We didn’t expect to cause a scene. It was just a fun neighborhood thing during our vacation in Edinburgh – a quirky midsummer street festival where locals encouraged visitors to dress up in traditional Scottish gear.
So naturally, my daughter went full Highland queen in her Mary Queen of Scots outfit, tartan sash and plastic crown and everything, and my son insisted on being a royal piper, complete with a toy set of bagpipes and a little tam-o’-shanter hat. People loved it.
Tourists took photos, locals laughed, somebody even handed them shortbread wrapped in a paper napkin. It was lighthearted, silly, and honestly, one of my favorite parenting wins.
Until we ran into her.
The Festival, Before Everything Went Sideways
I should back up a little.
We’d been in Edinburgh for four days by then. This was our first real family trip abroad, me and my husband Dale and our two kids, Rosie who’s nine and Connor who’s seven. We’d saved for it for two years. Dale had a spreadsheet. Multiple tabs. Color-coded.
The festival was called something I can’t pronounce correctly even after looking it up three times, a Gaelic name for a midsummer gathering that the Stockbridge neighborhood had apparently been running for about twenty years. We found out about it from the woman at our rental flat, Pat, who was in her sixties and had a laugh like a car that won’t quite start. She told us to go, told us to dress up if we wanted, said the locals would get a kick out of it.
“They love seeing the wee ones in kit,” she said. “Don’t be shy about it.”
So we weren’t.
Rosie had been obsessed with Mary Queen of Scots ever since she’d done a school project on her back in March. She could tell you things about Mary that I genuinely didn’t know. The execution. The embroidery she did in captivity. The fact that she was six feet tall. Rosie found all of this thrilling in the way only nine-year-olds can find historical tragedy thrilling, which is to say completely and without irony.
When we found a little costume shop near the Royal Mile, Rosie spotted the outfit in the window and that was it. Done. Non-negotiable. Connor, not wanting to be left out, picked the piper costume because it came with the toy bagpipes and he’d been trying to make bagpipe noises with his mouth since we landed at Edinburgh Airport.
Forty-two pounds total. Worth every penny.
The Part Where It Was Perfect
The festival ran along a stretch of street near the Water of Leith. There were stalls selling food and handmade things, a small stage where a folk band was playing something fast and stompy, and a general atmosphere of cheerful chaos. Kids running everywhere. Dogs in little tartan bandanas. An elderly man in full Highland dress who looked like he’d been born in it.
Rosie walked in like she owned the place.
She had the sash pinned just right, the plastic crown sitting slightly crooked on her head, and she was carrying a little printed card she’d made herself that said MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS in her best handwriting. She’d made it that morning at the flat’s kitchen table while the rest of us were still eating breakfast. She wanted people to know who she was.
Connor was less regal. He kept blowing into the toy bagpipes, which didn’t actually make a real sound but made a sort of wet, reedy wheeze that he was enormously proud of. His tam was too big and kept sliding down over his eyes. He didn’t care even slightly.
People responded exactly the way Pat had promised. A couple from somewhere in the American Midwest stopped and asked to take a photo. A teenage boy working one of the food stalls gave Connor a thumbs up. An older woman in a yellow raincoat crouched down to Rosie’s level and asked her, very seriously, which Scottish monarch she admired most, and Rosie answered without hesitation: “Mary, obviously, but also Robert the Bruce because he kept trying.”
The woman in the yellow raincoat looked genuinely delighted.
Then somebody handed them the shortbread. Two pieces each, wrapped in paper napkins with a little hand-stamped thistle on them. Rosie held hers like a prize. Connor ate his in about four seconds and tried to get a second piece.
This is the part of the trip I’ll remember when I’m old.
When the Afternoon Changed
We’d been there maybe ninety minutes when I noticed the woman watching us.
She was standing near one of the craft stalls, maybe thirty feet away. Sixties, I’d guess. Grey hair pulled back. She had the look of someone local, not a tourist, the kind of comfortable-in-her-own-skin quality that people get when they’re somewhere they’ve been a thousand times. She wasn’t smiling.
She was looking at my kids.
Not the way people had been looking at them all afternoon, with that warm, amused recognition. This was different. She had her arms crossed. She was watching Rosie specifically, tracking her as Rosie moved through the crowd.
I told myself I was imagining it. I looked away. I helped Connor fix his tam.
When I looked back, she was walking toward us.
She came straight to me, not the kids, and she said, “Excuse me. Are you their mother?”
