“A picnic set? He brought a picnic to the battle?”
“Oh, aye.” Roger found that he quite liked being Scottish for Brianna. He usually took pains to keep his accent modulated under the all-purpose Oxbridge speech that served him at the university, but now he was letting it have free rein for the sake of the smile that crossed her face when she heard it.
“D’ye know why they called him ‘Prince Charlie’?” Roger asked. “English people always think it was a nickname, showing how much his men loved him.”
“It wasn’t?”
Roger shook his head. “No, indeed. His men called him Prince Tcharlach”—he spelled it carefully—“which is the Gaelic for Charles. Tcharlach mac Seamus, ‘Charles, son of James.’ Very formal and respectful indeed. It’s only that Tcharlach in Gaelic sounds the hell of a lot like ‘Charlie’ in English.”
Brianna grinned. “So he never was ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’?”
“Not then.” Roger shrugged. “Now he is, of course. One of those little historical mistakes that get passed on for fact. There are a lot of them.”
“And you a historian!” Brianna said, teasing.
Roger smiled wryly. “That’s how I know.”
They wandered slowly down the graveled paths that led through the battlefield, Roger pointing out the positions of the different regiments that had fought there, explaining the order of battle, recounting small anecdotes of the commanders.
As they walked, the wind died down, and the silence of the field began to assert itself. Gradually their conversation died away as well, until they were talking only now and then, in low voices, almost whispers. The sky was gray with cloud from horizon to horizon, and everything beneath its bowl seemed muted, with only the whisper of the moor plants speaking in the voices of the men who fed them.
“This is the place they call the Well of Death.” Roger stooped by the small spring. Barely a foot square, it was a tiny pool of dark water, welling under a ridge of stone. “One of the Highland chieftains died here; his followers washed the blood from his face with the water from this spring. And over there are the graves of the clans.”
The clan stones were large boulders of gray granite, rounded by weather and blotched with lichens. They sat on patches of smooth grass, widely scattered near the edge of the moor. Each one bore a single name, the carving so faded by weather as to be nearly illegible in some cases. MacGillivray. MacDonald. Fraser. Grant. Chisholm. MacKenzie.
“Look,” Brianna said, almost in a whisper. She pointed at one of the stones. A small heap of greenish-gray twigs lay there; a few early spring flowers mingled, wilted, with the twigs.
“Heather,” Roger said. “It’s more common in the summer, when the heather is blooming—then you’ll see heaps like that in front of every clan stone. Purple, and here and there a branch of the white heather—the white is for luck, and for kingship; it was Charlie’s emblem, that and the white rose.”
“Who leaves them?” Brianna squatted on her heels next to the path, touching the twigs with a gentle finger.
“Visitors.” Roger squatted next to her. He traced the faded letters on the stone—FRASER. “People descended from the families of the men who were killed here. Or just those who like to remember them.”
She looked sidelong at him, hair drifting around her face. “Have you ever done it?”
He looked down, smiling at his hands as they hung between his knees.
“Yes. I suppose it’s very sentimental, but I do.”
Brianna turned to the thicket of moor plants that edged the path on the other side.
“Show me which is heather,” she said.
On the way home, the melancholy of Culloden lifted, but the feeling of shared sentiment lingered, and they talked and laughed together like old friends.
“It’s too bad Mother couldn’t come with us,” Brianna remarked as they turned into the road where the Randalls’ bed-and-breakfast was.
Much as he liked Claire Randall, Roger didn’t agree at all that it was too bad she hadn’t come. Three, he thought, would have been a crowd, and no mistake. But he grunted noncommitally, and a moment later asked, “How is your mother? I hope she’s not terribly ill.”
“Oh, no, it’s just an upset stomach—at least that’s what she says.” Brianna frowned to herself for a moment, then turned to Roger, laying a hand lightly on his leg. He felt the muscles quiver from knee to groin, and had a hard time keeping his mind on what she was saying. She was still talking about her mother.
“…think she’s all right?” she finished. She shook her head, and copper glinted from the waves of her hair, even in the dull light of the car. “I don’t know; she seems awfully preoccupied. Not ill, exactly—more as though she’s kind of worried about something.”