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

  Jamie is deeply averse to boats at the best of times, though he’s steeled himself for the rigors of an Atlantic voyage, with the help of Claire’s acupuncture needles. Acupuncture, though, is no help against the Royal Navy, which shows up in the person of one Captain Stebbings, commander of the naval cutter Pitt, a bumptious officer with a ruthless streak, who tries to press hands from the Teal—including Jamie and Young Ian. This is a mistake, as the captain discovers more or less immediately.

  Jamie and Ian (and Claire, who has followed them over the rail, desperate not to be abandoned on the high seas) take over the Pitt, and Jamie finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being an inadvertent pirate—and the still more uncomfortable position of being captain of a ship. Matters get worse when the Teal, now commanded by the enraged Captain Stebbings, pursues them, only to be intercepted by a third ship, the Asp, this captained by one (one of him was plenty, Claire reflects) Asa Hickman—a patriot, a smuggler, and a sworn enemy of Captain Stebbings, who was responsible for the death of Hickman’s brother.

  A three-sided sea battle ensues, though Claire sees little of it, locked in the hold with a cabin boy. Jamie and Captain Stebbings nearly succeed in killing each other, and Claire—to her intense annoyance—is obliged to stitch them both up. Captain Hickman is in command, though, and declares that they are now all going to keep his rendezvous—with the Continental army at Fort Ticonderoga, where he has a shipment of guns, ammunition—and now captives—to deliver.

  ——

  LORD JOHN, HAVING seen William, Jamie and Claire, and Brianna’s family all more or less safely disposed of for the moment, returns to London, where he visits an old connection from his days in the Black Chamber—the official center of diplomatic espionage. All major European capitals have their own Black Chambers, the inhabitants of which keep tabs on one another, and Lord John wants to know whether anything is known about Percy Wainwright (in his persona as Percival Beauchamp) or the Baron Amandine, whose sister Percy has married.

  Lord John’s connection has never heard of Amandine and has only a few obscure letters filed under Beauchamp. This intrigues and alarms Grey further, as he knows for a fact that there are—or were—extensive files of material on Beauchamp; Beauchamp was more or less his own opposite number when he himself was a member of the Black Chamber, and he knows Beauchamp’s style well—though he had no idea at the time that Beauchamp was Percy Wainwright. Now that material has evidently disappeared.

  His sense of disturbance is exacerbated by receipt of a letter from William, confessing that he, William, has fallen in love with Lady Dorothea Grey—Lord John’s niece and William’s cousin—and strongly implying that things between them had Gone Too Far one romantic evening in a garden. Clearly they must be married. Will Lord John speak to Dottie’s father? William asks.

  Knowing William—and Dottie—as well as he does, Lord John finds this deeply suspicious. Whatever William may be up to, though, the next step is obvious: Lord John goes to Argus House to talk to his brother, Hal, Duke of Pardloe.

  Hal is in poor health but brought to instant alertness by Lord John’s news regarding Percy Wainwright. John decides not to speak to Hal regarding William’s letter, though—not until he’s had a chance to speak to Dottie. This he does, and she assures him that she and William are indeed in love, begging him to use his influence with her father to allow her to travel to America so they can be married, in case William is killed in the conflict.

  Dottie is very convincing—but her uncle has been a soldier, a spy, and a parent for a long time and knows much too much about human nature—and Dottie—to believe her.

  “Dorothea,” he said firmly. “I will discover what you’re up to.”

  She looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment, as though estimating the chances. The corner of her mouth rose insensibly as her eyes narrowed, and he saw the response on her face, as clearly as if she’d said it aloud.

  No. I don’t think so.

  BACK IN SCOTLAND of 1980…Prodded into fury by Brianna—but admitting to himself that she’s right, which is even more galling—Roger goes to speak to the rector of St. Stephen’s, in search of spiritual guidance regarding his vocation. He finds the rector’s advice comforting—and the offer of employment as assistant choirmaster a welcome, if challenging, chance to do something useful while he looks for clarity in other matters. Having decided that confession is good for the soul, he makes up his mind to tell Brianna the source of his doubts.