Her accent was Scottish, Edinburgh specifically, the kind that sounds clipped and precise. Not unfriendly in tone, but not warm either. Direct.
“I am,” I said.
She glanced at Rosie, then back at me. “The Mary costume.”
“Yes,” I said. I could feel myself getting ready for something, though I didn’t know what.
She said, “Your daughter. Does she know who she’s dressed as?”
What She Actually Said
I thought, here we go.
I’d read enough travel forums before the trip to know there could be sensitivities around this kind of thing. Cultural appropriation debates, the wrong tartan, something offensive I wasn’t aware of. I was already composing my apology in my head, already thinking about how to explain it to Rosie without making her feel like she’d done something wrong.
“She does,” I said, carefully. “She’s quite interested in Scottish history, actually. She did a school project on Mary Queen of Scots.”
The woman looked at me for a second.
Then she said: “Which tartan is she wearing?”
I didn’t know. I told her I didn’t know, that we’d bought the costume at a shop near the Royal Mile and I hadn’t asked.
The woman nodded slowly. She said, “It’s a Hunting Stewart. It’s a royal tartan. Perfectly appropriate for the costume. I just wanted to make sure you knew.” She paused. “Some tourists come through wearing clan tartans they have no connection to and it can be a bit – ” she stopped, searched for the word. “Complicated. But this is fine. This is well done, actually.”
I stared at her.
She wasn’t done.
“Your daughter,” she said, and for the first time something shifted in her face, just slightly. “If she’s interested in Mary, there’s something she should know that most visitors don’t get told.”
She looked over at Rosie, who was examining a stall selling hand-painted stones and had no idea any of this was happening.
“Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle,” she said. “In England. She was forty-four years old. She’d been imprisoned for nineteen years by then.” She looked back at me. “When they cut off her head, her little dog had been hiding under her skirts the whole time. A Skye terrier. It refused to leave her body afterward.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Nobody tells that part,” she said. “The dog. I always think that’s the part that matters.”
Rosie Hears It
I don’t know what made me do it, but I called Rosie over.
She came immediately, the crown bouncing, the card still in her hand. She looked at the woman with the frank, slightly suspicious assessment that nine-year-olds give to unfamiliar adults.
The woman looked at her and said, “I hear you know quite a bit about Mary Queen of Scots.”
Rosie said, “I do. I did a project.”
“Did you know about her dog?”
Rosie’s expression shifted. “What dog?”
So the woman told her. Right there, standing between a craft stall and a folk band playing forty feet away, this stranger from Edinburgh told my daughter about the Skye terrier that had hidden under Mary’s skirts at Fotheringhay and wouldn’t leave afterward.
Rosie listened without moving. She’s not a still child, Rosie. She’s always in motion. But she stood completely still for this.
When the woman finished, Rosie said, “What happened to the dog?”
The woman said she didn’t know. She said some accounts mentioned it was taken away and washed because it had gotten blood on it, but that after that, the records were quiet on the subject.
Rosie thought about this for a long moment.
“That’s the saddest part of the whole story,” she said.
The woman looked at her. “Yes,” she said. “I think so too.”
After
Her name was Margaret. She told us that before she left, offered it almost as an afterthought. She’d lived in Stockbridge her whole life, she said. Came to this festival every year. She didn’t explain why she’d decided to tell us any of it.
She shook my hand, gave Rosie a small nod that felt like one adult acknowledging another, and walked back toward the craft stalls.
We stayed another hour. Connor got his second piece of shortbread. The folk band played something slower as the afternoon cooled down, and Rosie walked beside me with her crown slightly more crooked than before, not saying much.
At some point she reached up and straightened it.
On the flight home three days later, Rosie asked me if we could look up more about the dog. We did, on my phone, the two of us squeezed into adjacent seats with the window shade down. There wasn’t much. A few sentences in a few different accounts. The dog was real, historians agreed on that. What happened to it afterward, nobody could say for certain.
Rosie read everything we could find and then looked out the window for a while.
“I want to add it to my project,” she said finally. “The part about the dog.”
“You should,” I said.
She pulled out the little handwritten card she’d been carrying all week, the one that said MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, and turned it over. On the blank back she wrote, in her careful nine-year-old handwriting: and her dog.
She folded it and put it in her jacket pocket.
I left it alone.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to someone who’d get it.
For more unexpected encounters, read about my sister’s husband scheduling a “household meeting” in my own house or what happened when a cat walked into my laundromat with something tied to its collar. You might also appreciate the moving story of my cat’s final visit to the park.
