I confess I gave Adam, who became one of my favorite fictional characters, my own love of walking Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, but Adam would find his nightly walk greatly changed were he to do it today.
The Netherbow was taken down in the mid-eighteenth century to widen the street, although its bell, after some adventures, can now be found overlooking the Canongate once again, above the Scottish Storytelling Centre, beside the John Knox House.
And Forrester’s Wynd—sometimes shown on old maps as Foster’s Wynd—was swept away in the “improvement schemes” of the nineteenth century, leaving no trace of the rooms where I lodged Lily, in the house owned by the real Sir John Foulis, whose published account book provides a useful window on the daily life of people of the period.
But Hamilton’s Close, where Simon lounged in the shadows, survives today as Fisher’s Close.
From its entrance you have a clear view across what once was called the Landmarket—what we now call the Lawnmarket—to Gladstone’s Land, the very real seventeenth-century building that became the model, both inside and out, for my fictional Caldow’s Land.
Lieutenant Turnbull was never a tenant at Gladstone’s Land, but he existed in actual fact, as did Helen, his wife. It’s my hope they had more cheerful servants in real life than those I created and gave to them. All their family connections as mentioned are real, as are Turnbull’s endeavours to seek a promotion, while others with better connections advanced before him.
He was still a lieutenant on December 12, 1707, when he and Helen baptized their firstborn child at Standhill—a daughter they named Anna. But by the time their daughter Helen was born in 1711, Turnbull had finally advanced to the rank of captain. Several years later （one source says around the year 1717）， he became deputy-governor of Dumbarton Castle, a post he held until his death. His obituary, from the Derby Mercury of July 2, 1756, reads: “At Dumbarton-Castle, on the 5th of May last, died Robert Turnbull, Esq.; of Stand-Hill, Lieutenant-Governor of that Garrison, in the eighty sixth year of his Age. He served sixty-eight Years in the Army with Approbation, and was the only remaining Officer of those who went upon the Darien Expedition.”
If Mr. Gilroy—a fictional character who turned up entirely unexpectedly in this novel, and whose parents’ story began over a quarter of a century ago in my novel Mariana—were to venture down to Leith today in search of information, he’d find things changed there, too, although the Links are still there to be walked upon, the Shore can still be found, and the stone tower of the windmill stands as sturdily as ever at the end of it. South Leith church, much reconstructed and restored, yet occupies the same site that it did when Mr. Andrew Cant first came to preach there in real life in 1671, before he was transferred to Edinburgh’s Trinity parish in 1679, where he was still the minister that June day, six years later, when a soldier of the town guard, Edward Aitcheson, was executed in his churchyard.
At the revolution, he was deprived of his position for refusing to read the proclamation “disowning James VII., and acknowledging William and Mary,” but he continued to serve those of his faith clandestinely. In July 1708 he was one of five Episcopal ministers imprisoned for doing so, and in 1716 he was told again to stop preaching illegally, and fined for refusing to pray for King George. Undaunted, Mr. Cant carried on, and was appointed an Episcopal bishop by the exiled King James VIII in 1720. He died at Edinburgh ten years later. Depending which source you believe, he was either in his eighty-first or ninety-first year.
The Jacobite church where he preached in the last several years of his life, Old St. Paul’s in Edinburgh’s Carrubber’s Close, is still in use as a church, and worth visiting.
The house in Riddell’s Close, in Leith, does not exist, and never did. The close has been lost to development, and so I built a house for Barbara Malcolm from the sketches and descriptions and old photographs of ones that had once stood nearby.
The character of Barbara is herself a compilation of a handful of the women I encountered in the registers of South Leith Parish Church, whose lives were anything but easy in those unforgiving times.
It’s just as well my fictional notary, Archibald Browne, was not a real person—although there actually was a real-life notary named Mungo Strachan who, with the help of several accomplices, attempted a very similar swindle of the Commissioners of the Equivalent in the autumn of 1707, aiming to collect the wages of a dead Darien sailor by having a woman from Leith pose as the man’s sister. The trial was a sensation, and when Strachan and one of his fellow forgers were brought up for sentencing before the Lords that December, it was felt “that their guilt was so fragrant and palpable, that there was a necessity for some example to discourage such impudent growing boldness, and such flagitious contrivances deserved death,” so despite the fact forgery usually rated a fine and some time in the pillory or perhaps banishment, both Strachan and his fellow forger were hanged, “as an example to the terror of others.”