If Mr. Gilroy—a fictional character who turned up entirely unexpectedly in this novel, and whose parents’ story began over a quarter of a century ago in my novel Mariana—were to venture down to Leith today in search of information, he’d find things changed there, too, although the Links are still there to be walked upon, the Shore can still be found, and the stone tower of the windmill stands as sturdily as ever at the end of it. South Leith church, much reconstructed and restored, yet occupies the same site that it did when Mr. Andrew Cant first came to preach there in real life in 1671, before he was transferred to Edinburgh’s Trinity parish in 1679, where he was still the minister that June day, six years later, when a soldier of the town guard, Edward Aitcheson, was executed in his churchyard.

At the revolution, he was deprived of his position for refusing to read the proclamation “disowning James VII., and acknowledging William and Mary,” but he continued to serve those of his faith clandestinely. In July 1708 he was one of five Episcopal ministers imprisoned for doing so, and in 1716 he was told again to stop preaching illegally, and fined for refusing to pray for King George. Undaunted, Mr. Cant carried on, and was appointed an Episcopal bishop by the exiled King James VIII in 1720. He died at Edinburgh ten years later. Depending which source you believe, he was either in his eighty-first or ninety-first year.

The Jacobite church where he preached in the last several years of his life, Old St. Paul’s in Edinburgh’s Carrubber’s Close, is still in use as a church, and worth visiting.

The house in Riddell’s Close, in Leith, does not exist, and never did. The close has been lost to development, and so I built a house for Barbara Malcolm from the sketches and descriptions and old photographs of ones that had once stood nearby.

The character of Barbara is herself a compilation of a handful of the women I encountered in the registers of South Leith Parish Church, whose lives were anything but easy in those unforgiving times.

It’s just as well my fictional notary, Archibald Browne, was not a real person—although there actually was a real-life notary named Mungo Strachan who, with the help of several accomplices, attempted a very similar swindle of the Commissioners of the Equivalent in the autumn of 1707, aiming to collect the wages of a dead Darien sailor by having a woman from Leith pose as the man’s sister. The trial was a sensation, and when Strachan and one of his fellow forgers were brought up for sentencing before the Lords that December, it was felt “that their guilt was so fragrant and palpable, that there was a necessity for some example to discourage such impudent growing boldness, and such flagitious contrivances deserved death,” so despite the fact forgery usually rated a fine and some time in the pillory or perhaps banishment, both Strachan and his fellow forger were hanged, “as an example to the terror of others.”