  Brianna returns from a successful job interview, hoping to celebrate with Roger, and is disturbed to find him not at home. He’s gone to England, the housekeeper tells her, scandalized. A foreign country!

  Bree can’t imagine what he’s doing in Oxford and is annoyed at his abrupt departure on the night of her triumph. Her annoyance fades at once, though, when he returns with a photocopied page—a reproduction of a news clipping from the Wilmington Gazette, telling of the death by fire of the Frasers of Fraser’s Ridge. This was the clipping that sent Brianna—and then Roger—into the past, to find her family and, if possible, prevent the disaster. The disaster wasn’t precisely prevented—the house did burn down, as they learned from Claire’s letter—but Jamie and Claire escaped alive, and…the date on which the house burned was not the one given in the clipping.

  But the date in the clipping has changed.

  Roger is a Presbyterian, and one of the central tenets of his faith is a belief in predestination. The mere fact of time travel’s existence is enough to shake that belief; the knowledge that history can apparently be altered knocks one or two important stones out of the foundation.

  WILLIAM, MEANWHILE, WRITES to tell his father that he has enjoyed his intelligencing expedition into Canada but has now been abruptly and puzzlingly abandoned by his companion, Denys Randall-Isaacs. He spends a boring winter in Quebec, hunting and trapping ermine with an Indian scout and dining with the governor, and Lord John is left to make inquiries regarding Randall-Isaacs—an evidently reputable soldier, but one about whom almost nothing is known. What is Randall-Isaacs’s connection with Richardson?

  ROGER IS IN better case than William; his job as assistant choirmaster is going well, and he has—to Brianna’s joy—begun to sing again himself, though only with painful difficulty and only in private.

  Brianna’s job has also been going well—bar a certain amount of hazing from some of her male co-workers, who lock her into a maintenance tunnel for a joke. Fuming but level-headed, she boards the tiny electric train used to service the tunnel and drives toward the far end, where she knows there is a door into the service chamber of the dam. Somewhere in the darkness, though, something strikes her with the force of a garrote. Knocked half over and gasping, she realizes that whatever it was that nearly sliced through her, it had the same feel about it as the time passages she’s encountered among the standing stones.

  She tells Roger about it later, and they hypothesize that it may have been a ley line—a line of electromagnetic force in the earth’s field. Roger is compiling something he ironically calls “The Hitchhiker’s Guide”—this being a compendium of knowledge, guesses, and warnings about time travel, for the eventual use of his children.

  LORD JOHN, SEEKING to establish the veracity—or otherwise—of Percy Wainwright’s offer, goes to France to make inquiries. His lack of reception by officials who would normally see him causes him to think that there may just be something going on. Further investigations lead him to mention of the mysterious Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie, a Portuguese company whose directors and functions seem deliberately obscure. Finally, he goes to Trois Flèches, the estate of the Baron Amandine. He learns little from the baron, but there he meets another visitor—Dr. Benjamin Franklin. The doctor is pleasant company—but the presence of a prominent American at Trois Flèches convinces Lord John that there is indeed something going on, that the “something” concerns the American rebellion—and that Percy is in it up to his neck.

  Lord John’s brother, Hal, has be
en making his own inquiries in London and is able to assure John that Denys Randall-Isaacs is a “political,” with ties to Lord Germain, the secretary of state—but knows very little of Captain Richardson, who seems to be lying low, somewhere in the colonies.

  There is no time for further inquiries: news has come that Hal’s youngest son, Henry, has been wounded and captured. Lord John and Dottie take ship at once, to find and rescue him.

  BOUND FOR THE northern army under General Burgoyne, Willie detours—at Captain Richardson’s request—into the Great Dismal Swamp, charged with the delivery of secret messages to several men in Dismal Town, a settlement in the center of the swamp. William is familiar with the Great Dismal, having hunted there frequently in his younger years. It is, however, a very large swamp. He loses his way, and then his horse, and is forced to spend the night in the swamp during a lightning storm, during which a large cypress tree is struck by lightning and explodes, a large splinter skewering William’s arm. Alone, without food, and suffering from fever, William presses on toward the center of the swamp, where he knows Dismal Town is to be found along the shore of the lake there.

