“Well, there was a letter to Henrietta all about his being holed up in solitude and dilapidation, and feeling like a clam!”

“No. Not a clam. I can quote that one to you directly: ‘Let me alone six or seven days in my room, and I lose all sensation, either of pain or pleasure, and am in species little better than an oyster.’ ”

“An oyster! That’s right.”

“Of course it’s right.”

“Look, I’m not questioning—”

“I wrote it. I would know if it’s right or not.”

“Like I said, I’m still finding things out, thank you for correcting me. For turning the clam back into an oyster…”

“It was always an oyster. How can you write a book about me if you can’t get a simple detail like that correct?”

“It’s for that very reason that I wanted to have lunch, and to see how you feel about a few new things I’ve been researching that weren’t in any of the historical records.”

“What new things?”

“Well, like information about babies with January birthdays…”

“Mine was January the second.”

“Exactly. I mean winter babies born in the northern hemisphere are known now to be more susceptible to seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a depression that comes from spending your first few months on earth in dreary sunlessness—a baby like that is prone to suffer disheartened bouts of inconsolable unhappiness, especially in prolonged grey weather.”

“The thing that gives me inconsolable unhappiness now,” I interrupt her, “isn’t the desolate winters of my childhood, nor even the hateful blizzards on the Atlantic, or the windswept rocky wastes of Louisbourg or fog on the coast during my siege. It isn’t the deserts of history but modern-day wastelands that strain me beyond endurance now. Tell me, when you went to Scotland, what was the place like once you left the castle ruins and found yourself in a modern village?”

“Well…”

“Because when I went two years ago, looking for Culloden and all my old haunts, I found that the whole of Scotland now has a smell I do not remember it having in the past—manure, slightly rancid butter, hops and malt. It is as if the body of land and heather has become a rather old and decaying person who emits a sickly-sweet odour, from breath, or pores, or sweat, every time they manage to shift position on their bed, to which they have taken themselves some years ago and neither their clothing nor their greasy quilts has been laundered since.”

“Edinburgh certainly—”