The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [13]
Thrown out into the snow, Claire makes her way frantically in search of help. She has a plan—if only she is in time. Randall has put her out by a small rear door, concealed in a narrow declivity that forms the prison’s garbage dump. Randall doesn’t know about Claire’s companions; if she can find them in time, they can perhaps force the rear door and enter the prison. Unfortunately, Claire meets not her companions, but the dump’s inhabitants—a small pack of degenerate wolves.
Claire manages by luck and desperation to kill one wolf, but is stalked relentlessly through the winter twilight by the others. Suddenly an arrow whizzes out of nowhere—one of the woodsmen of Sir Marcus MacRannoch, whose estate adjoins Wentworth, has been attracted by the wolves’ howling, and is astonished to find Claire, tattered, bloodstained, and in a state of desperate hurry.
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