Prologue
Wednesday 4 February 1818. Edinburgh Castle.
The strongroom has been walled up for more than a century, and as the soldiers hack through the mortar and stone, the dignitaries overseeing the excavation loiter on the stairway in a state of excitement; each man hoping the lost treasure will be inside. The Honours of Scotland. The crown. The sceptre. The sword of state. It’s too noisy to speak. As one, the gentlemen bring handkerchiefs to their faces on account of the dust. Walter Scott, the country’s greatest poet and a personal friend of the prince regent, coughs. He was a sickly child. It’s never left him. As the dust begins to clear, he peers into the gaping darkness. He can just make out that the windowless room is larger than he had imagined. It’s time to find out if the regalia is here. ‘After you, sir,’ says the governor, and the soldiers stand back. Scott’s heart thumps as he approaches the only piece of furniture that matters: an ancient, dusty oak chest in the middle of the floor. It’s sealed with an iron lock the size of a sheep’s heart. The tension is palpable.
‘Well, lad, you better get on with it,’ he says, motioning a young private forward.
The soldier’s palms sweat, but he hacks with an axe until the lock smashes and falls onto the stone floor with a clink. Scott pauses dramatically before lifting the lid. He removes the handkerchief from his face as his smile spreads. It looks like nothing at all, some vague shapes wrapped in old linen, but he can already tell it’s there. The Honours of Scotland. The country’s greatest treasures; the symbols of kingship. Thedignitaries beam at each other. The governor of the castle and Sir Henry Jardine lock eyes. Carefully, Scott removes the artefacts and together he and Jardine unwrap the jewels. The gold glints in the flickering flame, the pearls might have just been fished from the sea, the rubies are the rich colour of blood. But these artefacts are more than a sum of gold and diamonds, they represent Scotland itself. The governor claps one of the soldiers on the back. ‘Well done,’ he says. ‘Mark me, you’ll have an extra tot today, by God.’
Scott considers this measly. The occasion is historic. But these are not his men.
‘What shall we do with the honours now?’ he asks, looking over his shoulder as if thieves might be lurking, even here in the citadel.
The governor is decisive. ‘We’ll leave them in this room with two men on guard. I’ll have the castle’s carpenter fit a mortice.’
Scott nods curtly. ‘Very well.’ He considers taking a seat on the carved-oak chair beside the fireplace but it’s peppered with debris. The emotion of what he’s achieved is only just sinking in. He’s almost certain to be offered a knighthood. Sir Walter has a ring to it.
‘I must write to Buckingham House immediately,’ he adds with a grin. If the regent is at the Pavilion, they can forward the missive to Brighton. Then, after he’s put pen to paper, Scott decides, he’ll go home to his wife.
*
The Misses McKenzie call on Mrs Charlotte Scott at North Castle Street for they know the reason that Edinburgh’s most august poet is out this afternoon. Lately, the fawning nature of Scott’s friendship with the prince regent has been the sisters’ uppermost reason for disrespecting their old family friend. ‘Poor Caroline of Brunswick,’ the McKenzies lament on behalf of the queen. They are not the prince regent’s onlyfemale subjects to find his royal highness’s behaviour towards his wife unacceptable. Ladies across the British Isles were horrified three years before when Jane Austen, a writer largely theretofore admired, dedicated her novelEmmato George in the most obsequious terms. The McKenzies are monarchists but, nonetheless, they consider Scott’s unquestioning friendship with His Royal Highness undignified at the least and tantamount to wife-beating on bad days. ‘I don’t know how Charlotte puts up with it,’ Eilidh has been known to mutter.
While they have come to expect nothing more from Walter (or his troublesome younger brother Thomas) than what Saoirse McKenzie, the older sister, calls ‘disappointments’, both women are extremely fond of Charlotte, who, being French, keeps an excellent pastry chef. This personage is said to travel with the Scotts when they come up to their house on North Castle Street, bringing a supply of good Borders butter so that Mrs Scott need never want for a decent friand.
