The Shoes of Fortune

Excerpt: It is an odd thing chance—the one element to baffle the logician and make the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as the sandy citadel a child builds upon the shore without any thought of the incoming tide. A strange thing chance; and but for chance I might this day be the sheriff of a shire my head stuffed with the tangled phrase and sentiment of interlocutors or maybe no more than an advocate overlooked sitting in John's Coffeehouse in Edinburgh—a moody soured man with a jug of claret and cursing the inconsistencies of preferment to office. I might have been that or less if it had not been for so trifling a circumstance as the burning of an elderly woman's batch of scones. Had Mistress Grant a more attentive eye to her Culross griddle what time the scones for her lodgers breakfast were a-baking forty years ago I would never have fled furth my native land in a mortal terror of the gallows: had her griddle say been higher on the swee-chain by a link or two Paul Greig would never have foregathered with Dan Risk the blackguard skipper of a notorious craft; nor pined in a foreign jail; nor connived unwitting at a prince's murder; nor marched the weary leagues of France and fought there on a beggar's wage. And this is not all that hung that long-gone day upon a woman's stair-head gossip to the neglect of her cuisine for had this woman been more diligent at her baking I had probably never seen my Isobel with a lover's eye.