I won’t tell either of their stories in great detail here, except to mention that, when Queen Anne died in 1714, Captain Gordon, who could stretch his Jacobite loyalties sufficiently to serve under a Stewart queen, could not stretch them far enough to swear allegiance to King George, whom Jacobites referred to as the German “Prince of Hanover.” Resigning his commission, he left Britain and went into Russia, where he rose to prominence as one of Peter the Great’s most trusted admirals, while continuing to do what he could to advance the interests of King James VIII in exile.

His time in Russia at the heart of the Jacobite community in St. Petersburg is partly told in my novel The Firebird, a story that also allowed me to trace the steps of Robin Moray’s youngest brother, Maurice, and Colonel Graeme’s soldier-turned-Capuchin-monk son, another Patrick, who appears in this book as young Pat in the children’s game of Covenanters and Montrose, but is known more commonly to history as Father Archangel.

Father Archangel claimed in his own family tree that there were four of them—four brothers—born to Colonel Graeme and his wife (although again, to keep things less confusing, I have only put two on the pages of this novel).

William was the youngest. He became a doctor. Robert died at twenty-one, a monk, like Father Archangel, who lived past his threescore and ten years, dying in Boulogne, France, where he’d risen to be the Guardien des Capucins—the Superior of his house.

And there was James.

I call him Jamie in this book—partly because he appears first as a child, when the name Jamie seemed more fitting for friends and family to use, and because in the letters I read from the period, few of the adults named James were referred to by their full name either, but commonly nicknamed Jemmy or Jamie.

When I first read Louisa Graham’s description of Jamie in Or and Sable, I was convinced I’d found a central part of the great story of adventure that I planned to write about the Scots in Darien.

She told a stirring tale of how, while sailing near the colony, he and his fellow crew members aboard the ship the Dolphin were captured by the Spanish, taken first to Cartagena, then to Spain, where they were held in prison and condemned as pirates, only narrowly escaping execution before finally returning home to Scotland.

It was quite a story, and as I researched the details, it became more fascinating—but there was one problem: that same research proved to me, beyond all doubt, that the James Graham taken by the Spanish was not “my” Jamie.

The index book of the African Company shows there was indeed a James Graham who sailed aboard the ship the Dolphin on that expedition down to Darien in 1698. But there was also a “James Graem” on that same voyage who sailed on the Saint Andrew.

And in all the documents I have before me—from the Company’s registers, to their certification in August 1707 that James Graeme had wages owed to him that needed to be paid from the Equivalent; to the agreement Colonel Graeme, safely in the north of Scotland, signed to have a factor travel down to Edinburgh to do the dealing for him; to the last Testament Dative on October 8, naming Colonel Graeme as Jamie’s nearest kin and heir and granting him the wages owed—the name of Jamie’s ship is clearly stated.