S H E WO R K E D S O L I D LY that day until three in the afternoon, when she telephoned Angus Spens at the Scotsman offices.
Angus was not there to take her call, but he called back fifteen minutes later, when Isabel was in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.
“I saw you the other day,” she said. “You were getting into a taxi outside your office. You looked terribly smart, Angus, in your black coat. Very smart.”
“I was off to interview another Stuart pretender,” he said.
“We get these people turning up from time to time, claiming to be descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie or his dad. They’re a pretty motley crew, as you can imagine.”
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“Cranks?” asked Isabel.
“Some of them,” said Angus. “The problem, as you no doubt know, is that Prince Charlie had no legitimate offspring. And his brother, who was a cardinal, enjoyed a very happy bachelor existence. He died full of years, but not exactly surrounded by descendants. So that was the end of the direct Stuart line. You learnt that in school, didn’t you? I certainly did.”
“But not everybody wants to believe it?”
There was silence for a moment. Then Angus sighed. “One of the problems of being in the newspaper business is that you get contacted by an awful lot of people who think the world is otherwise than we are told it is. They really believe that. And these Stuart people are a little bit like that. Some of them are perfectly reasonable people who really believe that they have a claim—and back it up with books on the subject. But others are fantasists, although every so often one comes along who appears to have a rather better claim. This one was an Italian and had been bombarding the Lord Lyon for ages with his papers. They took the view that he was at least who he said he was, and that there were interesting lines to explore, whatever they meant by that.”
“And?”
“And he turned out to be a most agreeable person to interview,” said Angus. “Very modest. Very charming. And you know what else? He bore a striking resemblance to James the sixth. It could have been old Jamie Sext himself sitting there. It was the bone structure, not the colouring. Just something about the cheekbones and the eyes. I was astonished.”
“There’s a good few generations in between,” said Isabel.
“Yes, but family looks go down the ages. Anyway, there he was, brimming with Jacobite enthusiasm. I wondered whether F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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he imagined that the clans would rise again if the Lord Lyon pronounced in his favour.”
“Well it was all rather romantic,” said Isabel.
“And Jamie Sext was an interesting monarch. An intellec-tual. Probably bisexual, or, should one put it, he ruled both ways?”
“You’re very amusing, Angus,” said Isabel drily. Then she laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to have had dinner with him?”
Angus would not. “It would have been highly dangerous to have dinner with any Scottish king,” he said. “That is, until recently, if you can call the Hanoverians Scottish. No, I don’t think dinner would have been a good idea. Look at Darnley and what happened to Rizzio.”
Isabel was not prepared to let this go. Rizzio, the Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been murdered in Edinburgh before the Queen’s very eyes by a group of armed men.
Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, was said to have been one of the murderers, acting out of jealousy. But Isabel felt that there was inadequate proof of this.
“Where exactly is your evidence, Angus?” she challenged.
“You can’t go round defaming people like that. You do Darnley a great injustice.”
Angus laughed. “How can you speak like that? This all happened in—when was it?—fifteen sixty-something. Can you do an injustice to somebody who hasn’t been with us for over four hundred years? Hardly.”
Again Isabel felt that she had to protest. As it happened, she was interested in the philosophical issue of whether you can harm the dead. There was more than one view on that . . . but perhaps this was not the time.
“I think that we shall have to come back to Lord Darnley 2 1 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h some other time,” she said. “And in particular, I should like to discuss with you the precise circumstances of his own death, or murder, as it undoubtedly was. I have views on that, you know.”
Isabel heard a sigh from the other end of the line. “Well, well, Isabel! So you might be able to solve that little issue. Now that would be a very good story. Can the Scotsman have the exclusive?”
“That depends on your attitude,” she said. “But look, Angus, I didn’t telephone you to discuss Scottish history. I want to call in a favour.”
Angus sounded surprised. “I thought you owed me . . .
Remember . . .”
“Let’s not count too scrupulously,” Isabel said hurriedly.
“Just a small favour. A name, that’s all.”
She told him what she wanted, and he listened quietly. She thought it would be easy, she said, and that surely he had his contacts in the health service or the hospital. Did he not have favours of his own to call in?
“As it happens I do,” he said. “There’s a certain doctor who had very sympathetic coverage from us when he appeared before the General Medical Council on a complaint. I felt genuinely sorry for him and thought he was in the right. Some of the other papers went for him in a big way. He was very grateful to me.”
“Ask him,” said Isabel.
“All right, but I won’t press him if he’s at all unwilling.”
They agreed that he would call her back if he heard anything, or even if he did not hear anything. Then they rang off, and Isabel turned to her cup of tea. She liked to mix Earl Grey F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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with Darjeeling. Earl Grey by itself she found too scented; Darjeeling took the edge off that. Flowers and smoke, she thought, and wondered for a moment about what Mary, Queen of Scots drank. She made a mental note to ask her friend Rosalind Mar-shall about that; she knew everything about Scottish queens and wrote books about them, in her house in Morningside. Poor Mary—she had spent so much time locked up in castles, poor woman, working away at her elaborate French needlework and writing those rather poignant letters of hers. Drinking chocolate had reached Spain by then, but had probably not reached the Scottish court. And tea did not arrive until the beginning of the seventeenth century, she believed. So it must have been some sort of herbal infusion, then, although she thought they did not drink infusions for pleasure; there was French wine for that.
Smoke and flowers, flavours of exile, and of a Scotland whose echoes one might just detect, now and then, in the lilt of a voice, in an old Scots word, in a shadow across the face, in a trick of the light.
A N G U S D I D P H O N E , as he said he would, but much more quickly than Isabel had imagined. She had finished her second cup of tea and was about to take the cup to the sink when the telephone rang.
“Here’s your name,” he said. “Macleod. Is that what you were after?”
She stood quite still. In her left hand, the empty teacup tilted, allowing a few last drops to fall to the floor.
“Isabel?”
She had been thinking; over her second cup of tea she had 2 1 2