The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(44)

‘Oh aye? Fit did I tell ye, noo?’

‘You told me not to worry, that you’d keep the cottage in good order and my chimney smoking.’

Jimmy grinned. ‘Michty, ye’ve a rare grasp o’ the Doric fer a quine fa’s nivver heard it afore.’

I’d never given it much thought, but I supposed that he was right. And come to think of it, a few of my own characters—the servants up at Slains—spoke in the Doric in my mind, and though I modified their speech when I was writing so my readers wouldn’t curse me, I still understood what they had said originally. Just as I understood everything Jimmy Keith said.

It was almost as if I had heard it before. Heard it spoken so often that I had remembered…

My gaze was pulled back to the window, and Slains.

Jimmy cheerfully said, ‘Weel, that’s me awa hame. Best o luck wi’ yer research, my quine.’

And I thanked him.

But part of me wasn’t so sure that I wanted good luck, at the moment. It was one thing, I thought, to ask questions, and look for the answers. It might be another to actually find them.



In the end, I decided the Duke of Hamilton would be the safest subject for my research. I did need to learn more about the man, since it appeared he was going to play a key role, whether onstage or off, in my novel. And I knew I’d have no trouble finding information on him down in Edinburgh.

I’d been there several times already, doing research for this book, but always I’d just flown across from France and stayed a few days in the flat that Jane still kept there for her use when she went down each month to work out of the office of her literary agency. Her agency was large and based in London, but she’d worked for them so long and so effectively that, when she’d married Alan, they had in effect created a new office for her private use, in Edinburgh. Since then, a few more agents had moved up to work in Scotland, so she didn’t feel the pressure to come down from Peterhead as often as she had before, but she still came enough to need the flat.

It was a tidy little place, two rooms, conveniently central. If I’d wanted to, I could have walked the short way down to Holyroodhouse, which had stood in its imposing park for centuries behind its great iron gates. I could have walked around it, or even tried to get permission to tour the old apartments of the Duke of Hamilton himself, to get more detail for the scenes that happened there between Sophia and the duke at the beginning of my story.

But I didn’t.

I would never have admitted that I stayed away in part because I didn’t want to know what those rooms looked like, didn’t want to take the chance that they, too, might be just the way I had imagined them.

Instead, I told myself I simply didn’t have the time this week for sightseeing—I had too many documents to slog through.

So it was that Wednesday morning found me settled in the record office reading room, a comfortably familiar environment, happily sifting through the Duke of Hamilton’s private correspondence.

The letters that he’d written and received gave me a clearer picture of the man—his double-edged role as the patriot and the betrayer, though I doubted he’d have ever judged himself like that. He’d simply served himself, I thought, before all others. His political and personal decisions, which so many of his own friends, in their letters, claimed they could not fathom, all could be reduced with mathematical precision to that one common denominator: what would best advance the duke’s ambition.

Always short of money, he had married an heiress with large estates in England, and he hadn’t been likely to do anything to irritate the English into cutting off that prime source of his income. He gave speeches in the parliament against the Union, but when others wanted to oppose with force instead of words, he held them back with empty promises until their opportunity was lost, and so made certain that the Union went ahead. He had not been a stupid man, and in his letters he’d left no clear evidence that he’d been bribed by England to support the vote for Union, but I knew, just from his character, that he would not have risked his reputation if he hadn’t stood to gain by it.

I knew exactly whom the countess had been speaking of to Hooke in that last scene I’d written, when she’d said, ‘He is suspected of holding a correspondence with the court of London…’

Someone coughed.

I looked up from my work, and saw a youngish female clerk who looked a little nervous. ‘You’re…excuse me, but you’re Carolyn McClelland, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’ I smiled politely, understanding now. She was a fan.

‘I’ve read your books,’ she told me. ‘Every one of them. They’re marvelous.’

‘Well, thank you. That’s so nice to hear.’

‘I love the history. Well, I would. That’s why I work here. But you make it come to life, you really do.’

I thanked her once again, and meant it. When a person cared enough to stop and tell me that they liked my books, I valued that connection. Since I wrote in isolation, just me and my computer, it was good to be reminded there were readers at the end of that long process who enjoyed the stories. And it was because of readers like this young clerk, after all, that my books had been successful.

So I put my pencil down, and asked her, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Kirsty.’

‘One of the characters in my new book is named Kirsty.’