“Aye,” he said quietly. “But ye can’t, can you?”
She stared up at him, not understanding. His eyes were intent on hers, not angry, not mocking. Waiting.
“You can’t,” he repeated, with emphasis.
And then realization came, flooding down her aching arms to her bruised fists.
“Oh, God,” she said. “No. I can’t. I couldn’t. Even if I’d fought him…I couldn’t.”
Quite suddenly she began to cry, the knots inside her slipping loose, the weights shifting, lifting, as a blessed relief spread through her body. It hadn’t been her fault. If she had fought with all her strength—as she had fought just now—
“Couldn’t,” she said, and swallowed hard, gasping for air. “I couldn’t have stopped him. I kept thinking, if only I’d fought harder…but it wouldn’t have mattered. I couldn’t have stopped him.”
A hand touched her face, big and gentle.
“You’re a fine, braw lassie,” he whispered. “But a lassie, nonetheless. Would ye fret your heart out and think yourself a coward because ye couldna fight off a lion wi’ your bare hands? It’s the same. Dinna be daft, now.”
She wiped the back of her hand under her nose, and sniffed deeply.
He put a hand under her elbow and helped her up, his strength no longer either threat or mockery, but unutterable comfort. Her knees stung, where she had scraped them on the ground. Her legs wobbled, but she made it to the haypile, where he let her sit down.
“You could have just told me, you know,” she said. “That it wasn’t my fault.”
He smiled faintly.
“I did. Ye couldna believe me, though, unless ye knew for yourself.”
“No. I guess not.” A profound but peaceful weariness had settled on her like a blanket. This time she had no urge to tear it off.
Comments by Readers
If I may address this from experience…intellectually knowing there was nothing you could do, being told by a therapist there was nothing you could do, does not change that nasty voice in your head, nor the subtle message from society, that if you really didn’t want to you could have stopped him.
Speaking as a survivor, the scene between Bree and Jamie in the barn thunders. It is a glory of text. If the woman had written nothing else, contributed nothing else to literature or science, that one scene would have been contribution enough.
It should be ripped from the pages and slapped into the pile of clinically detached paperwork they hand you.
On top.
I’m of the opinion this book (Drums of Autumn) should be handed to any woman seeking help after an assault; it is the only piece I have ever seen which hits at the helplessness of the victim accurately, viscerally, and in a manner making it possible for the victim to truly accept they weren’t at fault for not fighting “hard enough.” The scene is truth: bright as a diamond, hard as granite.
T. Burke
As a survivor of violence and sexual abuse, I appreciate that you do not look away when you write. Looking away tends to keep the abused victims, while looking straight on allows the abused to do more than react, allows them to go on and grow and develop and deal. And that gives hope…expands the possibilities of what it means to live to the fullest.
Cat Finch
BLACK JACK RANDALL—A STUDY IN SADISM
Author’s Note: I wrote this following piece specifically for Tobias Menzies (the actor who plays Black Jack Randall—and Frank Randall—on the Starz television series), who’d asked me about the captain’s family background, social class, and general SOP. In the process of discussing Jack Randall’s background, psyche, and motives, though, I combed back through several years of discussions from the CompuServe Books and Writers Forum and compiled—with the invaluable help of Kristin Matherly, a born archivist—a number of bits and pieces regarding Jack Randall that I thought might be useful to both Tobias and Sam Heughan, who was going to have to deal with Jack Randall at close range during the filming of Outlander. I sent both the biography and the compiled discussion (in the form of a Q&A with additional commentary) to the show’s writers and production team, as well as to the two actors.
The Randalls of Sussex are very minor aristocracy; the eldest brother, William,13 has a hereditary knighthood. They’re not a wealthy family, though they are landed gentry: enough money for the sons to be privately educated (Jack mentions his tutors to Claire, with regard to his civilized accent) and to purchase a captain’s commission for Jack.
The sons took the traditional path: eldest inherits the estate, second son enters the military, and the third goes to the Church—Alex, the youngest brother, is a Church of England curate.
There is a long-standing estrangement between William and his two younger brothers but not specified what caused it. It’s resulted in William refusing to help Alex financially and refusing to bring Jack’s body home to England when he’s killed at Culloden (not that this would have been very unusual; soldiers most often were buried where they were killed, or somewhere nearby).
Alex is the one person in the world whom Jack cares for. (And if you want to go for an acting trifecta in the second season, Tobias, Alex looks enough like Jack that both Claire and Jamie think he is Jack when they encounter him unexpectedly in Paris.14)
Don’t know if it’s in the script, but at one point in their prolonged (book) encounter, Jack says to Jamie, “Tell me that you love me, Alex.” People have been trying for years to figure out whether a) Jack knows that one of Jamie’s middle names is Alexander (he probably does, army paperwork being what it is), b) he means his brother (and what does that imply about his relationship with his brother, if so?), or c) he means a young Scottish prisoner named Alex MacGregor, who hanged himself a few months previously while in Randall’s custody (and following a few personal encounters with the captain).15
Jack is, as Claire notes, a sadist with a sense of humor—and thus particularly dangerous. He’s witty and fairly refined in manner, though not posh as such.
