Kate Carlisle - If Books Could Kill

I did. It would be one last tip of the hat to my old friend Kyle to prove the story true. It might allow him to rest in peace, if only in my own mind. And I could rub that in Perry’s face, which was always a plus. Yankee bitch, my butt. He had no idea what a bitch this Yankee could be.

That thought made me smile.

Figuring a visit by a royal princess would’ve been all over the newspapers of that day, I started a search for Edinburgh papers in business in the late seventeen hundreds. That led me to the National Library of Scotland Web site, where they’d digitized every newspaper in the country from 1600 to the present. The problem was, the information had to be accessed in person.

“Oh, great,” I murmured. But I checked the library location just in case, and as luck would have it, the main library was just a few blocks from the hotel. Looking out my window, I decided it was a perfect day for a walk.

I locked up my computer, grabbed my purse and warm jacket and went downstairs to return the book to the safe. I stopped at the concierge to get directions, and he was nice enough to insist on calling the library to verify that, as a book fair presenter, I could obtain a reader’s ticket immediately. It was like a temporary pass, which I would need if I wanted to use their computer system. I thanked the concierge and took off for the National Library.

Outside, I breathed in the clear air of the ancient city. I had a moment of guilt, knowing I should be inside, meeting booksellers and talking up my business, but the thought of running into Minka or Serena or Perry made my stomach churn. I loved books and I loved my work, but I seriously needed a break.

The haunting sound of bagpipes drifted up a narrow alley, and just for a moment I felt transported to another time. I took another deep breath. Intellectually, I knew the man in the kilt was playing the pipes for the benefit of tourists, who would throw coins in the box he’d placed on the sidewalk, but it didn’t matter as the wail of the pipes moved me to tears.

Yes, I seriously needed a break.

The wind was brisk as I turned the corner at George IV Bridge. I zipped up my jacket and shoved my hands in my pockets and walked until I found the big square building that housed the National Library of Scotland.

At the front desk, I showed my passport to the assistant librarian and filled out the necessary forms; then the librarian issued me a short-term ticket and a password. I followed her directions to the North Reading Room and logged on to one of the available computers.

After an hour of searching through their database of local newspapers, I knew plenty about the royal family of King George III but next to nothing about a possible liaison between Robert Burns and Princess Augusta Sophia. And my shoulders were beginning to ache from hunching in front of the computer screen.

There were vague indications that the family might’ve traveled to Scotland, but there was no mention of the princess specifically. And even if she had been allowed to visit the rough northern capital of Scotland, Queen Charlotte, her mother, was reported to have protected her six daughters fiercely-and not in a happy, friendly mama-kitty kind of way.

Evidently, Kyle was right about that.

The girls had been sheltered, of course, but this was ridiculous. The queen had assigned them all to be her ladies-in-waiting. They were rarely allowed to attend dances.

I tried to imagine a spirited Augusta Sophia sneaking off to do some quality flirting with the darling bad-boy poet of Scotland. But it wasn’t working. As much as I’d have liked to make it true, it just didn’t fly for me.

I rubbed my eyes and sat back. I’d always figured being a princess would be a kick in the pants, but for poor Augusta Sophia it sounded like drudgery. What kind of a life had she led if all she’d done was tote and lift for her pushy mother, never partying, never marrying or having kids?

And to top it off, her dad, old King George III, had gone mad. That couldn’t have made for much merriment at the family dinner table.

On the other hand, the king and queen managed to give birth to fifteen children, so it wasn’t like they didn’t have their own good times. Too bad their daughters hadn’t been allowed to have their own fun.

I cross-checked King George’s other five daughters but nothing really clicked. The others were either married or too old or too young. No, if the story were true, it would’ve been all about Augusta Sophia. But some articles reported that Augusta Sophia had worked for her mother until the queen died. The princess was in her fifties by then.

Could she secretly have given birth to a child out of wedlock? Without the knowledge of the people? Why not? She was royalty. Back then, they probably could’ve gotten away with anything.

Maybe it was just me and my Yankee-bitch sensibilities, but I really liked the idea of the princess escaping the palace for one wild fling before being consigned to work as her mother’s glorified servant for the rest of her life.

I sighed, knowing I’d spent too much time chasing this wild goose. I stood up and stretched my muscles, glanced at the twelve or fourteen people scattered around the North Reading Room, and asked myself what I was doing here. It was almost one o’clock and I was starting to get hungry. That was no big surprise. I was always hungry.

But there was one more hunch I wanted to follow before I gave up.

If Kyle had been telling me the truth about his relationship to the bookbinder William Cathcart, then maybe I could trust that he’d thought he was telling the truth about Robert Burns and the princess, too. Even if it turned out to be untrue. But if he was lying about Cathcart being his ancestor, then I would know it was time to let Kyle go.

I ran a search on William Cathcart and found that his bindery had been operating during Robert Burns’s time in Edinburgh. Interesting, but it still didn’t answer any questions.

I began a genealogical search for any McVees living in Edinburgh around the time of William Cathcart. It turned out the city was crawling with McVees.

“Hmm,” I said, and began to work backward from Kyle and Royce. I found a link a few generations back to an Edinburgh McVee named Thomas. Thomas’s ancestors could be traced back to the late seventeen hundreds, to a Douglas McVee who ran a paper mill.

Paper and bindings. A perfect marriage there.

I gave up on the McVee line and moved to Cathcart, working forward to see if any of his daughters or grand-daughters might’ve married a McVee. I felt a tingle and realized I was excited to think I might actually find a link.

I boiled it down to a few possibilities. Either Margaret or Doreen Cathcart could’ve married Russell or John McVee. The computer showed a marriage certificate that was so faded I couldn’t actually read the names. But there was a reference to the actual document in the genealogy stacks.

I wrote down the coordinates, grabbed my things and wandered off in search of the stacks. I found a bracket on the wall listing the different rooms, with arrows pointing the way. I realized at that moment that the arrow pointing to the ladies’ room was most appealing.

Minutes later, refreshed and hands cleaned, I found the tall, heavy door leading to the genealogy room and entered. The door closed with a dull thud and I looked around. The room was dark, huge, high-ceilinged and deserted. Rows of waist-high map cabinets ran lengthwise across the room, the same type of cabinets I’d seen used for blueprints and ledgers. I had a similar, smaller cabinet in my workshop to hold the wide sheets of marbled paper I used for end sheets.

Curious, I approached the nearest cabinet and opened the wide, shallow top drawer. It held five or six three-foot-long, thin, aged ledgers. I counted the cabinets in the room and did the math. There had to be thousands of ledgers in here. I pulled one out and laid it on top of the cabinet, then carefully opened it. There were hundreds of rows of names entered in old-fashioned handwriting. Names and dates, as well as some charts with lines indicating family trees. Some connected to more names and dates. One family listing began in the year 1477.