Fraser put down his fork and reached for his glass. “She must have cared for Robbie,” he said. “To come all this way. Sad that they had no future.” He quoted lines from one of O. A. Manning’s poems. “We walked away from all that was warm and dear and stood frightened in cold rain where the guns fired, and in the end, we died in pain, the black stinking mud our shroud, embraced at last not by living arms, but by the bones of those who before us died . . .”

Rutledge recognized the words. But he said only, “Manning understood better than most.”

“Yes.” Fraser sighed. “Well, when you catch up with Eleanor Gray, if she isn’t happily married to someone else by this time, tell her Robbie loved her too. I truly think he did.”

“Do you know if Captain Burns kept a dog? A cat?”

“He didn’t. He traveled more than most. But his fiancée was fond of King Charles spaniels.” He smiled. “Julia would bring them whenever she came, nasty little monsters, always wanting to climb into one’s lap. How Robbie put up with them, I don’t know! Love is blind, I suppose.”

“Did Captain Burns bury one of them in his garden?”

“Good God, how should I know?” Then he grinned. “Killed it, you mean? Robbie must have been sorely tempted a time or two.”

RUTLEDGE DROVE EAST out of the Trossachs, through some of the heart of Scottish history.

Many of the soldiers in France had seldom been farther from home than twenty miles in their short lives. Clan battles made for lively conversation among the Highlanders who had long memories for the feuds, ambushes, and massacres that had colored each family tree until the Battle of Culloden and the Highland Clearances had changed Scotland forever.

The Lowlanders had had a different perspective. Stirling, a great castle on a crag overlooking the Forth, had been a royal residence until James VI had taken himself off to London. Now it was a quiet county town lost in the backwaters of the past. Bannockburn, where the Scots had won their famous victory over the English, was a monument to Robert the Bruce’s determination to be free of the southern kingdom that had dominated his country for a lifetime. There were Scots who had only the vaguest notion now where the battle had been fought. Mary Stuart had been born at Linlithgow Palace, on its knoll above the loch. A queen from birth, she’d grown up to become a thorn in the flesh of Elizabeth of England. John Knox had thundered against Mary from the pulpit, and she had finally been forced to abdicate, a pensioner of the English crown. A rough and glorious past, now no more than a footnote in time.