“There’s no chance I could do the work here, from a copy?”

“The owner is very…” He searched for the word, until Jacqui supplied it:

“Insistent.”

“Aye.” Alistair Scott nodded. “Very insistent the source can’t be copied, or taken away from the house. But she’s willing to give you a room for the time that you work on it.”

Frowning a little, I asked, “And how long would that be?”

“That depends,” he replied, in his turn. “Once you’ve worked out the cipher itself, it will probably take a few weeks to transcribe the thing.”

We had come halfway down the long green of the Common now, midway between the pond end and the road to Richmond, where the cars were passing in a shifting dance of color. “And what,” I asked Alistair Scott, “is ‘the thing’? Jacqui mentioned an old book?”

“A diary,” he said, to correct me. “A handwritten diary, kept by a young lady named Mary Dundas.” He gave it the Scottish inflection: Dun-DASS.

I stopped walking when the others did and watched Hector, no longer stressed, bound out to recover the object his master had thrown—a stuffed red canvas cylinder, roughly the size and the shape of a compact umbrella when folded. A remnant of his training days, I guessed. Bird dogs were meant to have soft mouths, and not carry anything hard. Hector brought his prize happily over to me, long tail wagging, and taking the cylinder’s toggled end I threw it out again for him.

“Was she someone important, this Mary Dundas?” I asked.

Alistair Scott shook his head. “Quite the opposite. She was, from what I can gather, an ordinary girl. I expect that her diary will be about ordinary things. That’s what makes it so valuable.”

“How so?”

“You’ve not read my books,” he observed, very certain.

“I haven’t, no.”

“I write the history of ordinary people. The kings and the queens and the nobles don’t interest me nearly as much as the people they ruled.”

Jacqui told me, “This new book that Alistair’s writing is all about Jacobite exiles.”

She said that as though I should know what those were, and I nearly just nodded and answered with something like “Ah,” so as not to reveal my own ignorance, but I was spared that when Alistair Scott asked, straight out,

“D’ye know much at all about Jacobites?”

Truth, in the face of a question, came easily. “No.”

“Scottish history, in general?”

“Not much.”

“Well now, my country has a complicated past. A group of tribes all trapped together by geography, who’d sooner stab each other in the back than build a nation,” was his summary. “And when the Reformation came, religion only made those old divisions that much stronger.” He threw the canvas cylinder for Hector, further than my own throw, far out on the green. “The Highlanders stayed Catholic, and the rest turned either fiercely Presbyterian or fell between the two camps and became Episcopalian. And ruling them—or trying to—you had the line of Stewart kings and queens, whose own alliances with France were both a blessing and a curse to them.”

“Like Mary, Queen of Scots,” I said.

“Exactly. And her son, King James the Sixth, who afterwards became King James the First of England also, when the English Queen Elizabeth the First died with no children to succeed her.”

“And King James the Sixth,” I asked. “Was he a Catholic or a Protestant?”

“Protestant. As was his son, Charles the First. But Charles thought a king was above being ruled by his people. They didn’t agree. That’s what led to the Civil War. After a few years of battles, King Charles made a tactical decision to seek protection from the Scottish Presbyterians. A poor decision, as it happened, since their army held him prisoner, made a deal with England’s Parliament, and sold him to them for just under half a million pounds.”

“And Parliament beheaded him.”

“They did, aye. And put Cromwell in his place, to lead without a king for several years, and in this time the widowed queen with all her children fled to France. The French king was her nephew, her own brother’s son, and so he gave her refuge in a palace of her own at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Now, Charles the First had several children, but you only need mind two: young Charles, who would become King Charles the Second in his turn, and James, his brother. James was sixteen when his father died, and twenty-seven when the English Parliament restored his brother Charles to the throne. As Duke of York, James earned a reputation for himself as a great champion of the navy, a well-respected man, even though unlike his brother he openly practiced his faith as a Catholic. And when James was fifty-one, Charles the Second died, and James was crowned king.”

Hector had brought me his toy, and I dealt with it absently, sorting the chain of events in my mind. “But I thought that you couldn’t become king, if you were a Catholic.”

“That law wasn’t written yet. Nor would it be, for another few years. But you’re right, it presented a problem. The last time a Catholic had ruled them, a century earlier, things hadn’t gone all that well for the Protestants, and there were many in England and Scotland who felt fair uneasy with James on the throne. The only thing that calmed them was the knowledge that the crown would pass to one of James’s grown daughters, both good Protestants. But then his second wife, who like her husband was a Catholic, had a son, who having had the fortune and the sense to be born male, would take the place of his half sisters and become the heir. A Catholic heir. Those who had bided their time knew they’d have to take action. The elder of James’s two daughters was married to William of Orange, a man of ambition,” he said, “and a Protestant.”