The Outlandish Companion Page 18

  At this point, though, Bonnet returns, exhorting her to leave, and quickly! Shocked, but still retaining her presence of mind, Brianna brings up her musket, and insists that he bring Lord John to safety. Bonnet is not pleased, but is as always practical, and does as she says. They exit onto the riverbank below the loading ramp of the warehouse, and scramble to safety as the flames of the burning warehouse roar into the night sky.

  Dumping Lord John on the ground, Bonnet turns to escape, but pauses to invite Brianna to accompany him. She declines, and as Bonnet leaves, he reaches into his mouth and extracts something he had hidden there—the black diamond, originally stolen from the Frasers on the river.

  “For his maintenance, then,” he said, and grinned at her. “Take care of him, sweetheart!”

  And then he was gone, bounding long-legged up the riverbank, silhouetted like a demon in the flickering light. The turpentine flowing into the water had caught fire, and roiling billows of scarlet light shot upward, floating pillars of fire that lit the riverbank bright as day.

  Lord John survives, much to Brianna’s relief. Claire and Jamie return safely, to her even greater relief, and she and Jamie are reconciled, though Roger has not yet returned.

  Brianna’s child is born—a lusty boy, who resembles neither of his putative fathers. But, as Jamie states, “If I dinna ken who his father was, at least I know who his grandsire is!” and the family returns—with its new addition—to the house on Fraser’s Ridge.

  It is a bright summer’s day soon thereafter when a ragged figure limps slowly into the dooryard—Roger, who has made his choice.

  “I don’t imagine it pleases you any more than it does me,” he said, in his rusty voice, “but you are my nearest kinsman. Cut me. I’ve come to swear an oath in our shared blood.”

  I couldn’t tell whether Jamie hesitated or not; time seemed to have stopped, the air in the room crystallized around us. Then I watched Jamie’s dirk cut the air, honed edge draw swift across the thin, tanned wrist, and blood well red and sudden in its path.

  To my surprise, Roger didn’t look at Brianna, or reach for her hand. Instead, he swiped his thumb across his bleeding wrist, and stepped close to her, eyes on the baby. Roger knelt in front of her, and reaching out, pushed the shawl aside and smeared a broad red cross upon the downy curve of the baby’s forehead.

  “You are blood of my blood,” he said softly, “and bone of my bone. I claim thee as my son before all men, from this day forever.”

  But nearly a year has passed since the night when Roger and Brianna took each other for better or for worse, and who can say which of them has changed the most in the time since then? Unsure whether Roger has come back only from obligation, or because he truly loves her, Brianna is hesitant.

  Jamie decrees that Roger will stay; they are married, if only by handfasting. However, the traditional span of handfasting is for a year and a day. Roger has that long to convince his wife of his motives; Brianna has that long to make up her mind. In the meantime, they will live as husband and wife—though if Roger seeks to sleep with Brianna against her will, Jamie asserts that he will cut out Roger’s heart and feed it to the pig.

  For his part, Roger is more than willing to try to convince Brianna of his devotion —the difficulty is getting to talk to her for more than a few moments at a time, with the interruptions caused by the baby, and the fact that Roger is temporarily immobilized by Claire’s treatment of his foot injury. One night, though, he comes to Brianna’s cabin, and forces her to listen to him.

  Be careful, her mother said, and my daughter doesna need a coward, said her father. He could flip a bloody coin, but for the moment he was taking Jamie Frasers advice, and damn the torpedoes.

  “You said you’d seen a marriage of obligation and one of love. And do you think the one cuts out the other? Look—I spent three days in that godforsaken circle, thinking. And by God, I thought. I thought of staying, and I thought of going. And I stayed.”

  “We have time,” he said softly, and knew suddenly why it had been so important to talk to her now, here in the dark. He reached for her hand, clasped it flat against his breast.

  “Do you feel it? Do you feel my heart beat?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and slowly brought their linked hands to her own breast, pressing his palm against the thin white gauze.

