“Graham” was not the right spelling, for one thing—the Graemes of Inchbrakie used the “ae”。 But coming, as I do, from a family of amateur genealogists, I knew that was no argument at all, since surnames are often misspelt in such documents. After all, the Testament Dative for Jamie’s uncle John Graeme—Colonel Graeme’s brother—who also died in the Darien expedition, misspells his name as “Graham.”
All right, my mind argued. The James Graham on the list was called a “volunteer” when Jamie had been a midshipman. But when I traced through the records of the others on that list, I found men like William Miller, who on the list was also called a volunteer but who had no corresponding Testament Dative in the otherwise scrupulous records of the Company unless he was the William Mill, a “sailor and midshipman aboard the ship Unicorn” whose Testament Dative records his surname as both Milne and Mill in the same line, and who, like Jamie, died on the Darien expedition.
The African Company might have kept poor records of the women who were part of its two expeditions, but they did keep records of the men whom they employed, and I’ve found only two James Grahams.
In the end, there’s only one Testament Dative in that name among the records of the Company for wages owed to those who died at Darien. And in the end, I had to accept that the name on the Company’s list of those who’d died before they’d reached the colony could probably belong to just one person.
“The deceast James Graeme,” I could hear Colonel Graeme saying, in a gentle voice. “My son.”
And so, with Maggie and Lily, I stood on the pier and watched the Rising Sun sailing westward, without us.
It may be that someday I’ll write that grand Darien novel—that sweeping tale of adventure. But this book decided it wanted to be something different.
Robert Louis Stevenson, had he been sitting drinking whisky with me on the day that I first （cloudily） conceived it, might have warned me it would change, but I doubt even he could have predicted how much more this version of the story would have taken hold of my heart than the one that I began.
My writing room has been as full of phantom visitors as Adam’s study, while I’ve worked upon this novel, as the now-familiar shades of Abercairney Morays and Inchbrakie Graemes move around me, telling tales.
They have more left to tell, I think.
And when I go to Abercairney next, perhaps I’ll stand awhile beneath the old Inchbrakie yew, at evening when the shadows fall just right between the trees, and change the angle of my head and let my eyes half close—to see if, for a moment, I might glimpse an old man, once a soldier, walking to the now long-vanished castle, with a child holding fast to either hand.
A Word about Accuracy
Any story set within another time presents a challenge—how to tell it well, and not distort the past, yet not confuse the reader.
There are compromises.
Several of the characters in this novel would properly be speaking Scots, but to write their speech phonetically would render it difficult for many modern readers to understand, so I’ve opted to rely more upon cadence where I can. In Scotland, the long undergarment women wore beneath their clothing was a smock—but since that name conjures the wrong image in the modern mind, I’ve replaced it with shift. And while Scottish people of the time used dollars as their currency and said “gotten” in everyday speech, it’s difficult to convince a modern reader these are not Americanisms, so my characters use neither.
As a historical novelist I sometimes find myself having to be inaccurate to seem accurate.
But for the rest, I’ve tried to paint a picture that’s as true to life as possible, by drawing on the letters and the other varied writings that the people of those times have left behind.
All dates are noted in the Old Style of the Julian Calendar, with the Scottish exception being that their new year began not on March 25 as in England, but on January 1.
Continue your journey in 1707 Scotland with an excerpt from
The Winter Sea
the New York Times bestselling companion novel to The Vanished Days
XIII
November came, and brought a weary week of wind and storms, and one more unexpected guest. He came on horseback, blown across the threshold of the stables by a fiercely gusting north wind and a drenching sheet of rain, his cloak wet through and hanging heavily across his horse’s steaming flanks. To Sophia, who’d been passing time by chatting with the soft-eyed mare and feeding kitchen scrapings to the mastiff, Hugo, this new stranger bursting in upon them seemed like something flung up by a force unnatural. He looked, to her eyes, darker than the devil, and as large.