Book 9: Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

[Athena]

This is a thread for speculating and discussing any tidbits about the upcoming ninth book of the series. The book has no title yet let alone an estimated publishing date.

 

If you wish to know nothing about this book, it's probably best to leave this thread now. Possible spoilers below; please remember to tag unpublished excerpts and cite the source.

[lianau]

I collected all the lines of book 9 I could find . 

 

The trout were still biting, the water rippling with dozens of bright rings and the frequent splash of a leaping fish. Roger’s fingers tightened for a moment on his rod, but they had enough for supper and next morning’s breakfast, too. No point in catching more; the smoke-shed was full.
Jamie showed no signs of moving to pack up, though. He was sitting on a comfortable stump, bare-legged and clad in nothing but his shirt, his old hunting plaid puddled on the ground behind. He glanced at the boys, who had forgotten their argument and were back at their casting, intent as a pair of kingfishers.
Jamie turned to Roger then, and said, in a quite ordinary tone of voice, “Do Presbyterians have the sacrament of Confession, _mac mo chinnidh_?”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/774658802576958

 

 

It was the only place on earth that he felt truly belonged to him. Not officially: by law, he supposed he was still the ninth Earl of Ellesmere. For most of his life, that title had just seemed like another bit of his name, no more important in itself than Clarence or George—if a little more euphonious. Now the title was a stinking weight, like a dead cat tied to a string round his neck, bloated with all the properties and tenants and farms and manors that belonged to it. To the title—not to him.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/778079372234901 

 

 

Adso, draped languidly as a scarf over the table, opened his eyes and gave a small inquisitive “mowp” at the scraping noise.
“Not edible,” I said, and the big celadon eyes went back to slits. Not all the way closed, though—and the tip of his tail began to stir. He was watching something, and I swung around to find Jemmy in the doorway, swathed in his father’s ratty old blue calico shirt. It nearly touched his feet and was falling off one bony little shoulder, but that clearly didn’t matter; he was wide-awake and urgent.
“Grannie! Fanny’s took bad!”
“Taken,” I said automatically, setting a plate over the top of the bowl of goose-grease to keep Adso out. “What’s the matter?”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/778703562172482

 

 

“Who taught ye to cast, Roger Mac?” His father-in-law took the trout as it came ashore, still flapping, and clubbed it neatly on a stone. “That was as pretty a touch as ever I’ve seen.”
Roger made a modest gesture of dismissal, but flushed a little with pleasure at the compliment; Jamie didn’t say such things lightly.
“My father,” he said.
“Aye?” Jamie looked startled, and Roger hastened to correct himself.
“The Reverend, I mean. He was really my great-uncle, and by marriage at that.”
“Still your father,” Jamie said, but smiled. He glanced toward the far side of the pool where Germain and Jemmy were squabbling over who’d caught the biggest fish. They had a respectable string, but hadn’t thought to keep their catches separate, so couldn’t tell who’d caught what.
“Ye dinna think it makes a difference, do ye? That Jem’s mine by blood and Germain by love?”
“You know I don’t.” Roger smiled himself at sight of the two boys. Germain was two years older than Jem, but slightly built, like both his parents. Jem had the long bones and wide shoulders of his grandfather—and his father, Roger thought, straightening his own shoulders. The two boys were much of a height, and the hair of both glowed red at the moment, the ruddy light of the sinking sun setting fire to Germain’s blond mop. “Where’s Fanny, come to think? She’d settle them.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/809510302425141

 

Manoke was his father’s friend; Lord John had never called him anything else. The Indian came and went as he pleased, generally without notice, though he was at Mt. Josiah more often than not. He wasn’t a servant or a hired man, but he did the cooking and washing-up when he was there, kept the chickens—yes, there were still chickens; William could hear them clucking and rustling as they settled in the trees near the house—and helped when there was game to be cleaned and butchered.
“Your hog?” William asked Cinnamon, with a brief jerk of the head toward the muffled firepit. They’d chosen to take their supper on the crumbling porch, enjoying the soft evening air, and keeping an eye on the drying meat, in case of marauding raccoons.
“Oui. Up there,” Cinnamon said, waving a big hand toward the north. “Two hours walk. A few pigs in the wood there, not many.”
William nodded. “Do you have a horse?” he asked. It was a fairly small hog, maybe sixty pounds, but heavy to carry for two hours—especially as Cinnamon presumably hadn’t known how far he’d have to go. He’d already told William that he’d never visited Mt. Josiah before.
Cinnamon nodded, his mouth full, and jerked his chin in the direction of the ramshackle tobacco barn. William wondered how long Manoke had been in residence; the place looked as though it had been deserted for years—and yet there were chickens…
The clucking and brief squawks of the settling birds reminded him suddenly and sharply of Rachel Hunter, and in the next breath, he found the scent of rain, wet chickens—and wet girl.
[italics]
“_…the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual."
"Perverse?" Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description, and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.
"The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a rainstorm. Perverse." She pulled out a linen towel, and began to dry her hair with it.
The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel against the shutters.
"Hmph," said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. "I expect she will be knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve her right." She flapped the folded towel open and began to dry her hair with it. "No great matter. I shall be pleased never to see any of those chickens again_."
[end italics]
The scent of Rachel’s wet hair was strong in his memory, and the sight of it, dark and straggling in tails down her back, the wet making her worn shift transparent in spots, with shadows of her soft pale skin beneath.
“What? I mean—I beg your pardon?” Manoke had said something to him, and the smell of rain vanished, replaced by hickory smoke, fried cornmeal and fish.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/811958522180319

