* * *
They walked in silence for some time, with no sound but the passing of distant traffic, and the closer lapping of the river at its banks. Roger felt reluctant to start any conversation, lest he risk reminding her of things she wished to forget. But the floodgates had been opened, and there was no way of holding back.
She began to ask him small questions, hesitant and halting. He answered them as best he could, and hesitant in return, asked a few questions of his own. The freedom of talking, suddenly, after so many years of pent-up secrecy, seemed to act on her like a drug, and Roger, listening in fascination, drew her out despite herself. By the time they reached the railroad bridge, she had recovered the vigor and strength of character he had first seen in her.
“He was a fool, and a drunkard, and a weak, silly man,” she declared passionately. “They were all fools—Lochiel, Glengarry, and the rest. They drank too much together, and filled themselves with Charlie’s foolish dreams. Talk is cheap, and Dougal was right—it’s easy to be brave, sitting over a glass of ale in a warm room. Stupid with drink, they were, and then too proud of their bloody honor to back down. They whipped their men and threatened them, bribed them and lured them—took them all to bloody ruin…for the sake of honor and glory.”
She snorted through her nose, and was silent for a moment. Then, surprisingly, she laughed.
“But do you know what’s really funny? That poor, silly sot and his greedy, stupid helpers; and the foolish, honorable men who couldn’t bring themselves to turn back…they had the one tiny virtue among them; they believed. And the odd thing is, that that’s all that’s endured of them—all the silliness, the incompetence, the cowardice and drunken vainglory; that’s all gone. All that’s left now of Charles Stuart and his men is the glory that they sought for and never found.
“Perhaps Raymond was right,” she added in a softer tone; “it’s only the essence of a thing that counts. When time strips everything else away, it’s only the hardness of the bone that’s left.”
“I suppose you must feel some bitterness against the historians,” Roger ventured. “All the writers who got it wrong—made him out a hero. I mean, you can’t go anywhere in the Highlands without seeing the Bonnie Prince on toffee tins and souvenir tourist mugs.”
Claire shook her head, gazing off in the distance. The evening mist was growing heavier, the bushes beginning to drip again from the tips of their leaves.
“Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind—for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it’s a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.”
There was a faint rumble in the distance. The evening passenger train from London, Roger knew. You could hear the whistle from the manse on clear nights.
“No, the fault lies with the artists,” Claire went on. “The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It’s them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.”
“Are they all liars, then?” Roger asked. Claire shrugged. In spite of the chilly air, she had taken off the jacket to her suit; the damp molded the cotton shirt to show the fineness of collarbone and shoulder blades.
“Liars?” she asked, “or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?”
“And are they wrong to do it, then?” Roger asked. The rail bridge trembled as the Flying Scotsman hit the switch below. The wavering white letters shook with vibration—FREE SCOTLAND.
Claire stared upward at the letters, her face lit by fugitive starlight.
“You still don’t understand, do you?” she said. She was irritated, but the husky voice didn’t rise above its normal level.
“You don’t know why,” she said. “You don’t know, and I don’t know, and we never will know. Can’t you see? You don’t know, because you can’t say what the end is—there isn’t any end. You can’t say, ‘This particular event’ was ‘destined’ to happen, and therefore all these other things happened. What Charles did to the people of Scotland—was that the ‘thing’ that had to happen? Or was it ‘meant’ to happen as it did, and Charles’s real purpose was to be what he is now—a figurehead, an icon? Without him, would Scotland have endured two hundred years of union with England, and still—still”—she waved a hand at the sprawling letters overhead—“have kept its own identity?”
“I don’t know!” said Roger, having to shout as the swinging searchlight lit the trees and track, and the train roared over the bridge above them.
There was a solid minute of clash and roar, earthshaking noise that held them rooted to the spot. Then at last it was past, and the clatter died to a lonely crying wail as the red light of the end car swept out of sight beyond them.
“Well, that’s the hell of it, isn’t it?” she said, turning away. “You never know, but you have to act anyway, don’t you?”
She spread her hands suddenly, flexing the strong fingers so her rings flashed in the light.
“You learn it when you become a doctor. Not in school—that isn’t where you learn, in any case—but when you lay your hands on people and presume to heal them. There are so many there, beyond your reach. So many you can never touch, so many whose essence you can’t find, so many who slip through your fingers. But you can’t think about them. The only thing you can do—the only thing—is to try for the one who’s in front of you. Act as though this one patient is the only person in the world—because to do otherwise is to lose that one, too. One at a time, that’s all you can do. And you learn not to despair over all the ones you can’t help, but only to do what you can.”
She turned back to him, face haggard with fatigue, but eyes glowing with the rain-light, spangles of water caught in the tangles of her hair. Her hand rested on Roger’s arm, compelling as the wind that fills a boat’s sail and drives it on.
“Let’s go back to the manse, Roger,” she said. “I have something particular to tell you.”