The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [198]
Claire’s ring, therefore, is wide (like my own wedding band), made of silver (because gold jewelry wasn’t common in the Scottish Highlands, but silver was), and made with an interlace pattern (which is ancient, thus historically appropriate, and thoroughly Scottish) interspersed with thistle blooms (flowers, like my ring, but thistles for Scottishness).
Now, there are certain elements described in the Outlander books that I would not under any circumstances allow to be illustrated—the characters, for instance. (As I say to the occasional person who complains that they want a picture because they can’t visualize Claire or Jamie—thumb through magazines until you find a nice-looking face and use that; it’s certainly as good as any illustration would be. I know what they look like, and so does any reader who has not destroyed his or her visual cortex with an overdose of television.)
At the same time, there’s at least a sporting chance of coming up with a reasonable approximation of some of the inanimate objects about which people are curious—and with the aid of a pair of talented illustrators2 who were willing to take my rough suggestions and give me approximations to fiddle with, we’ve produced illustrations of some of the principal items of jewelry described in the books: Claire’s wedding ring, Ellen’s pearls, the boar’s-tusk bracelets, and the running-stag brooch worn by the ghost in Iverness.
Oh, my other two rings? Well, they’re identical, save for the metal; one’s silver, one gold (silver on the right, gold on the left). They’re reproductions of fifteenth-century French poesy rings, and were given to me by my husband—one for a birthday gift, the other for an anniversary. Each of them bears the legend “Vous, et nul autre. “3
Broch Tuarach means “the north-facing tower.” From the side of the mountain above, the broch that gave the small estate its name was no more than another mound of rocks, much like those that lay at the foot of the hills we had been traveling through.
We came down through a narrow, rocky gap between two crags, leading the horse between boulders. Then the going was easier, the land sloping more gently down through the fields and scattered cottages, until at last we struck a small winding road that led to the house.
It was larger than I had expected; a handsome three-story manor of harled white stone, windows outlined in the natural grey stone, a high slate roof with multiple chimneys, and several smaller whitewashed buildings clustered about it, like chicks about a hen. The old stone broch, situated on a small rise to the rear of the house, rose sixty feet above the ground, cone-topped like a witch’s hat, girdled with three rows of tiny arrow-slits.
—Outlander, chapter 26, “The Lairds Return”
“Scotland,” I sighed, thinking of the cool brown streams and dark pines of Lallybroch, Jamie’s estate. “Can we really go home?”
—Dragonfly in Amber, chapter 29, “To Grasp the Nettle”
From this distance, the house seemed completely unchanged. Built of white harled stone, its three stories gleamed immaculately amid its cluster of shabby outbuildings and the spread of stone-dyked brown fields. On the small rise behind the house stood the remains of the ancient broch, the circular stone tower that gave the place its name.
On closer inspection, I could see that the outbuildings had changed a bit; Jamie had told me that the English soldiery had burned the dovecote and the chapel the year after Culloden, and I could see the gaps where they had been. A space where the wall of the kailyard had been broken through had been repaired with stone of a different color, and a new shed built of stone and scrap lumber was evidently serving as a dovecote, judging from the row of plump feathered bodies lined up on the rooftree, enjoying the late autumn sun.
The rose brier planted by Jamie’s mother, Ellen, had grown up into a great, sprawling tangle latticed to the wall of the house, only now losing the last of its leaves.
—Voyager, chapter 32, “The Prodigal’s Return