Although Townshend himself took them seriously, and seemed particularly bothered by the three ships Deane had seen leaving the Baltic, apparently headed for Spain, no one in Townshend’s far-flung web of European agents was able to find any evidence to back Edmund’s claims. Britain’s agent in Sweden went so far as to say, in a letter to Townshend that very October, “one would almost suspect the letters from Petersburg to be a fiction.”
I began to agree with him. And if that were indeed the case, then in my view, it left only two possible options: either the Jacobites at St. Petersburg had known that Edmund O’Connor was a traitor, and had deliberately given him false information to unwittingly deliver to the British, or Edmund was a willing participant in a very clever “sting” operation.
I cannot know the motives of a man who has been dead more than two hundred years. I only know that, when he gave his information to the British, Edmund told them next to nothing about Gordon and Sir Harry and the Jacobites he’d lived with in close quarters at St. Petersburg the past nine months, claiming he “never heard anything of Business from them.” Perhaps he really did know nothing. Or perhaps he kept what he knew secret, to protect his friends. I chose to think the best of him. I’m happy with my choice.
At any rate, he got his royal pardon. I still hope to find some record of what he did, after that.
As for the three ships that Deane had observed and that had so alarmed Townshend, they eventually arrived without incident in Spain, offloaded their harmlessly commercial cargoes, and reloaded with nothing more incendiary than oil, salt, and raisins before sailing north again. Townshend, firm in his belief of the plot, continued to expend the government’s time, funds, and energy in gathering intelligence and trying to prepare for what he felt sure was an imminent invasion.
If the Jacobites had wanted to gain time to plan and regroup, while making the British waste valuable resources, they had succeeded.
I cannot claim to know what they intended. But I do know that, on August 8, 1725—the day before Edmund O’Connor left St. Petersburg to carry his tale and the letters to Townshend and Deane—King James VIII himself sat down and wrote a somewhat different story to his trusted friend, Lord Atterbury. “By my accounts of the North,” wrote the king, “I perceive the Czarina was willing to hear my proposals, and that the fleet was not like to undertake any thing this year; all which will afford time both for negociation [sic] and execution against the next; and I own I never had better hopes in general.”
These hopes stayed high till Empress Catherine’s death, just two years later. What she might have done to aid James in his efforts to regain his throne, we’ll never know. The next tsar was not sympathetic to the Jacobites, and after a few more years of attempting to gain assistance from Russia, James and his followers were forced to turn their hopes westward again, to their older allies Spain and France.
But that is another story.
A Note of Thanks
In addition to Alison Lindsay, head of the Historical Search Section at the National Archives of Scotland; Sister Maire Hickey, OSB, of Kylemore Abbey, Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland; and my friend and fellow author Maureen Jennings, all of whom I’ve mentioned in my notes about the characters, and all of whom deserve a second mention here, I also owe thanks to the two researchers at the National Archives of Scotland who kindly took time to share with me the more extensive catalogue of records from the Stirling-Home-Drummond-Moray papers; to Charles Hind, FSA, associate director and H. J. Heinz Curator of Drawings for the British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, who was my guide in St. Petersburg; to the two women working at the Municipal Museum in Ieper, Belgium, on the day that I walked in, who helped me track down the location of the former convent of the Irish nuns; to John G. Kruth, executive director, and Christine Simmonds-Moore, PhD, of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, who vetted my details concerning the ganzfeld procedure and parapsychology research; to thriller writer Ian Kharitonov, for correcting my Russian; and, as ever, to my editors and agents, and my mother—my most critical developmental editor.
Above all, I owe special thanks to Margaret McGovern, of Eyemouth, Scotland, my onetime landlady and longtime friend, who not only gave Robbie his bye-name, but helped me make sure that his voice was authentic. I couldn’t have written his story without her, and wouldn’t have wanted to.
About the Author
After studying politics and international development at university, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Susanna Kearsley worked as a museum curator before turning her hand to writing. Winner of the UK’s Catherine Cookson Fiction prize, Susanna Kearsley’s writing has been compared to that of Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. She hit the bestseller lists in the United States with The Winter Sea, which was also a finalist for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award and winner of an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction, and RITA-nominated The Rose Garden, which also won an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Historical Fantasy/Paranormal. Her books have been translated and published in more than twenty countries. She lives in Canada, near the shores of Lake Ontario.
Susanna Kearsley, The Firebird
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