The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(88)

‘Oh, aye?’

‘Daniel Defoe, in particular.’

‘Ah.’ He straightened. ‘Well, I might be able to assist you there. Just bear with me a minute while I check the stakes and straps on Elsie’s lilac, after last night’s wind.’

I followed him with interest to the bare-branched shrub, much taller than the others, at the far end of the border, by one window of the bungalow. ‘That’s a lilac?’

‘Aye. I haven’t had much luck with it. It’s meant to be a tree, but it’s a stubborn-minded thing, and it won’t grow.’

The bark felt smooth against my fingers, when I touched it. Leafless, it stood half the height of that which I’d remembered in the garden up at Slains, against the wall where Moray and Sophia had said their farewells. But even so, it touched a chord of sadness in my mind. ‘I’ve never liked the smell of lilacs,’ I confessed. ‘I always wondered why, and now I think I’ve found the answer.’

‘Oh?’ The doctor turned. His eyes, behind the spectacles, showed interest. ‘What is that?’

And so I told him of the scene I had just written.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s very telling. Scent is a powerful trigger for memory.’

‘I know.’ One whiff of pipe tobacco could transport me straight back to my childhood and my grandfather’s small study, where we’d sat and eaten cookies and discussed what I had thought were grown-up things. It had been there that he’d first told me of the small stone with a hole in it, and how it would protect me if I ever chanced to find one.

Dr Weir asked, ‘What becomes of him, the soldier in your book?’

‘I don’t know, yet. He must not have come back, though, because three years after he left Slains, the real Sophia was back in Kirkcudbright,’ I said, ‘marrying my ancestor.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, they were dangerous times. He most likely got killed on the Continent.’

‘You don’t think he could have died in the ’08, do you? In the invasion attempt, somehow?’

‘I don’t think that anyone died in the ’08.’ He gave a faint frown as he tried to remember. ‘I’d have to read over my books, to be sure, but I don’t mind that anyone died.’

‘Oh.’ It would have been a nice romantic feature for my plot, I knew, but never mind.

The doctor straightened from his work, his round face keen. ‘Now, come inside and have a cup of tea, and tell me what you’d like to know about Daniel Defoe.’



Elsie Weir had a decided opinion of the man who had written such classics as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. ‘Nasty little weasel of a man,’ she called him.

The doctor took a biscuit from the plate she held out, and said, ‘Elsie.’

‘He was, Douglas. You’ve said yourself.’

‘Aye, well.’ The doctor settled back into his chair and set his biscuit neatly on the saucer of his teacup. The curtains at the end wall of the sitting room were drawn well back this afternoon to let in the sunlight, which fell with a comforting warmth on my shoulders as I chose a biscuit myself, from my seat by the long row of glass-fronted bookcases.

‘Daniel Defoe,’ Dr Weir said, ‘was doing what he thought was right. That’s what motivates most spies.’

Elsie took her seat beside me, unconvinced. ‘He was doing what he thought would save his skin, and line his pockets.’

The doctor’s eyes twinkled briefly, as though his wife’s stubborn dislike of Defoe struck him as something amusing. To me, he said, ‘She won’t even read his books.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Elsie said, firm.

‘Even though the man’s been dead too long,’ her husband pointed out, ‘to profit from the royalties.’ He smiled. ‘Defoe,’ he told me, ‘was a stout supporter of King William, and no friend of the Jacobites. But he made the mistake, near the start of Queen Anne’s reign, of publishing a satirical pamphlet that the queen didn’t care for, and so he was arrested. He was bankrupt as well, at the time, so when the government Minister Robert Harley offered him an alternative to prison and the pillory, he leaped at it. And Harley was, of course, the queen’s chief spymaster.’

I knew the name, from my own reading.

‘Harley,’ Dr Weir went on, ‘was quick to see the benefits of having someone like Defoe to write his propaganda. And being a writer, Defoe was well-placed to do more for the government. Just before the Union, Harley sent him up to Edinburgh, to work in secret for the Union cause and to discredit those opposed to it. Defoe, as his cover, let dab he was writing a book on the Union and needed some help with his research. Not unlike what you yourself are doing, here in Cruden Bay.’

And, like myself, Defoe had found that people, by and large, were happy to sit down and tell a writer what they knew.

‘They didn’t think he was a spy,’ said Dr Weir. ‘But everything they told him found its way to Harley, down in London. And Defoe was good at learning things, observing, and manipulating. There’s no doubt that he had an impact on the Union being passed.’

‘A weasel,’ Elsie said again, and set her teacup down with force.

I asked, ‘Would he have ever been to Slains?’

‘Defoe?’ The doctor frowned. ‘I wouldn’t think so, no. He might have known what they were up to, and he doubtless would have met the Earl of Erroll, who was often down in Edinburgh, but I’ve not heard Defoe came up to Slains. But there were other spies. And not only in Scotland,’ he told me. ‘The English took a great interest in what went on at Saint-Germain. They had a whole network of spies based in Paris, and some at Versailles, with their ears to the ground. And they even sent people right into Saint-Germain, when they could manage it. Young women, usually, who slept with men at court and carried back what news they could.’