  He runs into a poisonous snake and then into two Indians, who try to capture him to sell as a slave. Fleeing from these Indians, William runs head-on into another—a Mohawk who at once sends the first Indians on their way. But this man isn’t exactly a Mohawk; he’s Ian Murray (who has left Jamie and Claire at Ticonderoga and is traveling to rendezvous in the Great Dismal with some Mohawk hunters he knows, in hopes of learning the whereabouts and welfare of his Mohawk ex-wife). Ian has of course met William, seven years earlier at Fraser’s Ridge. Any suspicions he entertained at that point regarding William’s identity are settled permanently once he gets a good look at William’s face—and his sprouting red beard.

  Ian does his best to doctor Willie’s arm, now badly infected, but when the other Mohawk hunters show up the next dawn, they agree that William needs more help than they can offer and suggest taking him to a small Quaker settlement not far away, where there is a doctor.

  William awakes, after a period of delirium, in the house of Denzell Hunter, a young physician, and his younger sister, Rachel. William is weak and shaky but not too weak to appreciate Rachel, who is not only pretty but a girl of strong mind and undiluted opinions.

  Neither is she shy. Having extracted enough information from William to suppose that he is a British deserter—but at least a capable man—she invites him to travel with her and her brother, to provide mutual protection on the road. They are going to join the Continental army, Denzell’s convictions having led him to the firm conclusion that he must help the cause of liberty. Not by fighting—he is a Quaker—but by offering his medical services as an army surgeon.

  William does not plan to get very close to the Continental army, but his way does lie north—and he may be able to pick up bits of intelligence along the way, in compensation for his failure to deliver messages to Dismal Town. He is somewhat uneasy about that mission, in fact; he’s learned from Ian that all the men in Dismal Town are fervent Rebels, not the Loyalists he’d been led to expect. Can Captain Richardson have been so badly mistaken? Or…had he sent William deliberately into an ambush?

  Meanwhile, Ian has learned from the other Mohawk that his wife is well and the mother of at least two children. She and her second husband, Sun Elk, have joined a group of Mohawk living in Unadilla, with the famous chief Thayendanegea, known to the English as Captain Joseph Brant.

  Ian has unfinished business. He has some hope of perhaps finding a wife in Scotland—if they ever get there—but, as he tells Claire, he can’t in good conscience wed a young woman if he knows he can never give her children. Claire questions him about the stillbirth and miscarriages suffered by his Mohawk wife and reassures him that it’s probably not his fault and likely would not be a problem if he marries again. Still, he feels that he must see Works With Her Hands once more—if only to apologize.

  He finds her—and her husband—in Unadilla. After a fight with Sun Elk, Ian succeeds in talking with Emily alone, and they make their peace with each other. She has in fact given birth a third time and offers Ian the naming of the new child—a great honor. Ian is deeply moved, but he has been talking with Emily’s oldest son, a five-year-old who has told Ian that his great-grandmother says he is the child of Ian’s spirit—but that it’s probably best not to tell Sun Elk that. Ian gravely agrees—but when offered the chance to name the younger child, he tells Emily that the oldest son is his to name and gives him the name Swiftest of Lizards. Then, with a lighter heart, he returns to Ticonderoga.

  On the road, William and the Hunters meet a man with a fractious cow, who offers them shelter from the driving rain—and a hot supper—if Denny and William will help him catch the cow. This they do, and after a terrible supper, they settle down to sleep by the farmer’s hearth.

  William suffers bad dreams and dreadful indigestion as a result of the foul stew served at supper, but this proves to be a blessing, as he wakes with griping in his guts just in time to avoid being brained by the ax-wielding farmer, bent on murder and robbery. Letting out a tremendous fart, William attacks the farmer and, after a bloody fight, succeeds in killing the man with his own ax, while the Hunters subdue his equally vicious wife.

