At that Claire put a spoonful in her mouth. It was sour but she rather liked it. She smiled up at him and, for some reason, her liking the yoghurt seemed to please him. He came into the room and sat on a chair that was against the wall, took a pipe and a can of tobacco off the windowsill, packed the pipe, and lit it.
Claire tore into the food ravenously. “What are you doing here?” she asked between bites. “Why do you have eleven tables in there? Whose room was this? Are you the only person who lives in this part of the house? Are you very, very ill?”
He looked at her through the haze of the pipe smoke. “Lonely for company, are you?”
“Why, no, of course not. There must be a hundred people living in this enormous house. How can I be lonely?” She looked down at the empty plate. With the food in her, she was losing the delicious feeling the whisky had given her.
“And there’s always Harry.”
She put her fork down. “I think I’d better go now.” She started to get up.
“This is Charlie’s room.”
She looked back at him. “I haven’t met any Charlie.”
“Charlie as in the prince of that name.”
Claire stood still a moment. “Bonnie Prince Charlie? That Prince Charlie?”
“None other. He came this way in…”
“1745.”
“I think that was the year. He came by here and of course some of my relatives, as well as Harry’s, were helping him, so they asked him to spend the night. He did.” Trevelyan pointed with the stem of his pipe toward the bed.
Claire looked at the bed with new eyes. “Bonnie Prince Charlie slept in this bed?”
“Left some things in a drawer over there.”
Slowly, Claire made her way to the small table next to the bed and opened the drawer. Inside was a bit of tartan cloth that she knew to be the prince’s sett. She had seen several pieces in museums. There was also an old, yellow, folded piece of paper in the drawer. Tentatively, she opened it, and inside was a curl of light brown hair. She looked at Trevelyan. “His?”
“Yes,” he said and smiled a bit.
Carefully, she put the items back into the drawer and closed it. “These things should be in a museum.”
Trevelyan shrugged and drew on his pipe.
Claire looked at the bed in reverence for a moment, then she did what she had always wanted to do when she saw wonderful things in museums: she touched it. Gently, she ran her hands along the carving of the post and along the coverlet.
“The bed’s not exactly fragile. As I sleep on it every night, I can assure you that it’s quite sturdy.”
Claire looked at him to see if he were joking but then, with a smile of great joy, she climbed onto the bed and stretched out. She was looking up at the underside of the same bed that Bonnie Prince Charlie had looked at.
“I think I hear bagpipes,” she said softly. “This is the real Scotland.”
Trevelyan watched her intently. “And what is your idea of the real Scotland?”
She sat up on her elbows. “The history of what has gone on in this place. Are you Scots?”
“Half. My mother is English.”
“Then your parents must have hated each other.” She lay back on the coverlet.
“True enough,” he said. “I’ve never seen a married couple hate each other more than my parents did.”
“Of course they did. The English have persecuted the Scots for centuries. Did you know that one of the English kings was called the Hammer of the Scots?” She smiled up at the canopy. “But no one, absolutely no one, could defeat the Scots. Not everything the English could do to them could make them surrender. And in the end they won.”
Trevelyan drew on his pipe. “If we Scots are so poor and the English are so rich, how have we won?”