Mm, the duke [the Duke of Sandringham]. I rather think he met Jack a few years before, when Jack was with a regiment quartered in London. We don’t know whether he’s presently commanding a garrison in the remote Highlands because he did something (or some things) in London that made his superiors nervous, or whether he chose to go there voluntarily, either because of his relationship with the duke (i.e., if the duke is indeed a secret Jacobite—and I kind of think he is16—he may have arranged for Randall to be transferred to a regiment in the Highlands (as distinct from a Highland regiment) for the purpose of keeping an eye on political developments there)…or because it was a better hunting ground for someone with his tastes.
There are fewer opportunities in terms of women—though there are always a few prostitutes, these would be well known to whichever village they live in, and the virtuous women are almost all under the protection of men, or in groups of women. When he finds one unprotected—like Jenny Fraser—or alone—like Claire—he’s more than ready to take advantage, but that doesn’t happen often.
But the opportunities offered to a man who’s more or less in sole charge of male prisoners, with no one to answer to, and mostly no one with the power to make real inquiries…that’s another thing.
Anyway, he probably met the duke in London. The duke is straightforwardly homosexual (so to speak) in his personal tastes (Randall isn’t gay; he’s an equal-opportunity sadist), but very astute psychologically. He recognizes what Jack is and exploits that knowledge to use and control him. (We don’t know what little jobs Jack may have done for the duke over the years, but pretty sure there was some wet work, as they say these days.)
The interesting thing is that the duke is cheerfully and coldly amoral. Jack’s not. He knows what he is, knows it’s despicable—but doesn’t struggle against it. He’s addicted to what he does and has grown a thick callus over what sensitivity he might once have had, in order to survive mentally.
BLACK JACK RANDALL—Q&A, WITH ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY17
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Author’s note: These answers and comments are drawn from stuff I’ve posted on the CompuServe Books and Writers Forum over the course of the last fifteen or twenty years, in response to the recurring discussions there about the character of Black Jack Randall.
Q: Do you think Captain Randall is a sociopath—by which I mean somebody totally fixated just on his own needs/desires? Or does he know that he’s a villain?
A: Interesting question, though one that I’ve never doubted the answer to.
He does know what he is, and the knowledge accounts for a good deal of the depth of his character. Stephen Bonnet, by contrast, doesn’t know—and wouldn’t care. Jack Randall does know, and does care. Not that he wants to reform, but the fact that he does know gives him an existential despair that lies at the root of the damage he does.
Now, why he is what he is is another question, and I’m not yet sure whether we’ll know the answer to that.
Q: I hear some people wonder why Jamie held Jack Randall when he cried during the torture, but I wonder what effect Jamie’s humane response had on Jack. I think what Jamie did—even though he told Claire he didn’t know WHY he did it—might be connected with the whole thing about forgiveness. It certainly says a lot about Jamie’s character that he should be capable of compassion, even in those circumstances! I wonder about Jack’s, though.
A: Well, we might reasonably assume that Jack Randall had probably never encountered that kind of humanity in that kind of situation before. See the next question and its answer for further thoughts on this….
Q: Do you think Jack Randall’s assaulting Fergus was done randomly, or was it intentionally to hurt Jamie?
A: Sociopaths and psychopaths view other people simply as objects, for the most part. “Evil” as a concept does not exist to them, no more than “good” does. I think it’s important to note, though, that both these terms are just useful constructs in the work of understanding how people at the extremes of human behavior operate; neither one is a blueprint for what an individual might think, feel, or do. I.e., I don’t think you can say absolutely, “Oh, this person is a sociopath; therefore, he’s completely incapable of feeling anything for anyone else, ever.” IF such a person did form a connection with another person, such as to establish actual communication and give him a glimpse of empathy, I imagine that connection and that person would be very important indeed. I imagine Jack Randall had such a connection with his brother, who is therefore immensely important to him. Jamie and Claire (and Fergus; and of course it’s random—how would Captain Randall know of Fergus’s association with Jamie? He isn’t tracking him around the city, hoping for an opportunity to do something mean to him, for heaven’s sake. Lust driven by sadism is one thing, and it has nothing in common with that sort of pettiness) are pretty much just objects to him.
I say “pretty much” because it’s possible that he did feel a brief (and doubtless deeply unsettling) connection with Jamie at one point.
Q: Is it the fact that men are usually less helpless/vulnerable that makes dominating another male more of a challenge for Jack Randall than terrorizing or raping a woman might be?
A: And that much more gratifying when accomplished. Yes, I think that’s so, as a general rule. On the other hand, the captain had plainly never run into women like Jenny Fraser and Claire Fraser before.
Q: Do you think Jamie had negative associations with oral sex after Wentworth?
A: Well, according to what he told Claire, Jack didn’t hurt him while giving him oral sex—which unnerved him a lot more than if he had but thus probably didn’t give him immediate revulsive associations with the act, either.
There was then quite a bit of back and forth on sadism, homosexuality, and bisexuality with a lot of short responses. The relevant bits of my response are below:
Jack Randall’s a sadist. He’s not wanting to rape Jamie because he’s hot stuff—the man isn’t basically a homosexual at all (vide his attacks on Jenny and Claire and the reports Frank found of “interference” with women of the countryside)—he wants to do it because it will cause Jamie great pain and emotional distress; that’s what Jack feeds on. Sex is just the weapon that he uses—an end to his own means.
