The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  She has no time to ask questions, though; she has a job to do.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, Roger helped his wife into a small rowboat, tied to the quay near the row of warehouses. The tide had been coming in all day; the water was more than five feet deep. Out in the midst of the shining gray stood the cluster of mooring posts—and the small dark head of the pirate.

  Brianna was remote as a pagan statue, her face expressionless. She lifted her skirts to step into the boat, and sat down, the weight in her pocket clunking against the wooden slat as she did so.

  Roger took up the oars and rowed, heading toward the posts. They would arouse no particular interest; boats had been going out ever since noon, carrying sightseers who wished to look upon the condemned man’s face, shout taunts, or clip a strand of his hair for a souvenir.

  He couldn’t see where he was going; Brianna directed him left or right with a silent tilt of her head. She could see; she sat straight and tall, her right hand hidden in her skirt.

  Then she lifted her left hand suddenly, and Roger lay on the oars, digging with one to slew the tiny craft around.

  Bonnet’s lips were cracked, his face chapped and crusted with salt, his lids so reddened that he could barely open his eyes. But his head lifted as they drew near, and Roger saw a man ravished, helpless and dreading a coming embrace—so much that he half welcomes its seductive touch, yielding his flesh to cold fingers and the overwhelming kiss that steals his breath.

  “Ye’ve left it late enough, darlin’,” he said to Brianna, and the cracked lips parted in a grin that split them and left blood on his teeth. “I knew ye’d come, though.”

  Roger paddled with one oar, working the boat close, then closer. He was looking over his shoulder when Brianna drew the gilt-handled pistol from her pocket, and put the barrel to Stephen Bonnet’s ear.

  “Go with God, Stephen,” she said clearly, in Gaelic, and pulled the trigger. Then she dropped the gun into the water and turned round to face her husband.

  “Take us home,” she said.

  Later, Brianna confronts Lord John and insists on knowing all about the young man; Lord John tells her the truth—or as much of it as he can. At the same time, he is horrified by her desire to tell her brother, William, the truth; a good many people have gone to a great deal of trouble over the last eighteen years to ensure that no one learns that the Ninth Earl of Ellesmere is actually the bastard of a Scottish Jacobite traitor, and Lord John is not disposed to let a young woman’s whim destroy his son’s life.

  Jamie weighs in solidly on Lord John’s side of the disagreement, and Brianna reluctantly agrees—but has a price. And so one afternoon the two estranged friends find themselves side by side in an upstairs room, watching the quay outside as brother and sister meet, for the first and last time.

  And at last the fateful day comes, and the family makes its way to the stone circle on Ocracoke. Jamie holds his grandson’s hand tightly, as his parents make their preparations.

  Roger reached out a hand and rested it gently on Jemmy’s head. “Know this, mo mac—I shall love ye all my life, and never forget ye. But this is a terrible thing we’re doing, and ye need not come with me. Ye can stay with your grandda and grannie Claire; it will be all right.”

  “Won’t I—won’t I see Mama again?” Jemmy’s eyes were huge, and he couldn’t keep from looking at the stone.

  “I don’t know,” Roger said, and I could see the tears he was fighting himself, and hear them in his thickened voice. He didn’t know whether he would ever see Brianna again himself, or baby Mandy. “Probably…probably not.”

  Jamie looked down at Jem, who was clinging to his hand, looking back and forth between father and grandfather, confusion, fright, and longing in his face.

  “If one day, a bhalaich,” Jamie said conversationally, “ye should meet a verra large mouse named Michael—ye’ll tell him your grandsire sends his regards.” He opened his hand, then, letting go, and nodded toward Roger.

  Jem stood staring for a moment, then dug in his feet and sprinted toward Roger, sand spurting from under his shoes. He leaped into his father’s arms, clutching him around the neck, and with a final glance backward, Roger turned and stepped behind the stone, and the inside of my head exploded in fire.

