Story within A Story - "Celtic Curse: An Yvonne Suarez Travel Mystery"

While waiting anxiously for Galley copies of my latest travel mystery to arrive, thought I'd relay a short story of love and loyalty that I encountered in my research and travels to Edinburgh. The story is a popular one and if you have small children, you may recognize it as one told by Walt Disney in a cartoon movie many years ago. It's the true story about a Skye terrier named Greyfriars Bobby who became famous in the 1800s for sleeping every night for fourteen years on the grave of his master who had died of tuberculosis, destitute except for the money to be buried in the Church yard near Edinburgh Castle.

During the day Bobby made friends of children from a local orphanage and the local restaurant owners who fed him scraps of food, but every night, no matter how cold, snowy or rainy, he’d return to sleep on his master’s grave. In 1867 he was at risk of being destroyed because he didn’t have an owner so the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who also happened to be the director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, bought Bobby a license and made him the responsibility of the town council. Bobby died in 1872 but couldn’t be buried inside the cemetery because it was consecrated ground, so he was buried just inside the Greyfriars Kirkyard, the nearest he could get to his master John Gray’s grave. A year later, Lady Burdett-Coutts commemorated Greyfriar’s Bobby by endowing a statue atop a fountain at the southern edge of George IV Bridge. To this day tourists and locals alike honor his memory by visiting his statue. In "Celtic Curse," protagonist Yvonne Suarez buys a book about Bobby for her daughter as a souvenir. Upon reading the story, she is touched and wishes that humans were as loving and loyal as that little skye terrier.