Free Blood Line by Alanna Knight

self-consciously worn suggested that he was new to responsibility and to the regiment of Scots Greys. Faro would have hazarded a guess that the lad was little past twenty, and his upper-class English accent indicated that after leaving public school his family had bought him a commission.
    Unlocking the door, Mace turned. 'Sir Eric said I was to assure you that since your last meeting he had instructed Mr Forster to make a most careful search and Mr Forster was satisfied that nothing had been disturbed in the attempted burglary.'
    Walking round the glass cases, Faro merely nodded. There was no evidence of locks being forced and a brief examination of the windows was enough to confirm the assistant keeper's report.
    Faro cursed silently. The trail, if any had existed, was already cold.
    'I have always been absolutely fascinated by Mary Queen of Scots,' said Mace with a sigh. 'Look at that dear little shoe of hers and the glove. Such tiny feet and hands and I'm told that she was six foot tall. Tall, indeed, for a man in those days.'
    'Or for anyone, if the height of doorways is to be believed.'
    Mace opened the door into the Queen's bedchamber and sighed again. 'I wish I had lived then.'
    Faro looked at Mace's high forehead, his long pale face and long slender hands. Quite remarkable. Mace might have stepped down from a portrait of that period and he smiled in sympathy.
    'A savage, cruel time, it was.'
    'But there was beauty, such chivalry, don't you think, dying for a young and beautiful Queen.'
    Faro said nothing. The lad was half in love with a ghost, as he himself had once been. Let him keep his illusions. Romantic young fools like this one had gone to bloody death in their dozens, by way of the torture chamber and the block, their lofty ideals and sufferings vanished into the dust of passing centuries. Of that tragic long-ago only a few pathetic faded artefacts remained, objects which might, or might not, have once belonged to the Queen. He touched the bed curtains reputed to have been embroidered during her long years of imprisonment. What secrets, what thoughts of agony and grief had she woven into those delicate patterns which had alone remained impervious to time?
    'Isn't our present Queen the one you would gladly die for,' Faro asked, 'seeing that you have taken her shilling?'
    Mace looked confused and embarrassed. 'Yes, I suppose so. Of course,' he added, but without any true conviction.
    Faro smiled. The poor lad's heart wasn't in it, to die for the royal widow, whose preoccupation with mourning Prince Albert, unpopular and misunderstood by the masses, suggested neglect of important matters of government, as well as the rumoured neglect of her subjects. A Queen who, stout after much child bearing, could only command her generation of romantic young fools to die on the battlefield of yet another outpost of her ever-growing Empire, hard won and even harder to hold.
    Mace pushed open the door of the tiny room high above the Castle Rock. In area it was not much larger than a linen closet in Sheridan Place, yet here Queen Mary had given birth to the future King James VI of Scotland and I of England.
    Here, as in no other room in the Castle associated with the Queen, Faro was conscious of a lingering sense of disaster and doom well beyond a monarch's personal tragedy. Here, from these very stones, emanated the events that had reverberated through Scotland's subsequent history, when a once-powerful nation took the wrong turning to wither and die from the effects of Jacobitism and the Clearances.
    Standing by the window, he was engulfed by a miasma of foreboding. Distorted whispers, faint cries echoed around him, as if only a thin veil divided the long-ago from now. He closed his eyes, seeking desperately to renew his own link with that time, half remembered, hovering on the brink of what his mother called 'long memory': their Stuart blood, via the Orkney Sinclairs and the Wicked Earl, an explanation too fanciful for her