The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [16]
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