‘That’s true. But Elizabeth let her visit Buxton often to take the waters there, on account of her bad health. She wasn’t a well person. And the spa waters were supposed to have amazing healing powers.’

‘Did it work?’ Ben asked.

‘I don’t think it did a lot for her. Then Elizabeth stopped her going anyway, because she was nervous about Mary getting involved in plots against her if she was given too much freedom.’

‘And then she chopped her head off.’

‘Not for a few years afterwards. That was one execution warrant Elizabeth really didn’t want to sign. She delayed it for a long time. But as she saw it, politically she had no other choice.’

‘I never knew all that,’ Ben said. ‘How come you’re so clued up?’

‘Someone had to pay attention during history class at school. I actually liked learning about Scotland’s past. All the famous figures from our history. William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Flora MacDonald—’

‘Who was she?’

‘A real Scottish heroine, who helped Prince Charlie escape after the English hammered his army at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. She managed to smuggle him to the Isle of Skye on a boat, disguised as a woman. You know the Skye Boat Song? I mean, who doesn’t? Anyway, that’s where it came from.’

Ben looked at her. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie, the great Scottish hero, dressed up as a woman to get away from the English?’

She nodded. ‘Yup. Petticoat, stockings, garters, and all. Posing as an Irish maid called Betty Burke. Actually, the pattern of material his dress was made of became all the rage for fashionable Jacobite ladies in the late 1740s.’

‘Kind of gives a new meaning to the term “Young Pretender”,’ Ben said.

‘Shocked?’

‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘An SAS squad once dressed up as Muslim women, the full head-to-toe garb, so they could infiltrate an ISIS terrorist cell in Raqqa.’

‘Bet that gave them a surprise.’

‘Especially when the troopers pulled submachine guns out from under their burqas and blasted them,’ Ben said. ‘But they were attacking, not running away. The SAS don’t do running away. And I’d like to see anyone try getting any of the guys I knew into stockings and garters.’

‘Oh, and Prince Charlie wasn’t really Scottish either,’ Grace said.

‘He wasn’t?’

‘His father James II was half French and born in London, and his mother was from Silesia, now Poland. He was born and raised in Italy, spent less than fourteen months of his entire life in this country, and if he spoke English at all it was with a foreign accent. I mean, European royal families were always a mixed bag, inbreeding all over the place. But if Prince Charlie could claim he was Scottish, then with a name like Kirk that goes back to seventh-century Norway, I’m definitely a Viking.’