My mother’s family goes a long way back here, he had told me.
And an image crossed my own mind of a little girl with darkly curling hair who long ago had run with outstretched arms along the beach. A girl who had grown up here and presumably had married and had children of her own. Had anybody ever traced the line of Graham’s family tree, I wondered? And if I tried to myself, would I find it included a fisherman’s family who’d lived in a cottage just north of the Bullers of Buchan?
That, too, seemed impossible. Too like a novel itself to be true. But still I saw that little girl at play along the shore. The wind rose swirling at my window with a voice that was familiar and again I heard Sophia saying, as I’d heard her say my first day in this cottage, that her heart was held forever by this place. And I could hear the countess answering, ‘But leave whatever part of it you will with us at Slains, and I will care for it. And by God’s grace I may yet live to see the day it draws you home.’
As I lay listening to Graham’s steady breathing in the darkness, I could almost feel that tiny missing fragment of Sophia’s heart rejoin my own and make it whole. Behind me, Graham shifted as though he had felt it, too. And then his arm came round me, solid, safe, and drew me firmly back against the shelter of his chest, and I felt peace, and turned my face against the pillow, and I slept.
THE END
ABOUT THE CHARACTERS
Any work of historical fiction relies on real people. With very few exceptions—little Anna, and the servants at Slains, and Sophia—the characters from the eighteenth-century story are real, and their actions are bound by the limits of what truly happened.
Not that finding out what truly happened in the ’08 is an easy thing. All sides, for their own purposes, tried hard to cover up the truth, and even what was written by the people who lived through it can’t be trusted. I’m indebted to John S Gibson’s masterfully succinct history of events surrounding the invasion, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708, the book that first inspired me to write about the period, and to Colonel Nathaniel Hooke’s wonderfully detailed memoir of the incident, published in 1760 as The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s Negotiations in Scotland, in Favor of the Pretender. I was fortunate enough to find an original copy of Hooke’s account that not only became one of the treasures of my home library, but also proved invaluable in sorting out the movements of my characters.
I’ve tried, wherever possible, to seek out the best evidence—the letters and the transcripts of the time. If an account was written down of what was said between two people, then I’ve had them say the same thing in my book. If Captain Gordon’s ship was in Leith harbor on a certain day, I’ve put him there. I’ve used this rule with even minor characters: “Mr Hall” was the alias commonly used by the priest Father Carnegy when he traveled in public on Jacobite business, and his visits to Slains on behalf of the Duke of Hamilton are a matter of fact, as is Mr Malcolm’s part in the invasion, and his going into hiding when it failed.
That said, I have taken a couple of liberties. For all the research I’ve done on John Moray, I don’t know for certain that he was at Malplaquet. But since the only reference to his death that I have found fits with the date of Malplaquet, and since it helped my plot to have him there, I put him on that battlefield, where in the woods the Royal Irish Regiment in fact did meet and fight the Irish Regiment that fought for France and James.
And while it’s also a recorded fact that Captain Gordon captured the Salisbury during the invasion, and that he was the only British captain in the fight to claim a French ship as his prize, there’s also little doubt that Gordon was a Jacobite. And since no one but Gordon knows exactly why he took that ship, I gave him an excuse that seemed to fit the man as I had come to know him.
His Jacobite loyalties lasted the rest of his life. When Queen Anne died in 1714 and the first Hanoverian king, George I, was brought over to sit on the British throne, Gordon refused to take the oath of allegiance, and as a result was dismissed. He promptly accepted a commission in the Russian navy of Tsar Peter the Great, where he served with distinction and rose to be an admiral and the Governor of Kronstadt. Throughout his time in Russia he continued to promote the Jacobite cause, and kept up a correspondence with King James and his supporters. When he died in the spring of 1741, a wealthy and respected man, his obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine stated he had always been ‘a true Friend to his Countrymen.’