The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(26)

Because the wing chair was so obviously the doctor’s, I took the other chintz-covered chair, angled with the bookcases to my one shoulder and the curtains of the window to my other, and the small round table set between myself and Elsie Weir.

Dr Weir stepped out a moment, and returned with three large tumblers of heavy cut glass, each a third of the way filled with rich amber whisky. He handed mine to me. ‘So, Jimmy said you were a writer. Historical fiction, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m that ashamed to say I didn’t recognize your name.’

Elsie smiled. ‘He’s a typical man. Never picks up a book if the writer’s a woman. He always expects it to end with a kiss.’

‘Well, mine usually do,’ I admitted. I tasted my whisky, and let the sharp warmth sear a path to my stomach. I loved the pure taste of a single malt Scotch, but I had to consume it in small, measured sips, or it did me in quickly. ‘The book that I’m working on now has to do with the French and the Jacobites trying to bring James VIII back to Scotland, in 1708.’

‘Does it, now?’ He had lifted his eyebrows. ‘That’s a lesser-known skirmish. What made you choose that one?’

I wasn’t sure myself. The main ideas for my novels never struck me like a lightning bolt. They formed themselves in stages, like a snowball packed in layers, with clumps padded on here and lumps scraped away there, till the whole thing was rounded and perfect. But by then, I could no longer see the shape of that first handful I’d scooped up, that first small thought that had begun the process.

I tried to think of what had started this one.

I’d been working on my last book, which was set in Spain, and, needing to find out some minor detail about eighteenth-century hospitals, I’d come across the memoirs of a doctor who had lived in France about the time I needed. That doctor had done surgery on Louis XIV—the Sun King—and had been so proud of it that he’d written several detailed pages on the incident. And that had got me interested in Louis XIV.

I’d started reading up on him, and on his court and all its goings-on. For pleasure, nothing more. And then one night I’d turned my television on to catch the news and got the channel wrong and tuned in an old movie—Errol Flynn in ‘Captain Blood’—and because I’d always had a thing for Errol Flynn I’d watched him instead, enjoying the swordfights and the romance and the swashbuckling, and at the end he’d leapt onto the foredeck of his ship and told his fellow pirates they could all return to England, now that bad King James had fled to France and good King William ruled the country.

And that had set me thinking, idly, of what rotten luck the Stewart kings had suffered, King James in particular, and how it must have felt for him to lose the crown, give up his throne, and have to live in exile.

And, still thinking this, I’d turned the television off and opened up the book that I’d been reading, a biography of Louis XIV, and on the page where I’d left off there’d been a mention of the palace, Saint-Germain, that Louis had loaned to the Stewart kings in exile, so they still could keep a royal court. Intrigued, I’d started reading up on that—on all the Scottish nobles coming in and out of Saint-Germain, and all the plotting that went on. I’d found it all so fascinating.

Shortly after that, I’d found the papers by Nathaniel Hooke, and learned about his dream of a rebellion, and…

It was, I knew, a convoluted explanation, and most people who asked where I got my ideas were looking for a shorter answer, so I said to Dr Weir that I had picked the 1708 rebellion just because, ‘I liked Nathaniel Hooke.’

‘Ah, Hooke.’ The doctor nodded. ‘He’s an interesting character. An Irishman, though, not a Scot. You knew that? Yes, he came to Slains on two occasions, I believe. The first in 1705, to gauge support among the nobles for his plan to bring the young king back, and then again in 1707, to set everything in motion.’

‘I’m just dealing with the second visit, really. And the actual attempt at the invasion, the next winter.’ I settled back and took another careful sip of whisky, and explained how, since I’d started writing my book from the French side of things, I needed to fill in some gaps on my knowledge of Slains. ‘Jimmy said you knew a lot about the castle.’

‘That I do.’

‘It’s his pet subject,’ Elsie told me, with a fond, indulgent smile. ‘I hope you’ve nothing else to do, this evening.’

Dr Weir, ignoring her, said, ‘What, specifically, were you wanting to know?’

‘Whatever you can tell me.’ I had learned from years of doing research not to put restrictions on the things that people told me and although he’d likely touch on things I’d read about already, I’d learn more from him if I just let him talk, and kept my own mouth shut.

He started with the history of the Hays, the Earls of Erroll, who had built Slains. ‘It’s an old and noble family. There’s a legend told about the Hays, you know, that in the ancient days an ancestor of theirs was ploughing a field with his two sons, in sight of a battlefield on which the Danes were destroying the Scots forces. And, says the legend, when one of the Scots lines began to break up and retreat, well, this farmer—a large man, with powerful arms—snatched the yoke from his oxen to use as a weapon, and called to his sons, and together the three of them herded the Scots soldiers back into battle and reformed the line, and the Danes, in the end, were defeated. The king then took the farmer and his sons to Perth, and let a falcon off from Kinnoull Hill, and said that all the land the falcon flew over was to be theirs. And the bird flew to a stone, still called the Hawk’s Stone, in St Madoes Parish, so then the farmer was master of some of the finest lands north of the Tay, and a man of great wealth.