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

  Fraser, Brian; Black Brian; Brian Dubh—Husband to Ellen MacKenzie; father of Jamie Fraser and Jenny Fraser Murray; he was the illegitimate—but recognized—son of Lord Lovat, Simon Fraser. [All]

  Fraser, Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall—Born Oct. 20, 1918; World War II army nurse. On a second honeymoon in Scotland with her husband, historian and former MI6 agent Frank Randall, she walks through a circle of standing stones and straight into the eighteenth century—where she’s obliged to rely on wit, courage, and her noticeable skill with healing in order to survive. In the course of events, she’s forced to marry a young clansman named James Fraser in order to avoid falling into the hands of the dangerous Black Jack Randall, after which things become Much More Complicated. [Author’s Note: it might be argued that if you’ve bought this particular book, you already know everything there is to know about Claire, but, what the heck, we aim for completeness….] Joining Claire’s story at the beginning of The Fiery Cross (her adventures through the earlier novels are synopsized in The Outlandish Companion, Volume One), we find her at a Gathering on Mount Helicon in North Carolina, sleeping next to one husband and dreaming of another. It’s her daughter Brianna’s wedding day; no wonder that Claire should think of her first husband, Frank Randall, who was Brianna’s father for all of her childhood and adolescence. But sentiment is fleeting when it’s been raining for three days, the food is running short, eight—no, nine—people are coming for dinner, there are no clean diapers, and you’ve started your period. Whisky helps. So does a husband who knows to give you some if you threaten to bite him if he kisses you. Beyond the domestic issues, Claire is dealing with her usual round of medical cases; there’s nothing like a large public gathering for injuries and contagious illnesses—and that’s before a Highland regiment of the British army shows up. Another thing that happens at large gatherings with a lot of alcohol is politics, and the backcountry of North Carolina is simmering with resentment of taxes and social injustices perpetrated by British rule. Claire, who knows all too well where this sort of thing is leading, is scared stiff at the idea of Jamie (and Roger, and Young Ian, and the other men of the Ridge) being caught up in such things. She’s right to be scared; in the fullness of time, as the Regulator movement grows, Jamie is obliged to bring men to back up the royal governor as he attacks the Regulators, and Claire finds herself, along with Brianna, in the vicinity of the Battle of Alamance. She’s patching up the wounded when a woman rushes up, looking for Jamie, and gasps out that they (Tryon’s troops) are hanging Roger MacKenzie! Through chance or the grace of God (not always separate things), Roger survives the hanging, and Claire narrowly manages to save his life with an emergency tracheotomy. But his voice is gone. The important thing, though, is that the family is preserved: the new young marriage of the MacKenzies, Jamie and Claire’s larger inclusive family—and the community of Fraser’s Ridge. But it’s not a peaceful time, and threats are constant. Some threats are external, as the process that will lead to rebellion and independence gathers steam, and some are internal. One of the external threats is the existence of lawless bandit gangs that roam the mountains, burning and looting. One of these gangs comes upon Marsali and Claire at the malting shed, and leaving the pregnant Marsali knocked out, they take Claire with them, with some idea of ransoming her to Jamie, who is perceived to be wealthy. One of the bandits warns them that this is a Bad Idea, but being Bad People, they naturally don’t listen. They should have…. They also shouldn’t have beaten and raped Claire, but they did. Jamie, with Roger, Ian, and the other men of the Ridge, tracks and rescues her, and deals out justice (“Kill them all”) to the perpetrators. Still, his only real focus is Claire. He knows too well what kind of lasting wounds such experiences leave and is racked with fear of losing her soul, even though he’s recovered her body. But he’s willing to relive his own hell to get her back, and she recognizes his courage and meets it with her own. (“I have lived through a fucking world war,” I said, my voice low and venomous. “I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army, been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked. And I have fucking survived!” My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop it. “And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and wiggled them?!” I stood up, seized the edge of the washstand and heaved it over, sending everything flying with a crash—basin, ewer, and lighted candlestick, which promptly went out.

  “Well, I won’t,” I said quite calmly.

  “Nasty little appendages?” he said, looking rather stunned.

  “Not yours,” I said. “I didn’t mean yours. I’m rather fond of yours.” Then I sat down and burst into tears.)

