In a report to Harley dated Christmas Day 1707, this spy wrote that an order had been given to a local officer to apprehend Colonel Graeme, but “this officer kept the order above four months and never did it, at last it was given to another officer and he had it three months, at last the Colonel came to a house by chance where this officer was, but alone, the master of the house did know of the thing and advertised the Colonel not to come in, but the Colonel being a…bold brave man said since he is alone he shall catch a Tartar if he offers anything to me; and the Colonel actually went up and drank all the night with this officer…”

Which doesn’t only tell us of the colonel’s courage, but of the respect that he commanded from the Highlanders—even from those who were not on his side.

There’s no denying he earned that respect through his own actions, but I don’t doubt some of it was given to him also for the simple fact he was the son of the Black Pate, who’d ridden with the great Montrose (who in Scotland is more commonly referred to by the French form of his title, marquis, instead of the English marquess, so in this book he’s the Marquis of Montrose).

I’d first “met” the Black Pate in Or and Sable: A Book of the Graemes and Grahams, Louisa Grace Graham’s history of her family and its origins, published at Edinburgh by William Brown in 1903.

But it was another man I encountered in Or and Sable who ended up taking my story off course in a way Robert Louis Stevenson would, I’m sure, have recognized and understood.

In her section on Colonel Graeme, the author of Or and Sable did what I’ve just done—she used an anecdote to try to show his character. She told how he’d attempted, unsuccessfully, to save the life of one of the town guardsmen under his command, named Acheson (her spelling), who’d killed a violer playing in the dead of night.

The unfortunate “Acheson” stayed with me. Characters do that, sometimes.

And when I next went to Edinburgh, I asked my friend Alison Lindsay, head of the Historical Search Rooms at the National Records of Scotland, if she could help me learn anything more about him.

Between the pair of us, we filled the gaps. I changed the spelling of his surname to Aitcheson—a composite of the ones I came across while searching through the records. By the end, I knew his first name: Edward. I knew when he’d married his wife, Jean, and where. I knew the dates when they’d baptized their little girl, Elizabeth, and their son, James. That made it harder, somehow, because then I knew that baby James was barely two months old, if that, when…

Well, it made it harder. But I wrote the scene.

I kept firmly to the historical record, which states that Edward Aitcheson was executed on June 17, 1685, in the churchyard of what most people in Edinburgh at that time would have called the College Church, but which I’ve chosen to call by its alternate name, Trinity Church, for clarity. This was not the public place of execution, and he was not hanged, but shot.