Braveheart (35 page)

I had been there several times, always with others, but the last time, I went alone. I walked around the spot; a plaque hanging on an outer wall of Saint Bart’s Hospital marks the area and commemorates Wallace’s life as well as his death. There, too, is a small, ancient church, some of which was standing when William Wallace was put to death. On our first visit Smithfield, my wife and I, thinking of Wallace would likely have seen this church with his own eyes from the platform of his execution, entered the sanctuary; we found a beautiful, serene place, and there we stood in a majestic, beautiful, and tragic silence. On the day I last returned, I wanted to visit that sanctuary again to find a private place away from the crowded street, where people passed neither knowing or caring about the long-dead Scot remembered upon the plaque or the American who stopped before it, gazing up at it with tears in his eyes.

The church was closed that day. So I stood in the arched shelter of its entryway, beside its graveyard. I had meant to pray inside the church, but where I now found myself seemed no less fine a place for prayer. So I thanked God for my family and friends and for my calling as a storyteller. And I thanked God for William Wallace.

I wondered if William Wallace was just as grateful that I had come upon his story.

And then something strange happened. I can’t say that I saw him; it may be an overstatement even to say that I felt his presence. But I felt . . . that I could talk to him there. And so I thanked him personally. I told him I had no idea if we were related by blood, but I had come to feel a kinship with him and felt that somehow I was meant to be there, seven hundred years after he was, to tell his story. I told him there were few promises that I could make him as to what would become of this telling of his tale, but I could make him the same one I had made to God and to myself: I would do my best to convey the truth as I saw it to those around me.

Maybe all that happened that day was that I talked to myself. Maybe the gift of any great person is the power to make us converse with our own hearts. And maybe as I stood there, I stood there all alone.

But when I walked away, I glanced one last time at the plaque. Someone had left flowers at its base. They were buttercups, and they were beautiful.