  Part of her recovery is her determination to resume doing what she needs to do, being who she’s always known she is: a healer. As to the internal threats to the peace of the Ridge: one of the new tenants, Thomas Christie, has a nubile young daughter named Malva, who seems to take to Claire and shows signs of becoming her much-longed-for apprentice. These hopes go up in flames when Malva turns up pregnant and—dragged in front of Jamie by her father—accuses Jamie of being the father. Talk and suspicion begin to split the community—which ruptures when Claire finds Malva in Claire’s own garden, her throat freshly cut. Claire tries to save the unborn child with a cesarean performed with her gardening knife, but the child dies in her hands—just as she in turn is discovered. Talk grows worse, and the Browns—a belligerent family from a nearby settlement—press to have Claire tried for murder. They organize a posse and take her from the house, delivering her to a jail in New Bern to await trial. Mistaken as a forger, she becomes the governor’s unwilling amanuensis and goes with him when he’s obliged to flee the governor’s palace and take refuge aboard a ship in the harbor. Here Jamie finds her but is unable to convince the governor to release her. He leaves and finds Thomas Christie. Christie comes aboard and confesses that he murdered his daughter out of shame and disgust at her scandalous behavior. He surrenders himself to the governor’s justice—but alone with Claire, he confesses that he’s in love with her and feels that saving her is one of the few truly good things he’s done in his life; he’s not afraid to die for her. Emotionally shattered by all of this, Claire goes home with Jamie to the Ridge, where she eventually learns the last part of Malva’s story. The final trauma of the book, though, is Amanda’s heart defect and Claire’s anguish at being unable to heal her granddaughter. She is forced to tell Bree that while the child could easily be cured in the twentieth century, there is no hope for her in the eighteenth—and thus Claire’s knowledge sends the young MacKenzie family back through the stones, in a dangerous bid to save their daughter, leaving Jamie and Claire thinking that they will never see their beloved family again. But there are more family members to be considered. The British army has landed in force, and the Revolution is fully under way. William Ransom has come, as a young lieutenant; his stepfather, Lord John Grey, is also in the colonies—though retired from the army, he still has one foot in the world of espionage. Claire has always been suspicious, if not outright hostile, to Lord John, knowing what his feelings are for Jamie. But as the two men’s friendship continues, mostly through letters, she begins to see why they are friends and to value John for himself. Which is rather a Good Thing later on. In between though, quite a number of things happen, including the Battle of Saratoga, Claire’s amputating Jamie’s ruined ring finger, and Jamie being asked to escort the body of Brigadier General Simon Fraser (a distant kinsman) home to Scotland, as part of the complex arrangements for the British surrender. Claire is relieved at being back in Scotland, away from the war, but there are private wars to be fought, too. The elder Ian Murray, Jamie’s best friend and brother-in-law, is dying of consumption—a fatal and nontreatable disease. Beyond Claire’s distress at being unable to help Ian and her further distress at Jamie’s sorrow is a rupture of relations with Jenny, Jamie’s sister—and a good friend/sister
to Claire during her first sojourn at Lallybroch. Jenny is more than suspicious of Claire’s long absence and feels utterly betrayed by what she sees as Claire’s refusal to help save Ian’s life. When news comes from Marsali in Philadelphia, begging Claire to come home and save little Henri-Christian, Marsali and Fergus’s youngest son, Claire’s distress at leaving Jamie to face Ian’s dying without her is at least slightly tempered by the relief of being away from Jenny. Back in Philadelphia, her operation on Henri-Christian’s enlarged tonsils and adenoids is successful, and things seem to be at least superficially normal, despite the British occupation of Philadelphia, which causes Fergus to live in hiding. Claire undertakes to carry messages and writings to and from Fergus and the printshop, using her basket of medical supplies as cover. She doesn’t realize that she’s been rumbled in this activity until sudden devastating news arrives: the ship Jamie and Jenny were sailing on has sunk, with all souls lost. Crushed by this tragedy, Claire has no attention to pay to small matters like being suspected of spying or arrested for passing seditious materials—but Lord John, devastated himself, feels that the last thing he can do for Jamie is to safeguard Jamie’s wife. Knowing that Claire is about to be arrested, he insists that she marry him, so he can protect not only her but Fergus and Marsali, as well. Distraught, she does. The marriage doesn’t last long—Jamie reappears, alive and well, only a couple of months later. But in the interim, Claire and Lord John have shared a bed, briefly, offering each other comfort. Which Lord John mentions to Jamie, as soon as the two of them have left the city. “I have had carnal knowledge of your wife,” he says. To which Jamie replies (rather calmly under the circumstances), “Oh? Why?” The answer to that question takes a good bit of unraveling, which leads us into the heart of the rebellion and the Battle of Monmouth; this ends—for Claire—with her being shot while tending the wounded. She comes close to dying but is saved by Denzell Hunter’s skill and recovers to see further adventures, including the double marriage of Young Ian and Rachel Hunter, and Dorothea Grey and Denzell Hunter. Happiness is succeeded by tragedy, though, when little Henri-Christian dies in a fire at the printshop. Gutted by this, the family leaves Philadelphia and goes to Savannah to retrieve Jamie’s printing press—and, in the fullness of time, return at last to Fraser’s Ridge. Here, the peace of the mountains enables Claire to ignore things like war for at least a little while—until she unexpectedly sees a man she recognizes at the local trading post: the man who raped her during her abduction by the bandit gang. She doesn’t want to tell Jamie, knowing that he’ll feel he has to do something about it—but he sees that something is amiss, winkles the truth out of Jenny…and goes to take care of the matter. Claire is torn between gratitude that the man is dead, distress that Jamie had to kill him, and a nagging burden of guilt at having been responsible—if indirectly—for the man’s death. But marriage means bearing each other’s burdens, and Claire and Jamie are rather good at that by now. They resume their building of the new Big House and are sharing a companionable moment at the site, when they see four strangers arrive in the clearing below: a tall, dark-haired man, a tall woman with long, flowing red hair, a redheaded boy, and a small girl with a redheaded doll. As anyone with an ounce more brain than a cuckoo clock would instantly realize, the MacKenzies have come home, and Claire follows Jamie at a run down the hill to meet them, flying on the wind of happiness. [All, SU, SP]

