Domenica picked up the photograph. “I’m always surprised that old glass survives,” she said. “You’d think that over a couple of centuries somebody might fumble and drop it.”
“Ah, but these Jacobite glasses were special,” said James. “And special things have a way of surviving. These glasses were tucked away for use in secret – they would not have been everyday ware.”
“I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the Stuarts,” said Domenica. “Apart from Mary, Queen of Scots, of course, who had such a difficult cousin, after all. And Charles II, of course, had what we might today call an enlightened arts policy. . . . But as for Charlie . . . well, that was a narrow escape for Scotland, if you ask me.”
She examined the photograph more closely. “Those stars are so delicately engraved,” she said. “Look at them all.”
“Yes,” said James. “But that’s the extraordinary thing. That glass is part of a set of six – or it looks like a set. Usually, one comes across only one or two together, but there are six with that design. Very strange, wouldn’t you agree, Nicola?”
186 What Can Be the Secret of the Tiny Stars?
Nicola nodded. “There’s something very unusual about it.
Normally, one finds only one star on these glasses, if there is a star at all. But here we have hundreds of little stars – it’s very strange.”
“And you have no idea of the meaning?” asked Domenica.
“None, I’m afraid,” said Nicola. “I’ve looked through the literature on the subject – and there’s quite a bit on Jacobite glass – but these particular glasses seem to be completely unusual.
We just don’t know what the stars mean.”
For a few moments the room became silent; outside in Queen Street, the vague hum of traffic; light slanted in through a window, pure, thin, northern light. Domenica felt the presence of the gallery around her; the repository of a nation’s memory, now distilled into this precious object depicted in the photograph – a moment of contact between the hands that had made the glass and engraved it so finely, and her.
James broke the silence. “There seems to us to be some pattern to the stars,” he said. “Look. Here and here. And again here.
They’re in clusters. Shapes.”
“I wondered if they could make a coded message of some sort,” said Anne from her desk at the side of the room.
Domenica looked at the photograph. She would mention it to Angus, who had said something about Jacobites to her recently –
what was it? She could not remember, but it was something about modern Jacobites sounding off even now about the Stuarts, still wanting them back.
“Of course, there are modern sympathisers of the cause, are there not?” asked Domenica.
“Oh yes,” said James. “They have their pretender, Francis II, who lives in Bavaria, I believe. Not that he has ever made any claim to the throne. But there are one or two people who still claim that he is the real King of Scotland.”
“How colourful,” said Domenica. She was still trying to remember what Angus had said. She had not been paying particular attention, but it involved Big Lou for some reason. What So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One 187
possible connection could Big Lou have with Prince Charlie and Francis II and the whole arcane Stuart dynasty?
James tapped the photograph with his finger. “If there were a coded message on the glasses, it would be rather interesting to find out what it is,” he said. “Perhaps we could get Bletchley Park, or whoever cracks codes these days, to work out what it says.”
Domenica laughed. “Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us,” she said. “Codes only occur in ridiculous novels. The real world is much more prosaic.”
The photograph was slipped back into a large envelope and Domenica turned her attention to the list of anthropologists.
Fifteen minutes later, James Holloway escorted her to the front door of the gallery and said goodbye to her there. They would see one another again soon, he said; Domenica suggested lunch with their mutual friend, Dilly Emslie, and James agreed. Then she walked down the hill towards Drummond Place and Scotland Street. As she passed Queen Street Gardens, the wind moved the branches of the trees against the sky, gently, almost imperceptibly.
This city is so beautiful, she thought, so intriguing. If one had it, the city, as one’s lover, that would be almost enough, almost enough.
56. So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One Moving, thought Bruce, had become rather familiar. Within the space of a year there had been his move from Edinburgh to London, where there were several moves, and then the move back to Edinburgh. His first flat in London had been a shared one in Fulham. He had liked that and would have been prepared to stay there longer, but had been unable to resist an offer he had received to move in with friends in Notting Hill. That had suited him perfectly; the flat was a couple of doors from an Italian restaurant and a small set of film studios. The film people often ate in the restaurant, along with other creative types, and this
188 So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One appealed greatly to Bruce. They had been stand-offish, though, and had not welcomed an overture which Bruce had once made, when he had offered their table an olive from a plate of olives on his own table. Bruce had thought this rude; there was something symbolic about rejecting an olive – or was the symbolism attached purely to whole olive branches? In spite of that, he still felt that by living there, and eating from time to time in that particular restaurant, he was at the heart of this fashionable and vibrant part of London. Je suis arrivé, he said to himself and reflected on how unimportant and faraway Scotland now seemed.
But things in London had not worked out quite as Bruce had planned. The flat in Notting Hill was expensive, even when the rent was divided three ways, and Bruce soon found that the money he had brought with him – most of it from that highly lucrative Chateau Petrus deal – soon haemorrhaged away, as money has a habit of doing in London. There was no shortage of work there, of course, but not all of it was the sort of work that Bruce wanted to do, and he began to think with a degree of regret of the job with Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, the Edinburgh surveyors. It had been time to move on from that, of course, and he could not imagine himself doing that sort of work for the rest of his life, but it had been steady and reasonably well paid, and often involved free tickets to Murrayfield for the rugby, even for the popular game against England, for which tickets were always in such short supply.
So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One 189
It was all the fault of that awful Todd woman, thought Bruce.
She had accosted him – yes, accosted – in that bookshop in George Street and virtually forced him to take her to lunch at the Café St Honoré. Of course I should have been on my guard, he thought: Edinburgh was full of women like that who were itching for an affair with a younger man, particularly somebody like me, and I should have shown a little bit more savvy. But what made it all so unjust was that nothing had happened, and it was only because her husband had come into the restaurant at the precise moment that this rapacious woman had seized his hand that the situation had become awkward.
Nothing like that had happened in London, of course, but over the months it had become apparent to Bruce that the reality of life in London was one of struggle; people worked hard, put up with cramped conditions, and had to travel miles to conduct their social lives – they struggled. With the inherent good nature of the English, they generally remained remarkably cheerful about all this, but such hardships began to wear Bruce down.