Along Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile, royalty and commoners – living and dead – mingle amongst the museums, cafés and former royal residences. From Castle Hill to Abbey Strand, there is far more going on than meets the eye, as ghosts of every era and background make their home along the Mile. Returning to the city for her annual visit, Mary, Queen of Scots, is troubled by the lacklustre attitude of her father, King James V of Scotland, and decides to do something about it, with the aid of her spiritual companions. More troubling, though, is the arrival of a constant thorn in her side: her second husband, Lord Darnley. Can Mary resolve both her own issues and those of her small, ghostly court? [Description from Amazon UK]
I am thoroughly enjoying this series. This is the second one I’ve read after ‘Kindred Spirits: Tower of London’. I preferred Tower of London, maybe just because it focused around Richard III and Anne Boleyn, two of my favourite historical figures.
However, this one about Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was equally fascinating, though Mary didn’t come across entirely as I expected her to. She has always been seen as a fanatical martyr for her faith, but in this story we see a more light-hearted side. It was unexpected and took me a while to get used to it, but I did love her relationship with the father she never knew in life, and I would like to think it would have been like that had James V lived longer and got to know his daughter. The melding of different myths, legends and hauntings was clever, and I particularly enjoyed the addition of Boy, who was sent into the tunnels under Edinburgh and trapped.
The Royal Mile comes alive with a mixture of the modern Mile and the historical figures, and comparisons between the historic city and the modern city of Edinburgh. The description is quite detailed and the characters really come alive. It feels perfectly normal that the ghosts are there, possibly because it’s something I have imagined before visiting historical places – do ghosts really exist and where would they be if they did?
It’s nice to think that ghosts wouldn’t necessarily haunt where they died but where they were happy or had unfinished business, and could move around fairly freely. It goes against the traditional views that ghosts are tied to a particular place, and the idea of the white light and choosing whether to leave and go on or not also goes against these traditional views. It was interesting to explore these different ideas and think about what Mary Queen of Scots would do if she saw the white light or if her friends and confidantes left her.
The story was well-written and the narrative moved along at a good pace, combining several different strands into a whole, which felt completed at the end, like things had come full circle but with one particular problem seemingly solved. I am really looking forward to reading the other two that I haven’t read – Westminster Abbey and York.
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