Well, it made it harder. But I wrote the scene.
I kept firmly to the historical record, which states that Edward Aitcheson was executed on June 17, 1685, in the churchyard of what most people in Edinburgh at that time would have called the College Church, but which I’ve chosen to call by its alternate name, Trinity Church, for clarity. This was not the public place of execution, and he was not hanged, but shot.
Those are the facts. But common people disappear so easily into the written record, and I haven’t yet been able to establish beyond all doubt what became of Jean and their two children, so I strayed from straight facts when it came to their life afterward. I was content to let Jean be the same Jean Atchison who, in the real-life registers of Edinburgh, was married to John Morison, a soldier, on October 29, 1685 （ignoring that Jean would more likely have retained her maiden name of Durhame）。 I liked that ending for her better than thinking of her all alone.
I did give Edward one more daughter, though.
I gave him Lily.
She is my creation, as are her fictional mother and grandmother.
I strayed from straight facts also when I placed the house of Mr. Bell, the swordslipper, in Bell’s Close, for I know I will get letters from historians reminding me that Bell’s Close was not known by that name at that time. They are right. The close took the name Bell’s Close from a much later Mr. Bell, a stabler and carrier, who lived there in the 1770s, and for a while before that it was known as Hope’s Close, but since I could find no definitive record of what it was called at the time when my characters lived there, I let it be Bell’s Close again.
The swordslipper, like everyone who lives within his house, is my creation, but because his treatment of Lily was drawn from my own experience, and in case anyone reading this has met their own Mr. Bell, I’d like to emphasize, as Barbara does to Lily, that what happened never was your fault, and there are helplines you can call, if you have not already done so.
In my story, Adam visits Bell’s Close in the last week of September 1707. In real life, two months after that, on November 28, a great fire broke out in that part of the Canongate head. It began around two in the morning, according to one eyewitness quoted in Chambers’s Notices of the Most Remarkable Fires in Edinburgh, who said, “When I came to the window, I saw the terrible light; both sides of the Canongate were on fire.”
That witness saw the fire as a sign of God’s judgment on the place. I saw it as a chance to free my fictional character Marion from her oppressive circumstances and give her the happier life hinted at in Adam’s epilogue.
Fires were a continual hazard in Edinburgh. The following August, another one began in Steell’s Close, burning backward from “the great lodging possest by him” into Borthwick’s Close and up to the High Street. Those flames, so close to St. Giles’s, would have been cause for concern, as would the damage to the Cross Keys tavern, which had, as I’ve portrayed it, been a landmark on the High Street for some years, known for its musical landlord, Patrick Steell.
You’ll find his name spelled variably in the records of the time, as Steele or Steil or Steill, but for the documents he or his family signed—his marriage, the baptism of his daughter Christian, his death record, and his will—it was spelled uniformly “Steell,” so that’s the way I’ve spelled it here.
The fame of Pat Steell’s tavern was its “parliament” of patrons—among whom was the powerful Fourth Duke of Hamilton.
I have a code I keep to when I deal with real-life characters: I don’t make anyone a villain unless I can do it with a clear conscience. That person is no longer here to defend themselves, and I must be convinced, from my research, that I’m portraying them correctly.
In the case of the Duke of Hamilton, apart from his own actions, it was the words of those who knew him best that, in the end, convinced me—particularly those of his longtime friend Nathaniel Hooke who, being sent to Scotland from the court of Saint-Germain in the spring of 1707 to prepare for the coming invasion attempt, came to the dismayed conclusion that the duke could no longer be trusted. “I was quickly convinced that he did not act sincerely,” Hooke wrote in his memoirs, adding, “it came into my mind that he had still an intention of seizing the throne himself.”
The Earl of Seafield is a more ambiguous figure, and therefore trickier to bring to life on the page, but where I could, I’ve used his own words in his dialogue, so that he may speak for himself as much as possible. The part he played in questioning Robin Moray is factual, and the house Seafield lived in then—called by coincidence Moray House—still stands today in the Canongate.