The Outlandish Companion Read online

  Reaching Sir Marcus, she implores his help in freeing Jamie from the prison. He is sympathetic, but adamant; there is nothing he can do. Claire offers to pay him, bringing out the string of freshwater pearls that Jamie gave her on their wedding day: pearls that had belonged to his mother, Ellen.

  MacRannoch is shaken by the sight of the pearls; as a young man, he had paid court to Ellen MacKenzie, and when she chose elsewhere had insisted nonetheless that she keep his gift—the freshwater pearls. Still, much as he would wish to help Ellen’s son, he tells Claire, he dares not risk an assault on the prison; the prison’s governor would be sure to take revenge on Eldridge Manor, MacRannoch’s estate.

  Driven to despair, Claire collapses, only dully noticing the entry of another of MacRannoch’s men, who reluctantly reports that he and his companions have managed to find only a small fraction of MacRannoch’s purebred herd of Highland cows—and there is a snowstorm coming on.

  Hearing this, Claire begins cautiously to hope. For one of her companions is Rupert MacKenzie, a man with a great reputation for “cattle-lifting”—and one unlikely to resist the temptation offered by a straying herd. Rising to her feet, she informs MacRannoch that she has a plan that will protect him from suspicion in Jamie’s escape—and if he wants to see his cattle again, he’d better agree to it.

  Finding her companions, Claire tells them her plan, leads them to the door—and then is forced to wait, as they drive head after head of shaggy Highland cattle down the alley and into the prison’s dungeons.

  Castle Leoch.

  Meanwhile, Sir Marcus MacRannoch, to whom the cattle belong, has stormed into the Governor’s office, claiming that the garrison soldiers have stolen his herd and insisting that he be allowed to search for them. Under cover of the bellowing confusion in the dungeon, his men have orders to find and rescue Jamie, spiriting him out through the rear door.

  As Sir Marcus reports to Claire, a man emerged from the dungeon cell to investigate the racket and was trampled to death beneath the cattle’s hooves, “nay more than a rag-doll, rolled in blood. “Jack Randall is dead, then, and Jamie rescued—but hours have passed; hours spent in an airless dungeon with a monster.

  Claire can heal Jamie’s external wounds, but how can she deal with the damage to his soul? She and Murtagh manage to get Jamie safely across the Channel to France, where one of Jamie’s uncles is the abbot of the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré.

  Taking refuge in the abbey, Claire faces her last and most important fight. With nothing but her healing skills and her own courage, she risks both her life and Jamie’s, using opium to resurrect and exorcise the ghost of Jack Randall, that Jamie might reclaim his manhood through the same violence by which it was taken from him.

  At the last, they both find healing in the grotto of a hot spring, in a cave far under the abbey.

  We struggled upward, out of the womb of the world, damp and steaming, rubber-limbed with wine and heat. I fell to my knees at the first landing, and Jamie, trying to help me, fell down next to me in an untidy heap of robes and bare legs. Giggling helplessly, drunk more with love than with wine, we made our way side by side, on hands and knees up the second flight of steps, hindering each other more than helping, jostling and caroming softly off each other in the narrow space, until we collapsed at last in each other’s arms on the second landing.

  Here an ancient oriel window opened glassless to the sky, and the light of the hunter’s moon washed us in silver. We lay clasped together, damp skins cooling in the winter air, waiting for our racing hearts to slow and breath to return to our heaving bodies.

  The moon above was a Christmas moon, so large as almost to fill the empty window. It seemed no wonder that the tides of sea and woman should be subject to the pull of that stately orb, so close and so commanding.

  But my own tides moved no longer to that chaste and sterile summons, and the knowledge of my freedom raced like danger through my blood.

  “I have a gift for you, too,” I said suddenly to Jamie. He turned toward me and his hand slid, large and sure, over the plane of my still-flat stomach.

  “Have you, now?” he said.

  And the world was all around us, new with possibility.

  THE END

  1See note following “Titles” “Outlander vs. Cross Stitch.”