  Fraser, Claudel—see “Fergus Fraser.”

  Fraser, Ellen Caitriona Sileas MacKenzie—Mother of Jamie Fraser and Jenny Fraser Murray, also William and Robert, both deceased; wife to Brian Fraser; elder sister to Colum, Dougal, and Jocasta MacKenzie. [All]

  Fraser, Faith—Claire and Jamie’s first child, stillborn at L’Hôpital des Anges following a miscarriage after Jamie’s duel with Jack Randall. [All]

  Fraser, Félicité—Second daughter of Marsali and Fergus Fraser; along with her elder sister, Joanie, they are known as “the hell-kittens.” [Ashes, Echo, MOBY]

  Fraser, Fergus (aka Claudel)—Jamie’s foster son, rescued from a Paris bordello as a child. Possibly the missing heir to the fortune of the French aristocrat, the Comte St. Germain. Married to Jamie’s stepdaughter Marsali and father to Germain, Joanie, Félicité, and Henri-Christian. [All]

  Fraser, Germain Alexander Claudel MacKenzie—Marsali and Fergus’s precocious eldest son. Born in America but decidedly a unique combination of Scots and French, he is fiercely protective of his family and very loyal to his grandfather, Jamie. He comes to live on Fraser’s Ridge with his grandparents following the death of his younger brother, Henri-Christian. [All]

  Fraser, Henri-Christian—Marsali and Fergus’s younger son, a dwarf but much loved and protected by his siblings; his “stage name” is Bubbles when performing in front of Claire’s Wilmington surgery or Fergus’s printshop. His accidental death during a fire at the printshop devastates his family, particularly his elder brother, Germain. [Ashes, Echo, MOBY]

  x Fraser, Hugh—(unknown) Older brother of Brigadier General Simon Fraser, named after their father, and still living at Balnain. He helps settle the general’s body in its (fictitious?) final resting place at Corrimony, Scotland. [Echo]

  Fraser, Jamie; James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie (aka “Seaumais Ruaidh”)—Born May 1, 1721; former Laird of Broch Tuarach in Scotland, son of Ellen MacKenzie and Brian Fraser, illegitimately descended (though legitimately born) grandson of Lord Lovat, Simon Fraser (the Old Fox). He is the father (by Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser) of Faith (stillborn in France) and Brianna Ellen Randall Fraser MacKenzie, and (by Geneva Dunsany) William Ransom. After leaving Scotland and finding a new life in the New World, Jamie establishes a small settlement called Fraser’s Ridge, in the mountains of North Carolina. Though remote, the Ridge is not immune to the turmoil of the times, and Jamie’s life is often a balance of joy in his wife and family and the constant strains of being leader and protector. While he’s seen enough of war not to want to see more, he knows from the time travelers in his family that war can’t be avoided—the only question is what path to take through the oncoming carnage. As the first rumbles of the Revolution begin to be felt in North Carolina, he’s obliged to pick his way between the royal governor, who gave him his land grant and is tacitly blackmailing him by not revealing Jamie’s illegal Catholicism, and the growing pressure of the Regulators—the men of the backcountry who oppose what they see as increasing tyranny and corruption. Obliged to form his own militia group, Jamie takes reluctant part in the Battle of Alamance, at which his son-in-law, Roger MacKenzie, is hanged and permanently damaged. Still, he manages despite everything to see that the important things are done: his daughter is married and his grandchildren are baptized. As Fraser’s Ridge continues to grow, so does the danger from the incipient—though so far undeclared—rebellion. As the royal institutions crumble and governors flee, bandits and violent elements spring up in their wake. Jamie protects his own, whatever the price—and sometimes the price is high. His wife is abducted by a band of roving brigands who attack his homestead, and he musters his tenants to rescue her. He finds her and kills (he thinks) all of those involved in the crime, but Claire has been badly abused and raped—something he knows much too much about. But he’s walked through hell for this woman before and has no hesitation in doing it again. (He’d meant to be gentle. Very gentle. Had planned it with care, worrying each step of the long way home. She was broken; he must go canny, take his time. Be careful in gluing back her shattered bits.

