And here’s some fun info on other characters.
Minor spoilers ahead. You’d need a microscope to find them.
Eilidh Rose
I made her up. She was called Mary-Rose McDougal first, whom I also made up. I changed it after I realized I had a better character to fill that position. Eilidh, you see, is the Gaelic name for Helen.
I honestly don’t know how common flower shops were in the 16th century, but it seems to me that it’s one of those shops that’s just decadent in a time when the average commoner has to share a bed with the whole family.
Agnes, cow
The original, real life Agnes may not have been a heavy metal cow. I’ll admit that I am unsure. Highland cows are one of the oldest cattle breeds in the word, with mentions going back to the 6th century, but the first herdbook dates from 1885, so there’s a bit of a gap. It’s likely John Fian was followed around by a regular old cow, but if this is a fact, I’m quite enthusiastic about ignoring it. Not just because I doubt a man followed around by an infatuated cow can be considered factually correct, but if I’m going to write about a cow in Scotland, it’s damn well going to be the most metal cow of them all.
Though I will confess that I sort of painted Agnes to be the size of a bull, instead of a smaller heifer. But come on, I once heard a person ask “are those mammoths?” So… just go with it. Who doesn’t love a big, fluffy cow?
Sources:
Eagle Brae
Wikipedia
Mr. Paisley
I don’t know who the executioner/interrogator was in John Fian’s case. I doubt it’s been written down at all. If it has, I’m sorry, I don’t care enough to look for it. It’s also unlikely that either Fian or Cunninghame knew who he was. I just enjoyed how the name really doesn’t match the job.
Dr. Ignacio
Doesn’t actually exist. Or, you know, there could be a Dr. Ignacio out there in the world somewhere, but I made up this one. Which would be more than enough reason to leave him off this list, but there’s a point where Tobias tells John “he knows a guy” and that this guy has invented DNA.
Obviously, Dr. Ignacio did not discover DNA. I was just so horribly stuck on how to get a cow to fall in love with a man that I had to resort to stealing.
I took quite some liberty with it, as DNA was first identified in 1860-ish by a Swiss dude called Johann Friedrich Miescher. Other scientists built upon that discovery, leading some people to believe that it wasn’t until 1950 two men called Watson and Crick discovered it.
The method Dr. Ignacio uses for the discovery, the Viewer Of Human Fabric, is more period appropriate. The good doctor expanded on the idea for the microscope as conceived in the 1600s by a Dutchman called Zacherias Janssen. It’s also been attributed to a pretty smart guy called Anthony van Leeuwenhoek at some point, and there are a bunch of claims by others as well. Because you would actually need a microscope to see the amount of fucks I have to give about that, this leaves us with one tangible fact: It’s a Ducth invention, so we, the Dutch, make wet things dry, and we like looking at tiny things.
The reason I choose to go with spectacle maker (a person who makes eyeglasses, not someone who yells about things in the town square) Janssen is because I can just picture him inventing the thing by accident. He’s merrily grinding lenses, having a glass of milk, possibly smoking a bowl because he’s Dutch, after all. He puts the finished lenses aside in a neat stack.
“This one’s done.” *grind-grind-grind* “This one’s done.” *puff-puff* *grind-grind* “This one’s done– Wat de neuk!”
He almost spills his milk in utter shock at the individual threads he can now see in the table cloth, and the tiny monsters that crawl around in them. He goes on to turn the whole thing into a microscope and the horrors he is able to see now convince him to give that shit right up and go into counterfeiting coins.
Sources:
Your Genome
Nature
Wikipedia
Science Museum
Hugh Fleming
Alright, I’ll admit I had the map of Scotland rotated about 50 degrees clockwise in my head. I had Glasgow, and subsequently Darvel, placed all wrong. Doesn’t really matter for Hugh Fleming, as he’s not entirely real. Maybe you recognize his last name. It’s the same as Alexander Fleming’s, and that’s the guy who invented penicillin. He was born in Darvel, and I thought it would be amusing if John Fian was indirectly responsible for the Flemings originating there.
I had a quick look at the Fleming family tree and tried to guesstimate which generation would be appropriate for my time period. The family tree I looked at didn’t go that far back, but there were a couple of Hughs on it. And that’s how side-characters happen.