  “This is our time,” he said. “Until that shall stop—for one of us, for both—it is our time. Now. Will ye waste it, Brianna, because you are afraid?”

  “No,” she said, and her voice was thick, but clear. “I won’t.”

  There was a sudden thin wail from the house, and a surprising gush of moist heat against his palm.

  “I have to go,” she said, pulling away. She took two steps, then turned. “Come in,” she said, and ran up the path in front of him, fleet and white as the ghost of a deer.

  AT THE END of October 1770, the Frasers go to the great Gathering on Mount Helicon—the largest Gathering of Scots in the New World. Here marriages are made, children are christened, news is exchanged, and business is done.

  The new baby will be christened here— if Roger and Brianna can ever agree on a name for him. Jeremiah, Roger suggests; it is an old family name. In fact, his father’s first name was Jeremiah, and it is Roger’s middle name—his mother once called him “Jemmy,” for short. It is the memory of this nickname that brings back to Roger other memories, of the days of terror on the Gloriana, with his vivid images of the woman, Morag MacKenzie, and her child—named Jemmy—whom he helped to save.

  With a disturbing notion blossoming in his brain, Roger asks Claire whether she perhaps recalls the details of his own genealogical record—she had examined it in some detail. She does, she replies; why? Does she also recall, he asks carefully, the name of the woman who married William Buccleigh MacKenzie—the “changeling,” the illegitimate child born to Dougal MacKenzie and the witch Geillis Duncan? Indeed she does, Claire answers—the woman’s name was Morag, Morag Gunn.

  Thanks, Roger murmurs, and settles back to deal with the realization that he has—quite unknowingly—saved his five-times-great-grandfather from drowning, and thus ensured his own survival; at least for the moment.

  The Gathering brings John Quincy Myers, down from the north with an important message—a brief note from Young Ian, written on the torn-out flyleaf of a book. He is well, Ian writes. He has married, in the Mohawk way, and his wife expects a child in the spring. He is happy—but he will never forget them.

  Another bit of news comes by way of a letter, though delivered less directly. Roger seeks out Jamie one evening by their family fire, to tell him of the contents of a letter he had discovered in Inverness, while waiting to go through the stones after Brianna. Unsure whether to share this with Claire—and feeling that, in fact, Jamie might be the intended recipient—he has finally decided to relate it to Jamie, and let him decide whether Claire—and Brianna— should be told.

  The import of the letter is that Frank had asked the Reverend Wakefield to erect a gravestone in the abandoned kirkyard at St. Kilda’s. Unable to dismiss Claire’s assertions about the past—and likewise unable to accept them—Frank had done the only thing he could: looked for James Fraser in the historical record. Finding a man whose connections matched those Claire had recounted, he was forced to accept Jamie’s reality—but in accepting it, was faced with a desperate choice; whether or not to tell Claire that James Fraser had survived the Battle of Culloden.

  On the one hand fearing to lose Claire, and on the other, fearing that she might remain with him for Brianna’s sake and yet still pine for Fraser, he chose to keep his silence—and Claire. He cannot help but feel guilt, though, at the sight of Brianna, with her father’s face.

  He is her father, he feels; and yet, she has another. He has, in effect, stolen Claire from Jamie, or at least kept her with him by deceit. He feels he owes Brianna the knowledge of her other father—at the same time, he knows himself too weak ever to tell her himself. His compromise
with conscience is the false gravestone, bearing Jamie’s full name—JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER—and the name of his wife. That, he tells the Reverend Wakefield, must suffice. If Brianna should be interested in her past—in his history—then she will go to St. Kilda’s, and find Black Jack Randall’s grave. If she sees the nearby stone for Jamie, she is bound to ask Claire—and the truth will be known, with Frank Randall safely dead and buried. As for Fraser himself… “Hadn’t thought of this before—do you suppose I’ll meet him in the sweet by-and-by, if there is one? Funny to think of it. Should we meet as fiends, I wonder, with the sins of the flesh behind us? Or end forever locked in some Celtic hell, with our hands wrapped round each other’s throat?”

