The punishments for criminals were swift, and often harsh by modern standards.

Transportation was a common one, and at that time in Leith it was a profitable business for such men as Alexander Fearne, the real-life merchant who was authorized by the Privy Council to receive “all such vagrant persones and other criminalls as should be delivered” to him and arrange their transport “to the plantations in Barbadoes or another of his Majesties plantations in America” where they were to “be disposed of in the usuall maner,” meaning sold into servitude.

I put my fictional young Matthew Browne aboard Fearne’s ship, the John and Nicholas, which sailed from Leith to Barbados in December 1685.

In charting Matthew’s course, I admit to being guided by the younger years of one of my own ancestors, Anthony Lamb, who in his days working as an apprentice in London made the mistake of befriending the notorious burglar Jack Sheppard. Lamb foolishly agreed to leave the street door of his master’s house open so Sheppard and another thief could enter one night and rob a fellow lodger there. Of course, he was caught—as was Sheppard, eventually. Sheppard was hanged at Tyburn later that same year, but Anthony Lamb, fortunately for me, was instead transported to the Americas, where in time he made his way to New York City and established himself as a notable maker of mathematical instruments. Anthony Lamb’s son, John, became a prominent figure of the American Revolution and was given the command of West Point by George Washington in 1779. John’s sister, Elizabeth, married into the Halletts of Long Island, the family that inspired my fictional Wilde family, touched on in this book and in my novel Bellewether.

Not all transported felons were so fortunate. The Englishman William Eddis, writing in 1770—nearly a hundred years after I sent young Matthew on that ship out of Leith—describes the conditions of life for convicts sent from Britain to America in terms that would have been recognizable to both my ancestor and Matthew: “These unhappy beings are, generally, consigned to an agent, who classes them suitably to their real or supposed qualifications; advertises them for sale, and disposes of them, for seven years, to planters, to mechanics, and to such as choose to retain them for domestic service. Those who survive the term of servitude, seldom establish their residence in this country: the stamp of infamy is too strong upon them to be easily erased: they either return to Europe, and renew their former practices; or, if they have fortunately imbibed habits of honesty and industry, they remove to a distant situation, where they may hope to remain unknown…”

I would imagine many who returned to their old homes, as Matthew did to Leith, would have had difficulty settling in completely to their old lives, as he did. Since he was my own creation, as were all his foundling brothers, I was able to explore this on the page without constraint.

That said, I did place one real person in that house in Riddell’s Close: young Maggie—little Margaret Graeme—the illegitimate daughter of Margaret Malcolm and Patrick Graeme, later Seventh Laird of Inchbrakie. I stumbled on the record of her birth while doing research. What became of her, or of her mother, I have not yet learned. It would not have been unusual for Margaret Malcolm to have died in childbirth, as I describe. So many women did. As I know well from my own family history research, records left are often incomplete and do not tell us all. Those times were turbulent—and ordinary people, as I’ve noted, can be difficult to trace.