose up to take the lead.
I was already prepared for Colonel Graeme to demand more space. He’d done this to me in my book The Winter Sea, where I’d first met him, and had stubbornly remained in my subconscious until I picked up the dropped thread of his family’s story in a later book, The Firebird.
Like most of the real-life characters I write about, the colonel has escaped the notice of many historians and so moves like a shadow through the history books. Thankfully, the Privy Councillors at Edinburgh kept minutes that record when they sent Colonel Graeme, as the captain of their town guard, to collect a prisoner, or when he asked for leave to go to London, or when he was given shoes and plaiding for his soldiers—and so, bit by bit, with help from correspondence left behind by others, I can try to reconstruct his life.
I always hope to find his own voice, when I do my research. I find echoes of it. Documents that bear his name, or even bear his signature.
I enter every archive in the hope I’ll find a letter that he’s written to a member of his family or, best of all, a portrait so that I could finally “meet” him face-to-face.
And yet, after these years of having him here in my writing room, he seems an old companion, and even though for now I must rely almost entirely upon what others say of him, I feel I’ve come to know him well.
One anecdote, from an unlikely source, gives us a window on his character.
In the autumn of 1707—at the same time this novel is set—Queen Anne’s spymaster, Robert Harley, being keen to learn whatever he could about the invasion plot, sent spies into the north of Scotland. One of these was a former friend of Colonel Graeme’s, who had offered now, for money, to betray him.
In a report to Harley dated Christmas Day 1707, this spy wrote that an order had been given to a local officer to apprehend Colonel Graeme, but “this officer kept the order above four months and never did it, at last it was given to another officer and he had it three months, at last the Colonel came to a house by chance where this officer was, but alone, the master of the house did know of the thing and advertised the Colonel not to come in, but the Colonel being a…bold brave man said since he is alone he shall catch a Tartar if he offers anything to me; and the Colonel actually went up and drank all the night with this officer…”
Which doesn’t only tell us of the colonel’s courage, but of the respect that he commanded from the Highlanders—even from those who were not on his side.
There’s no denying he earned that respect through his own actions, but I don’t doubt some of it was given to him also for the simple fact he was the son of the Black Pate, who’d ridden with the great Montrose （who in Scotland is more commonly referred to by the French form of his title, marquis, instead of the English marquess, so in this book he’s the Marquis of Montrose）。
I’d first “met” the Black Pate in Or and Sable: A Book of the Graemes and Grahams, Louisa Grace Graham’s history of her family and its origins, published at Edinburgh by William Brown in 1903.
But it was another man I encountered in Or and Sable who ended up taking my story off course in a way Robert Louis Stevenson would, I’m sure, have recognized and understood.
In her section on Colonel Graeme, the author of Or and Sable did what I’ve just done—she used an anecdote to try to show his character. She told how he’d attempted, unsuccessfully, to save the life of one of the town guardsmen under his command, named Acheson （her spelling）， who’d killed a violer playing in the dead of night.
The unfortunate “Acheson” stayed with me. Characters do that, sometimes.
And when I next went to Edinburgh, I asked my friend Alison Lindsay, head of the Historical Search Rooms at the National Records of Scotland, if she could help me learn anything more about him.
Between the pair of us, we filled the gaps. I changed the spelling of his surname to Aitcheson—a composite of the ones I came across while searching through the records. By the end, I knew his first name: Edward. I knew when he’d married his wife, Jean, and where. I knew the dates when they’d baptized their little girl, Elizabeth, and their son, James. That made it harder, somehow, because then I knew that baby James was barely two months old, if that, when…