HISTORICAL NOTE
Although this story is fiction and none of the characters existed, I based the historical background on fact. Dundee had a longstanding trade with the Baltic, and at that period was experiencing the industrial expansion which would see factories and mills dominate her streets. Many Scottish merchants sailed to India or other quarters of the Empire and returned with a fortune. Known as nabobs, they often bought large houses and lived in luxury.
In the 1820s, graverobbers were a plague to Scotland, digging up freshly-buried corpses to sell to anatomists, the doctors who taught anatomy to university students. Naturally unhappy that thieves were stealing their dead; communities built watch-towers and employed armed guards to repel them. The mass murders of Burke, MacDougall a