  If Frank Randall had chosen to keep secret what he’d found, had never placed that stone at St. Kilda’s—would Claire have learned the truth anyway? Perhaps; perhaps not. But it had been the sight of that spurious grave that had led her to tell her daughter the story of Jamie Fraser, and to set Roger on the path of discovery that had led them all to this place, this time.

  Jamie Fraser stirred at last, though his eyes stayed fixed on the fire.

  “Englishman,” he said softly, and it was a conjuration. The hair rose very slightly on the back of Roger’s neck; he could believe he saw something move in the flames.

  Jamie’s big hands spread, cradling his grandson. His face was remote, the flames catching sparks from hair and brows.

  “Englishman,” he said, speaking to whatever he saw beyond the flames. “I could wish that we shall meet one day. And I could hope that we shall not.”

  Among the bits of business still to be decided, then, is the matter of Claire’s ring. Jamie still has the gold wedding band, flung down during the confrontation with Brianna months ago. Knowing now what he does of Frank, his motives, his thoughts, and his actions, Jamie comes to Claire by the fire, and asks her—will she have it back?

  “And will ye choose, too?” he asked softly. He opened his hand, and I saw the glint of gold. “Do ye want it back?”

  I paused, looking up into his face, searching it for doubt. I saw none there, but something else; a waiting, a deep curiosity as to what I might say.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said softly.

  “And a long time,” he said. “I am a jealous man, but not a vengeful one. I would take you from him, my Sassenach—but I wouldna take him from you.”

  He paused for a moment, the fire glinting softly from the ring in his hand. “It was your life, no?”

  And he asked again, “Do you want it back?”

  I held up my hand in answer and he slid the gold ring on my finger, the metal warm from his body.

  From F. to C. with love. Always.

  “What did you say?” I asked. He had murmured something in Gaelic above me, too low for me to catch.

  “I said, ’Go in peace,’” he answered. “I wasna talking to you, though, Sassenach.”

  And then the final bit of business is accomplished, the final news exchanged:

  Across the fire, something winked red. I glanced across in time to see Roger lift Brianna’s hand to his lips; Jamie’s ruby shone dark on her finger, catching the light of moon and fire.

  “I see she’s chosen, then, ”Jamie said softly.

  Brianna smiled, her eyes on Roger’s face, and leaned to kiss him. Then she stood up, brushing sand from her skirts, and bent to pick up a brand from the campfire. She turned and held it out to him, speaking in a voice loud enough to carry to us where we sat across the fire.

  “Go down,” she said, “and tell them the MacKenzies are here.”

  THE END

  PART TWO

  CHARACTERS

  “It was … a lady novelist who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.”

  —J. Fraser, Voyager

  WHERE CHARACTERS COME FROM: MUSHROOMS, ONIONS, AND HARD NUTS

  HENEVER one talks about writing—writing fiction, at least—the conversation always turns to character, for obvious reasons. All good stories are built on, or by, good characters. Characters are defined in a story on the basis of what they want. What they want, of course, depends a lot on who they are, and so does the manner in which they go about getting it.

  Readers seem as interested in questions of character as do writers, though they ask slightly different questions. “Where do you get your characters?” readers ask. “Do you plan them, or do they pop up ad-lib?”

  Writers ask, “If you do plan a character, and he (or she) just lies there like a corpse on a slab, how do you bring him to life?“ And finally: ”What do you do if your characters won’t stick to your plan, and insist on going off and doing things on their own?”

  FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

  Mushrooms

  The answers to these questions are, of course, as many and various as are the writers who ask them. For myself, I’ve found that a lot of characters do pop up like mushrooms: Geillis Duncan, Master Raymond, Fergus, and Murphy the sea cook, to name a few from my own books.

  I’ll be slogging along, hoping to dig myself into the day’s work, and all of a sudden this … person shows up out of nowhere and walks off with the whole scene. No need to ask questions, analyze, or consciously “create”; I just watch in fascination, to see what he’ll do next.