  Mourning, the Frasers return to the Ridge once more. Claire goes one day to lay flowers on Malva’s grave and finds Malva’s brother, Allan, there, bent in sorrow. He tells Claire that he and his half sister had been lovers ever since she was a very young girl—and that the child she was carrying was his. He had told her to accuse Jamie of fathering the child, in hopes that Jamie would settle a large amount of money on her to keep quiet—then he and Malva could have gone away somewhere to live as man and wife. But Malva is gone, and he wishes to die, as well; he can’t live. Malva had qualms, though, and had decided to tell the truth; Allan had no choice but to kill her.

  Claire tries to dissuade him, but Ian, overhearing this confession from the wood, shoots Allan through the heart with an arrow.

  “He’s right, Auntie,” Ian said quietly. “He can’t.”

  Life is slowly returning to an approximation of normal when the Big House is invaded by a gang of men, led by Donner. They demand the gemstones that they are convinced Jamie has cached and ransack the house in search of wealth, breaking things with vicious abandon—including the carboy of ether in Claire’s surgery; she can smell the fumes from the kitchen, where she and Jamie are being held hostage with Ian and Mrs. Bug.

  The arrival of Scotchee Cameron with several Cherokee provides a distraction, and Jamie stabs Donner. A fight with the thugs ensues, but the bandits are quickly overpowered.

  The kitchen was nearly dark now, the figures swaying like fronds of kelp in some underwater forest.

  I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, Ian was saying, “Wait, I’ll light a candle.” He had one of Brianna’s matches in his hand, the tin in the other.

  “IAN!” I shrieked, and then he struck the match.

  There was a soft whoof! noise, then a louder whoomp! as the ether in the surgery ignited, and suddenly we were standing in a pool of fire. For a fraction of a second, I felt nothing, and then a burst of searing heat. Jamie seized my arm and hurled me toward the door; I staggered out, fell into the blackberry bushes, and rolled through them, thrashing and flailing at my smoking skirts.

  Panicked and still uncoordinated from the ether, I struggled with the strings of my apron, finally managing to rip loose the strings and wriggle out of my skirt. My linen petticoats were singed, but not charred. I crouched panting in the dead weeds of the dooryard, unable to do anything for the moment but breathe. The smell of smoke was strong and pungent.

  Mrs. Bug was on the back porch on her knees, jerking off her cap, which was on fire.

  Men erupted through the back door, beating at their clothes and hair. Rollo was in the yard, barking hysterically, and on the other side of the house, I could hear the screams of frightened horses. Someone had got Arch Bug out—he was stretched at full length in the dead grass, most of his hair and eyebrows gone, but evidently still alive.

  My legs were red and blistered, but I wasn’t badly burned—thank God for layers of linen and cotton, which burn slowly, I thought groggily. Had I been wearing something modern like rayon, I should have gone up like a torch.

  The thought made me look back toward the house. It was full dark by now, and all the windows on the lower floor were alight. Flame danced in the open door. The place looked like an immense jack-o’-lantern.

  So the house does burn—but the resident Frasers are not dead. And in the aftermath of the disaster, Jamie discovers one of the missing ingots from the King of France’s gold—in the possession of Arch Bug.

  “I give ye the chance of explanation, man, not the choice.” He’d dropped the pleasant tone. Jamie was smudged with soot, and scorched round the edges, but his eyebrows were intact and being put to good use. He turned to me, gesturing to the gold.


  “Ye’ve seen it before, aye?”

  “Of course.” The last time I’d seen it, it had been gleaming in the lantern light, packed solid with its fellows in the bottom of a coffin in Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, but the shape of the ingots and the fleur-de-lis stamp were unmistakable. “Unless Louis of France has been sending someone else vast quantities of gold, it’s part of Jocasta’s hoard.”

  “That it is not, and never was,” Arch corrected me firmly.

  “Aye?” Jamie cocked a thick brow at him. “To whom does it belong, then, if not to Jocasta Cameron? D’ye claim it as your own?”

  “I do not.” He hesitated, but the urge to speak was powerful. “It is the property of the King,” he said, and his old mouth closed tight on the last word.

