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
“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