  DRAGONFLY IN AMBER

  T is the spring of 1968 in Inverness, Scotland, and Roger Wakefield is going slowly mad. Faced with the task of clearing up the tons of historical debris left by his late adoptive father, the Reverend Wakefield, Roger thinks longingly of jumping into his car and heading back to Oxford, leaving the manse and its bulging contents to the mercies of rats, mildew, and the ladies of the Church Guild. When the doorbell rings, Roger is ready to invite in the devil himself—anyone and anything that offers distraction from his current situation.

  “Distraction” is putting it mildly. The visitors are Dr. Claire Randall, widow of an old friend of the Reverend’s—and her very striking daughter, Brianna. Reeling from the impact of a six-foot-tall redhead at close range, Roger pays only minor attention to Claire’s request: She has a list of names, Jacobite soldiers who fought at Culloden; can Roger find out for her how many survived?

  Motivated as much by a desire to impress Brianna as by historical curiosity and the inclination to oblige a family friend, Roger agrees to help. Besides, it will get him out of the house and away from the sagging bookshelves, the crammed-to-bursting desk, and the impenetrable murk of the Reverend’s garage, filled from floor to ceiling with boxes of cryptic papers.

  As Roger embarks on Claire Randall’s project, though, small things begin to bother him. Why does Claire not want him to take Brianna near the standing stone circle at Craigh na Dun? Why does she blanch at the name of the leader of her troop of Jacobites—and ask Roger not to mention the name James Fraser to her daughter?

  Suspicion is succeeded by shock late one night when Roger finds a roll of newspaper clippings in the Reverend’s desk; pictures of Claire Randall, taken twenty years before, over a headline: KIDNAPPED BY THE FAIRIES? Twenty-three years before, Claire Randall had disappeared in the Scottish Highlands, leaving no trace. Three years later, she had been found, malnourished, ragged, and half-crazed, wandering near the standing stones at Craigh na Dun.

  A picture shows Frank Randall, her husband, rushing to her bedside. A hell of a shock, Roger thinks, to find your wife after having given her up for dead.

  A greater shock awaited Frank, though— and now awaits Roger. Noticing the date of the clippings, Roger recalls Brianna’s birthday, mentioned in casual conversation. Counting rapidly backward, the blood drains from his face as he realizes that Claire Randall had returned from her disappearance bruised, disoriented, starving—and pregnant.

  What to do? Plainly Brianna regards Frank Randall as her father; she doesn’t know the truth, and Roger cannot bring himself to tell her. The mystery surrounding Claire Randall deepens; perhaps, Roger surmises, Brianna’s real father was a Highland Scot. James Fraser is a common enough name in the Highlands—if the unknown man was called that, it would be enough to account for Claire’s extraordinary reaction to hearing the name. Has Claire brought her daughter to Scotland in order to reveal the truth of her parentage? Perhaps even to meet the mysterious James Fraser?

  Increasingly fond of both women, Roger is uncertain what to do in order to prevent either of them being hurt. There seems nothing he can do, save stick close to them, and be ready to help, whatever happens.

  Meanwhile, his quest is bearing unexpected fruit. He has found her Jacobites, he tells Claire; the odd thing is that none of them appears to have been killed at Culloden—extraordinary, in view of the great slaughter that took place there. Nearly one man in two on the field was killed; it’s remarkable that none of the thirty men on Claire’s list was among them.

  Claire’s response to this news is as puzzling as her other reactions; she turns pale and nearly collapses with relief. What difference can the fate of men dead tw
o hundred years make to her? Roger wonders.

  The mystery deepens when Brianna helps Roger disinter some of the Reverend’s journals from the garage—journals that refer obliquely to Claire’s reappearance, to some dreadful secret that she seemed to be hiding—and to a mysterious request made by Frank Randall. The Reverend writes that he has done as Frank wished with regard to the gravestone—but of James Fraser, there is no record. Who is this mysterious James Fraser—and what has he to do with Claire?

  In an effort at distraction, Roger has taken Brianna to view the battleground at Culloden, with its mute and moving testament to the slaughter of the Highland clans; Claire, pleading a spurious illness, stays home. She agrees, however, to go along on another jaunt, to an old and long-deserted church some distance out of town.

