Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [1]
Barbara Schnell, for German translations, error-checking, and sympathetic reading.
Dr. Ellen Mandell, for medical opinions, close reading, and useful suggestions for dealing with inguinal hernias, abortion, and other forms of harrowing bodily trauma.
Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green, for details of Mohawk life and customs, and notes on Scots linguistics and German grammar.
Mac Beckett, for his notion of new and ancient spirits.
Jack Whyte, for his memoirs of life as a Scottish folksinger, including the proper response to kilt jokes.
Susan Davis, for friendship, boundless enthusiasm, dozens of books, descriptions of pulling ticks off her kids—and the strawberries.
Walt Hawn and Gordon Fenwick, for telling me how long is a furlong. John Ravenscroft and miscellaneous members of the UKForum, for a riveting discussion of the RAF’s underpants, circa WWII. Eve Ackerman and helpful members of the CompuServe SFLIT Forum, for the publication dates of Conan the Barbarian.
Barbara Raisbeck and Mary M. Robbins, for their helpful references on herbs and early pharmacology.
My anonymous library friend, for the reams of useful references.
Arnold Wagner and Steven Lopata, for discussions of high and low explosives and general advice on how to blow things up.
Margaret Campbell and other online residents of North Carolina, for miscellaneous descriptions of their fair state.
John L. Myers, both for telling me about his ghosts, and for generously allowing me to incorporate certain elements of his physique and persona into the formidable John Quincy Myers, Mountain Man. The hernia is fictitious.
As always, thanks also to the many members of the CompuServe Literary Forum and Writers Forum whose names have escaped my memory, for their helpful suggestions and convivial conversation, and to the AOL folder-folk for their stimulating discussions.
A special thanks to Rosana Madrid Gatti, for her labor of love in constructing and maintaining the award-winning Official Diana Gabaldon Web Page (http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~gatti/gabaldon/gabaldon.html).
And thanks to Lori Musser, Dawn Van Winkle, Kaera Hallahan, Virginia Clough, Elaine Faxon, Ellen Stanton, Elaine Smith, Cathy Kravitz, Hanneke (whose last name remains unfortunately illegible), Judith MacDonald, Susan Hunt and her sister Holly, the Boise gang, and many others, for their thoughtful gifts of wine, drawings, rosaries, chocolate, Celtic music, soap, statuary, pressed heather from Culloden, handkerchiefs with echidnas, Maori pens, English teas, garden trowels, and other miscellanea meant to boost my spirits and keep me writing far past the point of exhaustion. It worked.
And lastly to my mother, who touches me in passing.
Diana Gabaldon
dgabaldon@aol.com
76530,523@compuserve.com
[Section Leader, Research and the Craft of Writing, CompuServe Writers Forum]
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One - O Brave New World
Chapter 1 - A Hanging in Eden
Chapter 2 - In Which We Meet a Ghost
Part Two - Past Imperfect
Chapter 3 - The Minister’s Cat
Chapter 4 - A Blast from the Past
Chapter 5 - Two Hundred Years from Yesterday
Part Three - Pirates
Chapter 6 - I Encounter a Hernia
Chapter 7 - Great Prospects Fraught with Peril
Chapter 8 - Man of Worth
Chapter 9 - Two-Thirds of a Ghost
Part Four - River Run
Chapter 10 - Jocasta
Chapter 11 - The Law of Bloodshed
Chapter 12 - The Return of John Quincy Myers
Chapter 13 - An Examination of Conscience
Part Five - Strawberry Fields Forever
Chapter 14 - Flee from Wrath to Come
Chapter 15 - Noble Savages
Chapter 16 - The First Law of Thermodynamics
Part Six - Je T’Aime
Chapter 17 - Home For the Holidays
Chapter 18 - Unseemly Lust
Part Seven - On the Mountain
Chapter 19 - Hearth Blessing
Chapter 20 - The White Raven
Chapter 21 - Night on a Snowy Mountain
Chapter 22 - Spark of an Ancient Flame
Chapter 23 - The Skull Beneath the Skin
Chapter 24 - Letter-Writing: