A Lost Lady of Old Years

Description

Francis Birkenshaw, disowned stock, drinker and law apprentice, meets Margaret Murray — wife of John Murray of Broughton — and is mistaken for a Jacobite messenger. The reader watches a young man of no cause acquire one: letters north to Lovat, the ’45’s weather, Culloden’s aftermath, a visit to a turncoat in the Tower. Inner life of honour learned late. The ‘lost lady’ is Margaret, heading for a French convent; Francis returns to the signet and never marries. Romance and betrayal on the page of a divided Scotland. Edinburgh taverns, a botched theft at Broughton, messages north, Culloden’s road, Lovat’s scaffold. The reader follows Francis from mercenary appetite to a love he cannot keep. 1745 as a moral education, Margaret Murray the measure of it.