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By Root 344 0

who must have shared the inflated notions of entitlement that infected all those exiled Stuarts. Yet no matter how outrageous his claims, there was an undoubted romance in his story, and it was for this reason that she was prepared to have him on her wall. Scotland had not been well treated by the English at the time; the Scottish parliament had not been consulted by Westminster in the choice of the Hanoverians, and the Stuart cause had become synonymous with the resentment of a put-upon nation. This weak and rather effete Frenchman, bedecked in tartan, had become the focal point of Scottish resistance to London’s diktats, and that still resonated.

“Will you bid for me?” Isabel asked. “Let’s try to get it below the estimate. Twelve hundred?”

Guy made a note in the margins. “Good as done,” he said.

They finished their perusal of the catalogue and went back upstairs. Jamie arrived a few minutes later; she saw him coming up Dundas Street, with Charlie clearly asleep, tucked up in the pushchair.

“We went all the way down to Canonmills,” he said as she went out to join them. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the just.”

Isabel bent down and looked at Charlie. The tiny features were in repose, the mouth slightly open to allow the passage of air. Such an intricate collection of cells, she thought, all miraculously put together to produce a centre of human consciousness, so fragile, so infinitely precious to those whose life was transformed by it. She straightened up. The summer sun was riding high now, gilding the hills of Fife across the Forth. A bus laboured up the hill, bound for Princes Street and the Mound, the passengers in shirtsleeves for the unaccustomed heat. For a moment, Isabel’s eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgressing the conventions of isolation with which as city-dwellers we immure ourselves. The bus moved on, and Isabel felt a sudden desire to run alongside it, to wave to the woman, to acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between them. But she did not, because she never acted on these impulses, and because it might have puzzled or even frightened the other woman.

She turned to Jamie. “Can you remind me of the words of ‘King Fareweel’?” she asked. She knew that Jamie had an impressive knowledge of Scottish music, including the more arcane corners of the subject. “King Fareweel” was mainstream, the sort of thing sung by Scottish patriots in moments of enthusiastic inebriation, and by nostalgic Jacobites in cold sobriety.

The question took Jamie by surprise, but Isabel often said odd things; he was getting used to it.

“Now a young prince cam’ to Edinburgh toon,” he began, half singing, half speaking, “And he wasnae a wee bit German lairdie / For a far better man than ever he was / Lay oot in the heather wi’ his tartan plaidie.”

“That’s it,” said Isabel.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT MORNING Isabel’s niece, Cat, telephoned at seven. Isabel had been awake since six and had taken Charlie on an outing in the garden. He had been late in starting to walk, but now seemed eager to make up for lost time, rushing off purposefully and quite indifferent to any falls that came his way. It was an exhausting business for her, if not for Charlie himself, as he had to be watched every moment. She had a playpen, which at least could give her time to get her breath back and do things that needed to be done in the house.

“Do people approve of those things?” Jamie had asked when the pen had been delivered. “Don’t some people look on them as little prisons?”

Isabel had read about this. “Some do,” she said. “But not everyone, by any means. It all depends on how long the child is in one. If they’re in it for short periods of time they can enjoy playing by themselves.”

“But not for hours.”

“No, not for hours. And nor should children be parked in front of the television.”

“Which we don’t have,” Jamie pointed out.

“No.”

Jamie had bought something called a baby bungee, an apparatus