Still, I didn’t say he didn’t want Jamie particularly. I said a) Jack Randall isn’t a homosexual, and b) he didn’t want to have sex with Jamie as a matter of normal sexual attraction. He wants him, all right, though.
I’ve seen Jack Randall described as a bisexual sadist—and have used that description myself on occasion, if only because it’s factually correct, and you need a bit of shorthand when doing interviews; you can’t really delve into character very deeply under those circumstances. Still, he’s not really bisexual, either, save by default. He’s a genuine sadist. The gender of the person he’s working on is not all that relevant to him, save as a matter of technique.
(I would point out, though, that the “Alex” Jack refers to while assaulting Jamie may not be his brother but rather Alex MacGregor, the Scottish prisoner who hanged himself following a similar assault.)
In response to an observation that a reader thought Jack preferred men and his attacks on women were to divert suspicion:
No, it’s just that his position as an officer gives him access to men (in prison) who are helpless and at his mercy, whereas it’s harder for him to find women who are totally unprotected and available to him.
I often get questions as to just how I go about “creating” characters like Jack Randall. This is not specifically related to Jack, but just in general:
I’m not sure how to go about explaining, but I think that what a writer does is very much like what an actor does (insofar as I understand that process). You kind of reach…out…for whatever is out there, in terms of the material, the script, the plot, the background, the story, what you know intellectually about the character(s) involved. And then you reach…down…into yourself, for whatever you find there. Then you try to deal as honestly as you can with what you’re holding in your hands.
In response to speculations about why Jack wanted Jamie (or the unidentified Alex) to tell him he loved him:
Possibly, forcing a victim to admit “love” for him is the final indication of his mastery over them; he’s broken the victim completely. So he’s victorious—but then it isn’t fun anymore, either: hence, Jamie’s conviction that Randall would kill him if he said it. Game over.
Just a suggestion.
(Though with ref to Jack Randall suffering from rosy visions of himself as a sadistic Romeo…well, we will refrain from speculation as to what various of the readers may have been smoking while reading
In response to a question about the healing scene in the abbey:
Claire correctly perceives, both from what Jamie tells her and from her knowledge of him, that the heart of his depression stems from the fact that he was not able to fight Jack Randall. Had he fought and been overcome, then beaten and violated, that would have been bad, but his sense of himself as a man would likely have remained intact, if bruised. But he gave his word to save her life and thus surrendered himself. Which is a very self-sacrificing, thoroughly Christ-like thing to do. But he’s not Christ, he’s a man, a young man, and a man from a warrior culture, trained from boyhood to be willing to lay down his life to protect his own—but only at the point of a sword, and taking as many enemies with him as possible. The giving up of his body has mortgaged his soul, as well.
As I say, Claire sees this, though she doesn’t say it explicitly. She rouses the ghost, so to speak, and gives her own body in turn in order to incarnate it, so that Jamie can fight Randall and thus reclaim himself. At the same time, she still is herself, with her woman’s body—and Jamie’s rage can thus seek a sexual outlet, mingling violence with sex (you will have noticed that sex and violence are always fairly close, with them; this is one reason why Randall was able
to do so much damage, since he fully recognizes and uses that link) and reclaiming his soul by the same means by which it was taken.
Q: Do Randall’s tearful confessions of love to Jamie during Wentworth mean something regarding his character? There seems to be an implication in Dragonfly in Amber that Randall’s relationship with the Duke of Sandringham involves “punishment.” Could that be a sort of penance?
A: Well, just to be completely accurate—Jack Randall really doesn’t make “tearful confessions of love” to Jamie at Wentworth (this being clear in my mind because I had a long discussion on that point with one of the executive producers not ten hours ago). He says to Jamie (and I don’t think I said anything about his demeanor while saying it, but I don’t swear to that. We’re hearing about it from Jamie, who was in no condition, really, to notice the fine points), “Tell me that you love me, Alex.” And Jamie says to Claire that his conviction was that if he’d said it, Randall would have killed him on the spot.
What we don’t know, of course, is who he was speaking to. Did he know that one of Jamie’s middle names was Alexander? Was he referring to his brother Alex and having some fevered expression of frustrated incestuous longing (or, more sinisterly, a flashback to some such incident?), or was he referring to the young Scottish prisoner Alex MacGregor, who hanged himself after being tortured and raped by the captain? And those are just the possibilities we know about; it could have been someone else entirely.
Neither do we know his intent in issuing that command/plea. My personal impression—with which the executive producer agreed—was that a) he’s a sadist, b) he derives sexual pleasure from hurting people, both physically and emotionally, and c) he thus tries to break them, in one or both senses. But what would happen if he did break a victim and make them surrender unconditionally? Presumably it would be a great thrill—but a momentary one. He wouldn’t be able to get anything further out of a victim who has no further to go. Which would explain why Jamie thought Randall would have killed him if he’d given in to that final demand—he likely would have.
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 Page 63