  Claire plans to enjoy the Highland scenery, collect a few plants, and keep an eye on the budding relationship between Roger and her daughter. Brianna and Roger have other plans; looking through the Reverend’s papers, Roger has found a mention of a Captain Jonathan Randall, an ancestor of Brianna’s father—or supposed father—Frank. Thinking to surprise Claire, they lead her to Randall’s grave— and are not only surprised, but shocked, at Claire’s reaction, which is one of sudden and irrational fury.

  St. Kilda’s Cemetery.

  Leaving Claire to collect herself, the two baffled young people go into the deserted church, only to be yanked outside almost at once by the sound of a scream. They find Claire, incoherent and shaking, standing over a grave in the shadow of the yews. The stone on the grave is a “marriage stone”; a quarter-circle of granite, meant to be paired with another, forming a semicircle to mark the resting place of husband and wife.

  Only the husband lies here, though; the other half of the stone is missing.

  “What is it?” Roger said urgently, trying to rouse her from the staring trance she had fallen into. “What is it? Is it a name you know?” Even as he spoke, his own words were ringing in his ears. No one’s been buried here since the eighteenth century, he’d told Brianna.

  No one’s been buried here in two hundred years.

  Claire’s fingers brushed his own away and touched the stone, caressing, as though touching flesh, gently tracing the letters, the grooves worn shallow, but still clear.

  “JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER, “she read aloud. ”Yes, I know him. “Her hand dropped lower, brushing back the grass that grew thickly about the stone, obscuring the line of smaller letters at its base.

  “Beloved husband of Claire, ”she read.

  “Yes, I knew him,” she said again, so softly Roger could scarcely hear her. “I’m Claire. He was my husband.” She looked up then, into the face of her daughter, white and shocked above her. “And your father,” she said.

  In the wake of Claire’s revelation, the three return to the manse, where Claire reveals the bare bones of her secret: that twenty-three years before, she had stepped through the stones of Craigh na Dun— and disappeared into the past. Struggling to survive in the barbarous Scotland of 1743, she had found her chief enemy to be Jack Randall; her husband Frank’s distant ancestor, and a man unsettlingly like his descendant in appearance, if not in character—“Black Jack” being a predator of marked and unusual tastes.

  In order to stay out of Randall’s hands, she had been obliged to marry a young clansman—Jamie Fraser—only to find her difficulties deepening as she fell in love with him. Brianna is less than sympathetic to this account, caught between feelings of disbelief and betrayal.

  In the course of events, Claire tells the young people, Jamie discovered the truth about her and insisted that she must return to her own time—and to Frank. However, brought at last to the stone circle she had struggled so long to reach, she found she could not take the final step through the cleft stones—but made the choice to remain in the past, with Jamie.

  They had returned to Jamie’s home, Lallybroch, but their idyll there was brief; Jamie was arrested by the Watch, and fell into the hands of Jack Randall. Claire had succeeded in rescuing him from Wentworth Prison, though not in time to prevent his being tortured and brutalized by Jack Randall. Seeking safety, the Frasers had sailed for France, taking refuge in the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, where one of Jamie’s uncles was abbot. Here Claire undertook her greatest challenge—healing Jamie’s wounds of mind and body—and in the process became pregnant.

  Brianna refuses utterly to countenance any of this, insisting that her mother must be suffering from shock or delusion. Roger, seeing no choice, gives her the newspaper clippings; if they don’t verify her mother’s claims that James Fraser was Brianna’s father, they do at least prove that Frank Randall wasn’t.

  If Brianna is shocked and horrified by her mother’s story, Roger is enthralled. While sympathetic to both women, it is the historian in him that is uppermost at the moment.

  “Then those men whose names you gave me, the ones who fought at Culloden—you knew them?”

  I relaxed, ever so slightly. “Yes, I knew them.” There was a grumble of thunder to the east, and the rain broke in a spatter against the long windows that lined the study from floor to ceiling on one side. Brianna’s head was bent over the clippings, the wings of her hair hiding everything but the tip of her nose, which was bright red. Jamie always went red when he was furious or upset. I was all too familiar with the sight of a Fraser on the verge of explosion.