  Afterward, Willie rushes into the outdoor privy, from which he emerges some time later, pale of face and very shaken. He finds Rachel waiting for him and takes comfort in her presence, confessing to her that this was the first time he had ever killed a man. He’d thought about it, of course, but had expected such an event to occur in battle.

  “Rachel.” His own voice sounded odd to him, remote, as though someone else was speaking. “I’ve never killed anyone before. I don’t—I don’t quite know what to do about it.” He looked up at her, searching her face for understanding. “If it had been—I expected it to be in battle. That—I think I’d know how. How to feel, I mean. If it had been like that.”

  She met his eyes, her face drawn in troubled thought. The light touched her, a pink softer than the sheen of pearls, and after a long time she touched his face, very gently.

  “No,” she said. “Thee wouldn’t.”

  Sometime later, William parts from the Hunters to seek his own way, leaving them to head for Fort Ticonderoga. Along his road, he meets an old man, who holds his staff with a maimed hand, and who tells him he is in search of a man named Ian Murray—might William know him? Made uneasy by something in the old man’s manner, William replies curtly that he does not and rides on toward his own rendezvous with General Burgoyne.

  AT TICONDEROGA, CLAIRE has set up a medical practice—mostly among the women, as the army surgeons are extremely prejudiced against the intrusion of a woman onto their turf. An exception, though, is Captain Stebbings, now held as a prisoner. Stebbings refuses to be treated by anyone save Claire, nor will he allow his men to be treated by the other doctors. Claire meets Denzell Hunter over the amputation of a sailor’s leg, and the two become friends at once, each recognizing the other as a real physician.

  Jamie has taken responsibility for the volunteers from the Asp and formed them into a militia unit. The militia at the fort are all working under short-term contracts (most of which will not be paid), and Claire is keeping a line of notches on the doorpost of their room, counting the days until Jamie’s enlistment will be up and they can leave. She only hopes that Young Ian will return from his errand before that day comes.

  The matter is of some importance, because General Burgoyne’s army is coming, and while the fort is well stocked and decently armed, its position is such that it can’t be held for long against a besieging force. Everyone in the fort knows this—but the commander, Arthur St. Clair, is more than reluctant to evacuate the fort and thus fail in his duty and blemish his record—though, as Jamie points out rather acerbically, getting everyone in the fort killed or captured isn’t going to do his record any good, either.

  Still, St. Clair hesitates, and as news of Burgoyne�
�s approach gets more and more exigent, and the protests of Jamie and other militia captains more urgent, the uneasiness of the fort’s inhabitants explodes into panic. The British climb the small mountain opposite the fort and build an artillery emplacement, from which the whole fort can be enfiladed. Plainly, the time has come to evacuate. Luckily, Young Ian has returned and is able to help with the removal of the invalids and wounded.

  The Battle of Ticonderoga is short and decisive—what battle there is, for most of the fort’s inhabitants are already fleeing, by land or by boat. The refugees are closely pursued by the British army—and the army’s Indian allies, who terrorize the fleeing Americans, killing and scalping in the dark.

  Moving slowly, with a convoy of invalids, Claire is captured. Herded into a field with her patients, she meets a young British lieutenant with a familiar face—William. He doesn’t at once recognize her, but when she explains that she’d met him several years before when he came with his father to Fraser’s Ridge, he at once recalls the occasion and does his best to offer what help there is—precious little, as the British army has outstripped its baggage train and is seriously short of supplies.

  Claire’s concerns for her patients and worry over Jamie are cut short by the sudden appearance in the trees of Young Ian, come to rescue her. He’s detected by William, who tries to stop him, but upon recognizing the man who saved his life in the swamp, William reluctantly lets Claire go.

  She and Young Ian rejoin Jamie and continue the retreat south, drawing farther ahead of the British—who are still coming. As the refugees begin to coalesce into a unified body, some of the men begin to play the deserter game. This is a subterfuge in which an American pretends to desert to the British and, after being fed and having a good look around the camp, re-deserts back to his comrades.