The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [53]
We had been blown at least six hundred miles by the storm.
“America,” I said softly. “The New World.” The pulse beneath my fingers had quickened, echoing my own. A new world. Refuge. Freedom.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Olivier, plainly having no idea what the news meant to us, but still smiling kindly from one to the other. “It is America.”
Jamie straightened his shoulders and smiled back at her. The clean bright air stirred his hair like kindling flames.
“In that case, ma’am,” he said, “my name is Jamie Fraser.” He looked then at me, eyes blue and brilliant as the sky behind him, and his heart beat strong in the palm of my hand.
“And this is Claire,” he said. “My wife.”
THE END
DRUMS OF AUTUMN
heard the drums long before they came in sight. The beating echoed in the pit of my stomach, as though I too were hollow. I saw heads turn as the people fell silent, looking up the stretch of East Bay Street, where it ran from the half-built skeleton of the new Customs House toward White Point Gardens.
The drums are attending a procession to the gallows. Among the spectators are Claire and Jamie Fraser, there not from morbid curiosity, but as moral support for one of the condemned—Gavin Hayes, who was once a fellow prisoner with Jamie in Ardsmuir Prison, in Scotland. Transported as a felon and later released from indenture, Gavin has fallen afoul of the English Crown for the last time.
The attention of the onlookers is drawn from the noose and its dangling burden by something more exciting; another of the condemned prisoners has seized the distraction of Gavin’s death to make a run for his life, dodging away among the palmettos and the crowds on the thronged seafront.
With all of Charleston roused in the hunt for the escaped man, circumstances seem too dangerous for the Frasers to linger. Jamie’s association with a condemned man is known, and he wants to invite no official curiosity—not with what the Frasers carry. Shipwrecked in Georgia two months before, they arrived in the New World with nothing save the remnants of their clothing—and a fortune in gemstones, salvaged from the cave of Abandawe on Hispaniola.
While the Frasers are technically wealthy, the gems “might be beach pebbles, for all the good they were to us,” as Claire notes. Trade in the Colonies is conducted mostly by means of barter; there are few merchants or bankers in the South with the available capital to turn the Frasers’ fortune into money. With no more than a few shillings in ready cash, they must decide whether to stay in Charleston to look for a buyer, or head north immediately, toward the Cape Fear region of North Carolina, where there are many Highland immigrants—and where Jamie has kinfolk.”
Deciding that the path of wisdom lies north, the Frasers and their companions— Jamie’s nephew Ian, his French foster son, Fergus, and his friend Duncan Innes— pause only long enough to bury Gavin Hayes. Coming out of the churchyard at night, though, they are startled to find a stowaway in their wagon: the Irish prisoner who fled the gallows earlier in the day.
Introducing himself as Stephen Bonnet, the man begs their mercy and their help to escape the city. The roads out will be patrolled, he says; will Jamie help him, for the sake of Gavin Hayes, who was his friend as well?
Jamie is skeptical; Bonnet is personable, but as Jamie later tells Claire privately, “The Crown doesna always hang the wrong man; most of those at the end of a rope deserve to be there.” Duncan is moved by drink and sentiment, though, and urges Jamie to help the Irishman, for Gavin’s sake. With some reluctance, Jamie agrees, and they smuggle Bonnet out of the city, parting from him in the dark near a distant creek, where he plans to meet with unknown associates.
Seeking solitude, Jamie and Claire find respite from the day’s adventures on the banks of the creek, and amid speculations about their uncertain future in this strange new land, find a temporary comfort in each other’s arms.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN the future…
A phone