Today, Charlotte, chic in a salmon-pink, empire-line frock embroidered with tiny gold stars, cannot help glancing out of the drawing room window towards Castle Rock as she greets her guests, her dog always at her heel. Eilidh and Saoirse, despite their misgivings about Walter, were instrumental in his discovery of the lost crown. Saoirse unearthed the historic letter that mentioned the honours. She passed this to Walter knowing that he was a hound to the chase in the matter of anything royal and, in truth, a thorough antiquarian with the skills required to crack the puzzle of the missing regalia. After months of investigation, Walter finally received permission from the regent to break through a wall in the castle and, potentially, unearth the honours commissioned by James V almost three centuries before. ‘Proper royals,’ Eilidh calls the Stuart dynasty. George, or, as he is known (mostly behind his back), ‘Prinny’, is Hanoverian, his great grandfather’s ascension to the thronenever fully forgiven by the Stuart faithful. Edinburgh has been a Hanoverian city since Anne Stuart’s death in 1714. Its citizens prefer to back winners, but beneath the surface there remains a secret and mostly silent thrum of Jacobite dissent. George’s great grandfather was nineteenth in line to the throne, his distant claim successful entirely on account of his Protestant faith, and while pragmatic, the citizens of Scotland’s capital have a strong sense of justice, though these days few would change the Hanoverian accession. The Mistresses McKenzie are not from Edinburgh. They are Highland lasses. It’s been three generations and they know the Stuarts will never reign again. The last of the line is a cardinal and childless. ‘Still,’ Saoirse always says, making the objection without having an end to her sentence. A family trait.
Charlotte Scott offers her guests champagne. She has bought several cases from a new producer known as Veuve Cliquot. There’s a comet printed on the cork; the wine made by a French widow who took over her husband’s vineyard after his death. Charlotte purchased the first bottles out of charitable sentiment, but the widow, it turns out, makes excellent wine.
Mrs Scott proposes a toast. ‘Schiehallion.’
The sisters clink. Last year Saoirse gifted Charlotte a watercolour of the Perthshire mountain, which the women have agreed they will one day climb. It has become a rallying cry.
‘Do you think it’s really there?’ Eilidh asks, moving swiftly on to the reason they have come. The question is posed too quickly for Saoirse, who considers Eilidh overly direct. Her cheeks redden. Charlotte gives a Gallic shrug. ‘If it’s there, Walter will uncover it,’ she says in a tone that recognises that if he does so, her husband will be unbearable. He’s a good man but his moods undulate like the Lowland hills round their country home. Charlotte would never admit it but she prefers the troughs to the peaks for they are easier to live with. She retrieves a sheafof papers from a cherrywood table behind the sopha. ‘It looks marvellous,’ she says, laying out engravings of the crown worn by the country’s rulers, prior to the Act of Union in 1707 that joined Scotland and England.
The McKenzies cast their eyes over the images: among them, Mary of Guise when she was Scotland’s regent and Mary Queen of Scots, her daughter, when she was queen – both stylish French women, just like Charlotte. Their forebears served both as ladies-in-waiting. Indeed, the McKenzie family motto translates from the Gaelic asHelp the Queen. The Stuart queen, that is.
‘It seems so careless to lose the crown,’ Charlotte says drily.
Saoirse has an inbuilt sense of diplomacy born of generations of ancestors close to an ancient throne. She does not like to point out that if Walter succeeds, the crown won’t have been lost but stowed for safe keeping – forgotten for the last century, admittedly, but now regained. Instead, she cocks her head as she examines the monochrome sketches. ‘Do you think these are rubies or sapphires?’
Charlotte gestures towards Walter’s leather-topped desk. ‘He has descriptions somewhere,’ she says. ‘Scottish pearls, rubies, diamonds and sapphires. Set on gold amid red velvet and ermine.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ Eilidh enthuses.
‘No emeralds, do you think?’ Saoirse pushes. The elder McKenzie favours green, her outfit today a pale velvet the colour of unripe plums. Eilidh always wears red.
To pass the time, the women play piquet for an hour, Charlotte’s dog under the table, until they hear the clop of horses on the setts. Below, the front door slams. As the dog shoots to greet him, Scott clatters upstairs, his gait distinctive. He is breathless, behind him a cohort from the castle – two redcoats wearing swords, Sir Henry Jardine and a fellow thatthe McKenzies recognise as the son of an erstwhile Lord Lyon, as well as Thomas Scott, a pale reflection of his brother. All are cock-a-hoop. The women need not ask what has happened.
‘All of it!’ Walter declares triumphantly. ‘The crown, the sword and the sceptre. Cached in an oak chest, Lottie. Walled up in an old strongroom!’ He clasps his wife, lifting her off her feet.
Eilidh and Saoirse clap obligingly, their kid gloves emanating an enthusiastic pitter-patter. Thomas lets out a whoop and the soldiers cry, ‘Hurrah!’
Walter continues. ‘His Royal Highness will be delighted. I’ve sent a missive to Leith for the next sailing. We’re bound to have him up now. In time we may even have a Scottish coronation,’ he exclaims. Walter is not indiscreet enough to mention his expectation of an honour. The women know, however, that this means the elevation of the Scotts to the peerage. ‘It started with you, Miss McKenzie,’ Walter adds generously, kissing her gloved hand. ‘That wonderful old letter you came across.’
‘It was your hard work, sir, which truly uncovered the treasure,’ Saoirse bats back.
‘Well done, darling.’ Charlotte returns to her seat and coolly lays an ace onto the baize.
