The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [79]
“And will ye choose, too?” he asked softly. He opened his hand, and I saw the glint of gold. “Do ye want it back?”
I paused, looking up into his face, searching it for doubt. I saw none there, but something else; a waiting, a deep curiosity as to what I might say.
“It was a long time ago,” I said softly.
“And a long time,” he said. “I am a jealous man, but not a vengeful one. I would take you from him, my Sassenach—but I wouldna take him from you.”
He paused for a moment, the fire glinting softly from the ring in his hand. “It was your life, no?”
And he asked again, “Do you want it back?”
I held up my hand in answer and he slid the gold ring on my finger, the metal warm from his body.
From F. to C. with love. Always.
“What did you say?” I asked. He had murmured something in Gaelic above me, too low for me to catch.
“I said, ’Go in peace,’” he answered. “I wasna talking to you, though, Sassenach.”
And then the final bit of business is accomplished, the final news exchanged:
Across the fire, something winked red. I glanced across in time to see Roger lift Brianna’s hand to his lips; Jamie’s ruby shone dark on her finger, catching the light of moon and fire.
“I see she’s chosen, then, ”Jamie said softly.
Brianna smiled, her eyes on Roger’s face, and leaned to kiss him. Then she stood up, brushing sand from her skirts, and bent to pick up a brand from the campfire. She turned and held it out to him, speaking in a voice loud enough to carry to us where we sat across the fire.
“Go down,” she said, “and tell them the MacKenzies are here.”
THE END
PART TWO
CHARACTERS
“It was … a lady novelist who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.”
—J. Fraser, Voyager
WHERE CHARACTERS COME FROM: MUSHROOMS, ONIONS, AND HARD NUTS
HENEVER one talks about writing—writing fiction, at least—the conversation always turns to character, for obvious reasons. All good stories are built on, or by, good characters. Characters are defined in a story on the basis of what they want. What they want, of course, depends a lot on who they are, and so does the manner in which they go about getting it.
Readers seem as interested in questions of character as do writers, though they ask slightly different questions. “Where do you get your characters?” readers ask. “Do you plan them, or do they pop up ad-lib?”
Writers ask, “If you do plan a character, and he (or she) just lies there like a corpse on a slab, how do you bring him to life?“ And finally: ”What do you do if your characters won’t stick to your plan, and insist on going off and doing things on their own?”
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS
Mushrooms
The answers to these questions are, of course, as many and various as are the writers who ask them. For myself, I’ve found that a lot of characters do pop up like mushrooms: Geillis Duncan, Master Raymond, Fergus, and Murphy the sea cook, to name a few from my own books.
I’ll be slogging along, hoping to dig myself into the day’s work, and all of a sudden this … person shows up out of nowhere and walks off with the whole scene. No need to ask questions, analyze, or consciously “create”; I just watch in fascination, to see what he’ll do next.
I have no idea where these characters come from, but I’m delighted and grateful when one shows up.
Onions
Other characters were conceived before I wrote them, and were consciously intended to serve some specific purpose in the story. However, once I began to write them, they obligingly came to life and started acting on their own. Mother Hildegarde in Dragonfly in Amber was one such “built” character—I needed someone who could decode a musical cipher, and I needed a hospital for Claire to work in. Fine, I thought, let’s have the abbess of a convent hospital, and give her a musical avocation, thus saving my having to make up