It would be a poor book that didn’t present tantalising mysteries to puzzle the mind of the sorry reader who spends years collecting and analysing enough obsessive detail to fill a fansite about it. Here are a few unsolved questions about The Flight of the Heron. Please let me know if you can throw any light on them; I’m genuinely flummoxed.
In chapter 2.1, Ewen gets into an argument with Charles Edward Stuart, and Charles says this:
“Captain Cameron, when I appointed you my aide-de-camp, I did not think that I was hampering myself with a s——” He bit off the short, pregnant word, that aide-de-camp’s suddenly paling face evidently recalling to him whither he was going.
To which Ewen later responds:
“I think that your Royal Highness was near calling me . . . something that no gentleman can possibly call another.”
What word was Charles about to say? It’s a short word beginning with S, which would have been an unforgiveable insult between eighteenth-century gentlemen, and which makes sense in the context of the argument: Charles’s frustration with Ewen’s over-solicitousness for his safety. Also, the word ‘pregnant’ perhaps suggests that the offensiveness would be more in the suggestions or implications made by using the word than in its straightforward literal meaning. I have racked my brain time and again and cannot think of a word that fits these criteria! Various commenters have suggested ‘spy’, ‘snitch’, ‘scab’, ‘sod’ and ‘scrub’, to general agreement that none of them work brilliantly. Patricia Beer—as recounted in her autobiography Mrs Beer’s House—read the book in the 1930s and was similarly puzzled, which suggests the problem isn’t that this word was well-known and obvious to contemporary readers but has since become more obscure. Beer’s sister teased her by suggesting ‘shit’, which she and I agree is not really plausible. I think the most likely candidate is ‘spy’, but even this seems doubtful: the problem is that Ewen is being interfering and overly concerned about Charles’s safety, not that his loyalty is in question, and ‘hampering’ oneself with a spy, rather than being undermined or betrayed by him, would be a strange way to put it. In any case, Broster certainly seems to have intended it to be more obvious than this!
I have three physical copies of The Flight of the Heron, including a 1993 Reed Consumer Books paperback omnibus edition including the sequels—the first copy I bought and read. This edition has a footnote to chapter 5.5 stating that Morar is pronounced ‘Móar’—which puzzled me for a while, because that’s not how it’s pronounced now. But historian Christopher Duffy, in his authoritative book Fight for a Throne, lists the same silent-R pronunciation in an appendix of regional and period name pronunciations, so I was happy to accept Broster’s and Duffy’s combined authority for this being the correct period pronunciation.
But then I read my other copies of Flight of the Heron, one of which is a first edition—and in both of these the footnote says ‘Mórar’, with the first R still intact. This is very strange! Perhaps the missing R was simply a printing error in the omnibus; but in that case it’s a bit funny that a printing error accidentally recreates what is, according to Duffy, a real historical pronunciation. Or perhaps it was a printing error in the first edition, which was later corrected—but that seems unlikely given that the two-R version is still there in my third copy, a hardback from 1979. Part of the mystery is that I’m not at all sure what distinction ‘Mórar’ as opposed to ‘Morar’ is supposed to communicate to the English-speaking reader at whom the footnote is presumably aimed; the only thing I can think of is clarifying that the stress is on the first syllable, which I think most English speakers would assume anyway.