  “What, the King of—oh,” I said, realizing at long last. “That king.”

  “Le roi, c’est mort,” Jamie said softly, as though to himself, but Arch turned fiercely to him.

  “Is Scotland dead?”

  Jamie drew breath, but didn’t speak at once. Instead, he gestured me to a seat on the stack of chopped cordwood, and nodded at Arch to take another, before sitting down beside me.

  “Scotland will die when her last son does, a charaid,” he said, and waved a hand toward the door, taking in the mountains and hollows around us—and all the people therein. “How many are here? How many will be? Scotland lives—but not in Italy.” In Rome, he meant, where Charles Stuart eked out what remained to him of a life, drowning his disappointed dreams of a crown in drink.

  Arch narrowed his eyes at this, but kept a stubborn silence.

  “Ye were the third man, were ye not?” Jamie asked, disregarding this. “When the gold was brought ashore from France. Dougal MacKenzie took one-third, and Hector Cameron another. I couldna say what Dougal did with his—gave it to Charles Stuart, most likely, and may God have mercy on his soul for that. You were tacksman to Malcolm Grant; he sent ye, did he not? You took one-third of the gold on his behalf. Did ye give it to him?”

  Arch nodded, slowly.

  “It was given in trust,” he said, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat and spat, the mucus tinged with black. “To me, and then to the Grant—who should have given it in turn to the King’s son.”

  ***

  “You are free of your oath to me,” Jamie said formally in Gaelic. “Take your life from my hand.” And inclining his head toward the ingot, said, “Take that—and go.”

  Arch regarded him for a moment, unblinking. Then stooped, picked up the ingot, and went.

  Jamie and Claire stand in the falling snow, looking at the burnt embers of their house.

  “Ye can at least promise me the victory,” he said, but his voice held the whisper of a question.

  “Yes,” I said, and touched his face. I sounded choked, and my vision blurred. “Yes, I can promise that. This time.” No mention made of what that promise spared, of the things I could not guarantee. Not life, not safety. Not home, nor family; not law nor legacy. Just the one thing—or maybe two.

  “The victory,” I said. “And that I will be with you ’til the end.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Snowflakes pelted down, melting as they struck his face, sticking for an instant, white on his lashes. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “That is enough,” he said softly. “I ask no more.”

  He reached forward then and took me in his arms, held me close for a moment, the breath of snow and ashes cold around us. Then he kissed me, released me, and I took a deep breath of cold air, harsh with the scent of burning. I brushed a floating smut off my arm.

  “Well…good. Bloody good. Er…” I hesitated. “What do you suggest we do next?”

  He stood looking at the charred ruin, eyes narrowed, then lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “we shall go—” He stopped suddenly, frowning. “What in God’s name…?”

  Something was moving at the side of the house. I blinked away the snowflakes, standing on tiptoe to see better.

  “Oh, it can’t be!” I said—but it was. With a tremendous upheaval of snow, dirt, and charred wood, the white sow thrust her way into daylight. Fully emerged, she shook her massive shoulders, then, pink snout twitching irritably, moved purposefully off toward the wood. A moment later, a smaller version likewise emerged—and another, and another…and eight half-grown piglets, some white, some spotted, and one as black as the timbers of the house, trotted off in a line, following their mother.

  “Scotland lives,” I said again, giggling uncontrollably. “Er—where did you say we were going?”

  “To Scotland,” he said, as though this were obvious. “To fetch my printing press.”

  He was still looking at the house, but his eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the ashes, far beyond the present moment. An owl hooted deep in the distant wood, startled from its sleep. He stood silent for a bit, then shook off his reverie, and smiled at me, snow melting in his hair.

  “And then,” he said simply, “we shall come back to fight.”

  He took my hand and turned away from the house, toward the barn where the horses stood waiting, patient in the cold.

  EPILOGUE: THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

  “What’s this, then?” Amos Crupp squinted at the page laid out in the bed of the press, reading it backward with the ease of long experience.

