The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [32]
“One man, a Fraser of the Master of Lovat’s regiment, escaped …” Roger repeated softly. He looked up from the stark page to see her eyes, wide and unseeing as a deer’s fixed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
“He meant to die on Culloden Field,” Roger whispered. “But he didn’t.”
VOYAGER
e was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances. While he placed considerable trust in the understanding and mercy of his Creator, he harbored that residue of elemental guilt that made all men fear the chance of hell. Still, all he had ever heard of hell made him think it unlikely that the torments reserved for its luckless inhabitants could be restricted to a sore nose.
On the other hand, this couldn’t be heaven, on several counts. For one, he didn’t deserve it. For another, it didn’t look it. And for a third, he doubted that the rewards of the blessed included a broken nose, any more than those of the damned…
His hand struck something hard, and the fingers tangled in wet, snarled hair. He sat up abruptly, and with some effort, cracked the layer of dried blood that had sealed his eyelids shut. Memory flooded back, and he groaned aloud. He had been mistaken. This was hell. But James Fraser was unfortunately not dead, after all.
He isn’t dead, and he isn’t in hell. Where Jamie Fraser is is lying wounded on Culloden Moor, the body of his enemy, Jack Randall, on top of him, and the English army all around him, dispatching those Highlanders unlucky enough not to be already dead.
Rescued—temporarily—by friends, he takes refuge with other wounded Jacobite officers in a farmhouse by the moor. Here they wait for two days, hearing the crack of gunshots on the field, smelling the fires built to consume the bodies of the Highland dead—whom they will soon join.
The other Highlanders do indeed go to join their comrades in death, executed by the English. Jamie, though, is saved by chance; the commanding officer who visits the farmhouse is Harold, Lord Melton; elder brother of John William Grey, whose life Jamie had spared a few months earlier, during an encounter on the road to Prestonpans. Unable to disregard what he considers a debt of honor, Melton discharges his unwelcome obligation by removing Jamie secretly, sending him home to Lallybroch. He is badly wounded, and may die on the journey—but that, Melton thinks, is hardly his concern. For the moment, Jamie Fraser is alive.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN the future (1968) …
Claire Randall and her daughter, Brianna, have just learned from Roger Wakefield that, contrary to Claire’s long-held belief, Jamie Fraser survived the battle of Culloden. Claire is staggered by this news— but when Roger asks whether she wants him to find out what happened to Jamie Fraser, she agrees.
A detective hunt through history ensues, with Brianna Randall at first reluctant, but then increasingly absorbed in the story of the man who was her father—and the three-cornered love affair among her parents: Claire and Jamie, her real father— and Frank Randall, the man she has loved as her father all her life.
Given Brianna’s complex feelings about her two fathers, Claire cannot talk to her daughter about her two husbands—or her own complex feelings. She does talk to Roger, who is equally fascinated but lacks Brianna’s emotional involvement. As the hunt for Jamie Fraser goes on, Roger gradually learns more and more about what happened when Claire returned from the past, starving, half-demented with grief at the loss of her lover—and pregnant.
He hears the story of Claire’s struggle back to life, for the sake of Jamie’s child— and then of her struggle to fulfill the other half of her destiny, as a healer. Torn between the roles of mother and doctor, she finds a balance made possible only