The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [14]
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