  “It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire…Where’d that come from?”

  “Note from a subscriber,” said Sampson, his new printer’s devil, shrugging as he inked the plate. “Good for a bit of filler, there, I thought; General Washington’s address to the troops run short of the page.”

  “Hmph. I s’pose. Very old news, though,” Crupp said, glancing at the date. “January?”

  “Well, no,” the devil admitted, heaving down on the lever that lowered the page onto the plate of inked type. The press sprang up again, the letters wet and black on the paper, and he picked the sheet off with nimble fingertips, hanging it up to dry. “ ’Twas December, by the notice. But I’d set the page in Baskerville twelve-point, and the slugs for November and December are missing in that font. Not room to do it in separate letters, and not worth the labor to reset the whole page.”

  “To be sure,” said Amos, losing interest in the matter, as he perused the last paragraphs of Washington’s speech. “Scarcely signifies, anyway. After all, they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

  THE END

  AN ECHO IN THE BONE

  Breath of Snow and Ashes ends (more or less) in 1777. An Echo in the Bone begins in 1776. (Well, we are playing fast and loose with time, pretty much all the time. Surely you’ve noticed that.)

  We’re seeing a scene that we’ve seen before—but this time it’s from the point of view of Lieutenant William Ransom, Ninth Earl of Ellesmere. William is just eighteen, pleased to be back in the South, where he spent part of his youth, and excited at the prospect of his first military campaign. Still, he’s not too distracted to notice the charms of the tall, red-haired young matron whom he meets on the quay in Wilmington—despite the presence of her husband and two children. The memory of the woman’s dark-blue eyes, intent and slightly slanted, lingers pleasantly. It’s been a long time since William’s seen himself in a proper mirror, or he might think twice about those eyes.

  As it is, the eyes and their owner depart, never to be seen again, and the memory vanishes, too, when William goes to take supper with his father, Lord John Grey, at a friend’s house. The friend, Richard Bell, has two lovely—and single—daughters (William is only eighteen, after all). Bell also has an interesting guest: one Captain Ezekiel Richardson, who manages to get William’s attention long enough to make him an interesting proposal: to wit, that William might undertake a small “intelligencing” job, carrying secret messages for Richardson and noticing anything helpful that might turn up along the way. (Intelligencing was what gentlemen did. Spying was vulgar—not something a gentle
man would touch with his bare hands.) As reward, William would be attached to General Howe’s staff up north—a much better prospect for military advancement.

  William, always up for adventure and advantage, agrees, with his father’s blessing. Lord John has private opinions (not all favorable) regarding the world of espionage, and a lot of experience to back them up. On the other hand, he has one urgent reason for wanting Willie out of town: the nearby presence of Jamie Fraser, William’s real father. William may not have noticed the family resemblance when he met his half sister on the quay, but he can’t miss it—and neither will anyone else—if he and Jamie ever come face-to-face. And a number of people have gone to a lot of trouble for some years now to conceal the fact that the Ninth Earl of Ellesmere is the bastard of a Scottish criminal.

  Returning alone to his lodging, Lord John is distracted from his family complications when he’s informed that “a Frenchman” is waiting in his room. He opens the door and comes face-to-face with an unexpected bit of his own past. The “Monsieur Beauchamp” who greets him is Perseverance Wainwright, his stepbrother and erstwhile (a long while erst) lover.

  Lord John barely has time to absorb the shock of Percy’s reappearance after nearly twenty years, or the knowledge that Percy has been working for the French government as an intelligence operative during those years, before Percy lays something even more disturbing at his feet: a suggestion that the French (or at least someone connected with the French military or government) would like to do a deal with the English. To wit, the French would like to get back the Northwest Territory, which they had ceded to Great Britain after the French and Indian War a decade earlier. In exchange for making this possible, Percy’s masters—whomever they may be—will undertake to subvert one of Washington’s highest officers and do anything else they can to cripple the infant rebellion and enable Britain to quash it before it grows into something large and expensive.