A church with a blood-red door. That’s the first thing I noticed as I walked up the Royal Mile toward Edinburgh Castle. The second was a red rope for visitors to line up behind to enter.
As I waited with the other tourists, I thought about the castle in my dream that left such an impact on me. A medieval fortress with turrets rising behind walls so thick and tall they were impossible to breach. Rocks below and the sound of crashing waves. There was no way to enter except the front gate….
Edinburgh Castle was not my castle. An entire city lay beneath this massive fortress, not the sea. But the high walls were eerily similar to my dream, and the rounded facade of the Scottish National War Memorial so familiar…. I let out a sigh. Like an odd puzzle piece I couldn’t fit, I decided to focus on the parts I’d gathered so far.
Mary, Queen of Scots, one of the Marys I’d decided to follow in the hunt for my castle, was the most connected to this place. A woman romanticized and demonized by writers and historians. A woman who gave birth to a King. A woman whose rumored lover was stabbed to death outside her bedchambers.
A few nights after the horrific murder at Holyroodhouse, Mary, who was six months pregnant, fled her home in the middle of the night. Once the adrenaline wore off, and the finality of David’s death settled in, I wonder if she felt like Victor Frankenstein after losing Justine?
“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.” ~Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Later, after amassing an army in Dunbar, Mary returned to Edinburgh to begin her revenge, some say. But another life-changing event happened to her before that. And as I stood staring at the small chambers where her son James was born, her only child to survive infancy, I wondered what went through her mind. Did she seek vengeance, to right a perceived wrong by plotting murder? Maybe she wanted something else? And, like Victor Frankenstein, did that path lead to her dark demise?
Again, I had the thought, this trip was turning very bleak. Maybe I should stop now. Find a nice spa, some fancy restaurant, do a bit of shopping, whatever normal vacationers do, And yet, my thirst for more drove me on.
How fitting, and eerily odd, that the next stop on my search for my dream castle was the very place where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born.
Dawn B~
Dawn Berkoski 
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