  I have no idea where these characters come from, but I’m delighted and grateful when one shows up.

  Onions

  Other characters were conceived before I wrote them, and were consciously intended to serve some specific purpose in the story. However, once I began to write them, they obligingly came to life and started acting on their own. Mother Hildegarde in Dragonfly in Amber was one such “built” character—I needed someone who could decode a musical cipher, and I needed a hospital for Claire to work in. Fine, I thought, let’s have the abbess of a convent hospital, and give her a musical avocation, thus saving my having to make up an additional character. The moment I began to write Mother Hildegarde, though, I could see her (“a face of an ugliness so transcendent as to be grotesquely beautiful“), and within a couple of paragraphs, I could hear her talk.

  Likewise, Mr. Willoughby, in Voyager, was a “made” character.

  Simply put, I needed to find a way to get Jamie Fraser across the Atlantic Ocean without killing him. Ergo, I needed a method of curing seasickness that would be reliable and that could plausibly exist in the eighteenth century. Aha, acupuncture! Perfectly plausible, but only if I had a Chinese person to administer it or instruct Claire in its uses. Enter Yi Tien Cho, aka Mr. Willoughby. (“Mr. Willoughby,” by the way, was entirely Jamie’s notion; I have no idea why he thought that a suitable name, but that’s what he insisted on calling him.)

  Now, Mother Hildegarde and Mr. Willoughby are what I call “onions”; characters who develop slowly through the addition of multiple layers of personality, rather than popping up full-fledged as the “mushrooms” do. Mother Hildegarde was an onion, but her dog, Bouton, was a pure mushroom.

  “Is that a dog?” I asked one of the orderlies in amazement, when I first beheld Bouton, passing through L’Hôpital at the heels of his mistress.

  He paused in his floor-sweeping to look after the curly, plumed tail, disappearing into the next ward.

  “Well,” he said doubtfully, “Mother Hildegarde says he’s a dog. I wouldn’t like to be the one to say he isn’t.”

  One may not know everything about an onion all at once, but rather discover him little by little, by writing multiple scenes involving him, or by thinking about him and figuring out bits of his personal history. Claire and Jamie both developed in this way; even though I had a good grasp of their essential characters from the beginning, I gradually found out more about them as I deduced their personal histories and became well acquainted with them.

  (I have writer
friends who do this formally—give characters a history, before they even begin writing scenes involving them. Michael Lee West—who’s one of the best “character” writers around—often draws up extensive genealogical charts for her characters, including generations of people who never appear in the story. She also says that she knows what kind of peanut butter her characters prefer— smooth or crunchy. This would drive me crazy, but as long as it works for Michael Lee …)

  What do you do when your characters don’t adhere to a plan, but go off and do things on their own? Ha! One should be so lucky all the time!

  Hard Nuts

  Beyond mushrooms and onions are the hard nuts (onions, mushrooms, and nuts; this is beginning to sound like an exotic recipe for turkey stuffing. Oh, well; cookery and writing have quite a bit in common, after all). These are the most difficult characters for me to animate; the characters whose function in the story is structural—they’re important not because of personality or action, but because of the role that they play.

  One example of a hard nut is Brianna, Jamie and Claire’s daughter. She existed in the first place only because I had to have a child. The fact of her conception provides the motive for one of the major dramatic scenes in Dragonfly, but it didn’t matter at all at that point who this kid was or what she would be like; the fact that Claire was pregnant was the only important factor.

  Still, once having created this kid— even in utero—there she was. I couldn’t just ignore her. Her existence—rather than her personality—dictated quite a bit about the structure of the third book, and thus, the second as well; I decided to use her as an adult, creating a “framing story” for the main action of the second book. Here again, though, it was her existence as a structural element that was important, rather than the girl herself. That is, I needed a grown daughter to whom Claire would confess the secret of her past, said confession leading to the future events of the third book.