  And then he came to her and discovered that she wished no part of gentleness, of courting. She wished directness. Brevity and violence. If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.

  For a moment, two moments, he struggled, trying to hold her close and kiss her tenderly. She squirmed like an eel in his arms, then rolled over him, wriggling and biting.

  He’d thought to ease her—both of them—with the wine. He’d known she lost all sense of restraint when in drink;
he simply hadn’t realized what she was restraining, he thought grimly, trying to seize her without hurting.

  He, of all people, should have known. Not fear or grief or pain—but rage.

  She raked his back; he felt the scrape of broken nails, and thought dimly that was good—she’d fought. That was the last of his thought; his own fury took him then, rage and a lust that came on him like black thunder on a mountain, a cloud that hid all from him and him from all, so that kind familiarity was lost and he was alone, strange in darkness.

  It might be her neck he grasped, or anyone’s. The feel of small bones came to him, knobbled in the dark, and the screams of rabbits, killed in his hand. He rose up in a whirlwind, choked with dirt and the scourings of blood.

  Wrath boiled and curdled in his balls, and he rode to her spurs. Let his lightning blaze and sear all trace of the intruder from her womb, and if it burnt them both to bone and ash—then let it be.)

  A reluctant Rebel, he nonetheless finds a sense of idealism that resonates with the principles of the new Revolution. But if war is not a respecter of private life, the opposite is true, as well, and everything he’s built is threatened when Malva Christie turns up pregnant and identifies Jamie as the father. The ensuing brouhaha splits Fraser’s Ridge, particularly when Claire finds the young woman freshly murdered and is suspected of having killed the girl and her child. Nearby troublemakers take advantage of the situation to have Claire arrested, which also removes Jamie from the Ridge, as he’s obliged to find and rescue her from the ship to which the ex-royal governor has fled with her. Beyond politics and violence, though, there is a deeper threat to the family’s happiness: Jamie and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, gives birth to an enchanting baby girl named Amanda—but Mandy suffers from a birth defect of the heart. It’s a defect easily cured by surgery—in the twentieth century. And with much anguish, the young MacKenzie family decides to risk the journey through the stones to save the child’s life. They leave, taking half of Jamie’s heart with them. But Brianna is not Jamie’s only child, and with the onset of the war itself, Jamie finds himself in close proximity to William, his illegitimate son, who believes himself to be the Ninth Earl of Ellesmere and is now in the colonies as an officer in His Majesty’s Army. Jamie has a terrible premonition that he will one day face his son across the barrel of a gun—and does, at the Battle of Saratoga, where he narrowly misses killing William by accident. At his side through the travails of battle and travel, though, are both his beloved wife and Young Ian, his nephew and the son of his heart. Ian’s own life has been a troubled one, but his return from the Mohawk heartens Jamie and provides him with an invaluable ally on the road to war. Following Saratoga, Jamie is asked to go to Scotland, accompanying the body of a distant kinsman, Brigadier General Simon Fraser, who was killed in the battle. Ian accompanies Jamie and Claire and thus arrives with them at Lallybroch in time to bid his father farewell. The elder Ian is dying slowly of consumption, and the loss of the man who has been more than a brother to Jamie is almost more than he can bear. But he has a small space of precious time with Ian, and when Claire is obliged to return to North Carolina for a medical emergency, Jamie stays, to see his friend decently buried and take care of his sister Jenny, Ian’s wife. Jenny declares her intent to travel to North Carolina with Jamie after the funeral, determined to look after Ian, her youngest child. By mischance and miscommunication, Claire and Lord John Grey are informed that the ship on which Jamie and Jenny sailed has sunk. Thus, when they arrive on a different ship, Jamie discovers that Claire has married Lord John Grey, which is something of a shock. So is his coming face-to-face unexpectedly with his son, William, who sees the marked resemblance and who immediately Draws Conclusions. The still-greater shock, though, is to have Lord John inform Jamie that “I have had carnal knowledge of your wife.” To which Jamie can only manage to say, “Oh? Why?” The answer to that, plus the Battle of Monmouth, Claire’s nearly fatal wound, and a few other things, keep him from thinking too much about William. But when William comes to him for help in rescuing a young woman under his protection, Jamie assures his son that he’s entitled to Jamie’s help for any worthy purpose he intends. Through deaths and weddings and war and births, the Frasers at last manage to return to the Ridge, where Jamie begins to rebuild their house and their lives. [All, HF, PM, SU, BL, HS, SP, PZ]