I cross-checked King George’s other five daughters but nothing really clicked. The others were either married or too old or too young. No, if the story were true, it would’ve been all about Augusta Sophia. But some articles reported that Augusta Sophia had worked for her mother until the queen died. The princess was in her fifties by then.
Could she secretly have given birth to a child out of wedlock? Without the knowledge of the people? Why not? She was royalty. Back then, they probably could’ve gotten away with anything.
Maybe it was just me and my Yankee-bitch sensibilities, but I really liked the idea of the princess escaping the palace for one wild fling before being consigned to work as her mother’s glorified servant for the rest of her life.
I sighed, knowing I’d spent too much time chasing this wild goose. I stood up and stretched my muscles, glanced at the twelve or fourteen people scattered around the North Reading Room, and asked myself what I was doing here. It was almost one o’clock and I was starting to get hungry. That was no big surprise. I was always hungry.
But there was one more hunch I wanted to follow before I gave up.
If Kyle had been telling me the truth about his relationship to the bookbinder William Cathcart, then maybe I could trust that he’d thought he was telling the truth about Robert Burns and the princess, too. Even if it turned out to be untrue. But if he was lying about Cathcart being his ancestor, then I would know it was time to let Kyle go.
I ran a search on William Cathcart and found that his bindery had been operating during Robert Burns’s time in Edinburgh. Interesting, but it still didn’t answer any questions.
I began a genealogical search for any McVees living in Edinburgh around the time of William Cathcart. It turned out the city was crawling with McVees.
“Hmm,” I said, and began to work backward from Kyle and Royce. I found a link a few generations back to an Edinburgh McVee named Thomas. Thomas’s ancestors could be traced back to the late seventeen hundreds, to a Douglas McVee who ran a paper mill.
Paper and bindings. A perfect marriage there.
I gave up on the McVee line and moved to Cathcart, working forward to see if any of his daughters or grand-daughters might’ve married a McVee. I felt a tingle and realized I was excited to think I might actually find a link.
I boiled it down to a few possibilities. Either Margaret or Doreen Cathcart could’ve married Russell or John McVee. The computer showed a marriage certificate that was so faded I couldn’t actually read the names. But there was a reference to the actual document in the genealogy stacks.
I wrote down the coordinates, grabbed my things and wandered off in search of the stacks. I found a bracket on the wall listing the different rooms, with arrows pointing the way. I realized at that moment that the arrow pointing to the ladies’ room was most appealing.
Minutes later, refreshed and hands cleaned, I found the tall, heavy door leading to the genealogy room and entered. The door closed with a dull thud and I looked around. The room was dark, huge, high-ceilinged and deserted. Rows of waist-high map cabinets ran lengthwise across the room, the same type of cabinets I’d seen used for blueprints and ledgers. I had a similar, smaller cabinet in my workshop to hold the wide sheets of marbled paper I used for end sheets.
Curious, I approached the nearest cabinet and opened the wide, shallow top drawer. It held five or six three-foot-long, thin, aged ledgers. I counted the cabinets in the room and did the math. There had to be thousands of ledgers in here. I pulled one out and laid it on top of the cabinet, then carefully opened it. There were hundreds of rows of names entered in old-fashioned handwriting. Names and dates, as well as some charts with lines indicating family trees. Some connected to more names and dates. One family listing began in the year 1477.
I stared at the faded handwriting, fascinated. Then I shook myself. I was wasting time. I knew where I needed to go for a look at the Cathcart marriage certificate: the stacks. I stared at the narrow aisles of tall bookshelves that climbed to the ceiling and stretched all the way to the back wall. The room was like a warehouse. Here and there in some of the aisles were industrial-type ladders on wheels, used for reaching the highest shelves.
There had to be thousands of ledgers and journals in those shelves too. Maybe millions. Good grief.
I looked around. The room was still empty of people, and I wondered briefly if I should’ve asked for a special pass to come in here. At the same time I felt excitement. I could geek out for hours in this room, poring through the fascinating family histories contained in these books.
But I didn’t have hours of time to waste. I checked my watch. I’d give myself a half hour to find the certificate; then I was going to go back to my hotel room for a late lunch and a nap.
And wasn’t I the party girl?
I checked my coordinates and found the shelf I needed, but there were easily a hundred thin ledgers on that shelf.