Free Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon Page A

epaulet, leaving it swinging. "I don't feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven't forgotten, either." He held out a hand to her. "Shall we go outside?"
    It was cold outside, with a gusty wind that lashed two pennons, flying atop the poles set at either side of the moor. One yellow, one red, they marked the positions where the two commanders had stood behind their troops, awaiting the outcome of the battle.
    "Well back out of the way, I see," Brianna observed dryly. "No chance of getting in the way of a stray bullet."
    Roger noticed her shivering, and drew her hand further through his arm, bringing her close. He thought he might burst from the sudden swell of happiness touching her gave him, but tried to disguise it with a retreat into historical monologue. "Well, that was how generals led, back then—from the rear. Especially Charlie; he ran off so fast at the end of the battle that he left behind his sterling silver picnic set."
    "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