  “And you were in France,” Roger murmured as though to himself, still studying me closely. The shock in his face was fading into surmise, and a kind of excitement. “I don’t suppose you knew …”

  “Yes, I did,” I told him. “That’s why we went to Paris. I’d told Jamie about Culloden—the ’45, and what would happen. We went to Paris to stop Charles Stuart.”

  Abbot Alexander of Ste. Anne de Beaupré is Jamie’s uncle—and a Jacobite supporter, strongly in favor of restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne of Scotland. He urges his nephew—newly recovered from his ordeal in Wentworth—to go to Paris, where the young Prince Charles Edward Casimir Maria Sylvester Stuart has just arrived. Jamie’s mission—should he choose to accept it—is to lend his prince aid and succor, and assist him in forming the political and business connections that will help him to regain his throne.

  This assignment suits the young Frasers very well; Jamie is outlawed, under sentence of death, and they cannot return to Scotland. At the same time, Claire knows the shape of the future there: that Charles Stuart will lead a rebellion that will end in slaughter at Culloden and leave the Highland clans in smoking ruins.

  They must find a way to stop the deadly march of events toward Culloden—how better to subvert an attempt at a Stuart restoration than by befriending the Bonnie Prince? Jamie has a relation, Jared Fraser, now a wealthy and respected wine merchant with warehouses and ships in Le Havre, and a residence in Paris. Jared also has Jacobite sympathies, and is more than willing to employ his younger cousin, thus giving him entree into the circles where he might be of most use—or obstruction—to Charles Stuart.

  While Jared and Jamie toast the successful conclusion of their business arrangement onboard one of Jared’s ships in the harbor at Le Havre, Claire is on deck, watching as another ship is unloaded. Seeing a man carried off, obviously ill, she hurries down to lend assistance, and is in time both to diagnose a case of smallpox—and to see the man die in front of her.

  Unfortunately, the harbormaster has arrived in time to hear her diagnosis, and in accordance with French maritime law declares that the ship from which the sailor came must be towed out into the harbor and burned, in order to prevent contagion being spread through the port.

  Still more unfortunately, the Comte St. Germain, the owner of the ship in question, is present—and strongly inclined to blame Claire for the loss of his ship and cargo. Jamie arrives in time to prevent harm, but the Comte St. Germain, Claire is given to understand, is not a good enemy to have. Shadowed by the flames of the burning ship, the Frasers leave Le Havre, bound for Paris
and what seem the lesser perils of Royal politics.

  With Jared gone to Germany on business, Jamie takes over the French affairs of the House of Fraser, and takes his place in the circle of Jacobites that surround Charles Stuart. Near in age to the Prince, he quickly becomes Stuart’s boon companion and confidante, unwillingly privy to the Prince’s affairs—including an affair of the heart with the married Princesse Louise de Rohan.

  Blissfully married himself, and looking forward to the birth of his first child, Jamie views the carryings-on of Charles Stuart with a jaundiced eye. Still, duty calls, and many a night sees him coming home to Claire’s bed with the scent of wine and strange women clinging to his skin.

  “Who looks on a woman with lust in his heart hath committed adultery with her already. Is that how ye see it?”

  “Is it how you see it?”

  “No,” he said shortly. “I don’t. And what would ye do if I had lain wi’ a whore, Sassenach? Slap my face? Order me out of your chamber? Keep yourself from my bed?”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “I’d kill you,” I said through my teeth.

  Both eyebrows shot up, and his mouth dropped slightly with incredulity.

  “Kill me? God, if I found you wi’ another man, I’d kill him.” He paused, and one corner of his mouth quirked wryly.

  “Mind ye,” he said, “I’d no be verra pleased wi’ you either, but still, it’s him I’d kill.”

  “Typical man,” I said. “Always missing the point.”

  He snorted with a bitter humor.

  “Am I, then? So you dinna believe me. Want me to prove it to ye, Sassenach, that I’ve lain wi’ no one in the last few hours?” He stood up, water cascading down the stretches of his long legs. The light from the window highlighted the reddish-gold hairs of his body and the steam rose off his flesh in wisps. He looked like a figure of freshly molten gold. I glanced briefly down.