Where she remains—as she has been from our first meeting—my own lass.

For now and always.

THE END

About the Characters

One of the most beloved of Scottish writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, says in his Essays in the Art of Writing that a novel “is first cloudily conceived in the mind;… On the approach to execution all is changed.”

That was certainly true with this novel.

It was conceived, and cloudily, when I sat down with Darien: The Scottish Dream of Empire by John Prebble, and read this: “A hundred women were sailing with the expedition at the Company’s expense… Most of them were loyal wives, and all but a few of them are now nameless.”

Nothing sets a brighter match to my imagination than learning about those whose lives have been largely forgotten, and when I discovered that my old friend Colonel Patrick Graeme—whose footprints I’d traced through two of my own novels—had a son who’d sailed on the first voyage to the ill-fated Scots colony, I knew I had a book to write.

I thought, at the beginning, it would be a grand tale of adventure, telling what had happened to the colonists at Darien—but in the execution, all was changed.

Other characters rose up to take the lead.

I was already prepared for Colonel Graeme to demand more space. He’d done this to me in my book The Winter Sea, where I’d first met him, and had stubbornly remained in my subconscious until I picked up the dropped thread of his family’s story in a later book, The Firebird.

Like most of the real-life characters I write about, the colonel has escaped the notice of many historians and so moves like a shadow through the history books. Thankfully, the Privy Councillors at Edinburgh kept minutes that record when they sent Colonel Graeme, as the captain of their town guard, to collect a prisoner, or when he asked for leave to go to London, or when he was given shoes and plaiding for his soldiers—and so, bit by bit, with help from correspondence left behind by others, I can try to reconstruct his life.

I always hope to find his own voice, when I do my research. I find echoes of it. Documents that bear his name, or even bear his signature.

I enter every archive in the hope I’ll find a letter that he’s written to a member of his family or, best of all, a portrait so that I could finally “meet” him face-to-face.

And yet, after these years of having him here in my writing room, he seems an old companion, and even though for now I must rely almost entirely upon what others say of him, I feel I’ve come to know him well.

One anecdote, from an unlikely source, gives us a window on his character.

In the autumn of 1707—at the same time this novel is set—Queen Anne’s spymaster, Robert Harley, being keen to learn whatever he could about the invasion plot, sent spies into the north of Scotland. One of these was a former friend of Colonel Graeme’s, who had offered now, for money, to betray him.