 

 

Part of this is already in the first excerpt

 

The sun came low through the trees, but the trout were still biting, the water dappling with dozens of bright rings and the frequent splash of a leaping fish. Roger’s fingers tightened for a moment on his rod, tempted--but they had enough for supper and next morning’s breakfast, too. No point in catching more; there were a dozen casks of smoked and salted fish already put away in the cold-cellar, and the light was going.
Jamie showed no signs of moving, though. He was sitting on a comfortable stump, bare-legged and clad in nothing but his shirt, his old hunting plaid puddled on the ground behind; it had been a warm day for (September, October?) and the balm of it still lingered in the air. He glanced at the boys, who had forgotten their argument and were back at their lines, intent as a pair of kingfishers.
Jamie turned to Roger then, and said, in a quite ordinary tone of voice, “Do Presbyterians have the sacrament of Confession, _mac mo chinnidh_?”
Roger said nothing for a moment, taken aback both by the question and its immediate implications, and by Jamie’s addressing him as “son of my house”—a thing he’d done exactly once, at the calling of the clans at Mt. Helicon some years before.
The question itself was straight-forward, though, and he answered it that way.
“No. Catholics have seven sacraments but Presbyterians only recognize two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” He might have left it at that, but the first implication of the question was plain before him.
“D’ye have a thing ye want to tell me, Jamie?” He thought it might be the second time he’d called his father-in-law ‘Jamie’ to his face. “I can’t give ye absolution—but I can listen.”
He wouldn’t have said that Jamie’s face showed anything in the way of strain. But now it relaxed and the difference was sufficiently visible that his own heart opened to the man, ready for whatever he might say. Or so he thought.
“Aye.” Jamie’s voice was husky and he cleared his throat, ducking his head, a little shy. “Aye, that’ll do fine.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/812469432129228

 

 

I was having the delightful sort of dream where you realize that you’re asleep and are enjoying it extremely. I was warm, bonelessly relaxed, and my mind was an exquisite blank. I was just beginning to sink down through this cloudy layer of bliss to the deeper realms of unconsciousness when a violent movement of the mattress under me jerked me into instant alertness.
By reflex, I rolled onto my side and reached for Jamie. I hadn’t reached the stage of conscious thought yet, but my synapses had already drawn their own conclusions. He was still in bed, so we weren’t under attack and the house wasn’t afire. I heard nothing but his rapid breathing; the children were all right and no one had broken in. Ergo…it was his own dream that had wakened him.
This thought penetrated into the conscious part of my mind just as my hand touched his shoulder. He drew back, but not with the violent recoil he usually showed if I touched him too suddenly after a bad dream. He was awake, then; he knew it was me. _Thank God for that_, I thought, and drew a deep breath of my own.
“Jamie?” I said softly. My eyes were dark-adapted already; I could see him, half-curled beside me, tense, facing me.
“Dinna touch me, Sassenach,” he said, just as softly. “Not yet. Let it pass.” He’d gone to bed in a night-shirt; the room was still chilly. But he was naked now. When had he taken it off? And why?

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/823579324351572

 

 

“How old were you, the first time you saw a man killed?” Roger asked abruptly.
“Eight,” Jamie replied without hesitation. “In a fight during my first cattle raid. I wasna much troubled about it.”
Jamie stopped quite suddenly, and Roger had to step to the side to avoid running into him.
“Look,” Jamie said, and he did. They were standing at the top of a small rise, where the trees fell away for a moment, and the Ridge and the north side of the cove below it spread before them, a massive chunk of solid black against the indigo of the faded sky. Tiny lights pricked the blackness, though; the windows and sparking chimneys of a dozen cabins.
“It’s not only our wives and our weans, ken?” Jamie said, and nodded toward the lights. “It’s them, as well. All of them.” His voice held an odd note; a sort of pride—but rue and resignation, too.
_All of them_.
Seventy-three households in all, Roger knew. He’d seen the ledgers Jamie kept, written with painful care, noting the economy and welfare of each family who occupied his land—and his mind.
“_Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel_.” The quote sprang to mind and he’d spoken it aloud before he could think.
Jamie drew a deep, audible breath.
“Aye,” he said. “Sheep would be easier.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/836987206344117

 

 

Fanny was on her narrow bed, curled up tight as a hedgehog, her back to the door. She didn’t look round at the sound of my footsteps, but her shoulders rose up higher round her ears.
“Fanny?” I said softly. “Are you all right, sweetheart?” From Jemmy’s obvious concern about the blood, I’d been a bit worried—but I could see only a single small streak of blood and one or two spots on the muslin of her nightgown.
“I’m fine,” said a small, cold voice. “It’s juth—_just_—blood.”
“That’s quite true,” I said equably, though the tone in which she’d said it rather alarmed me. I sat down beside her, and put a hand on her shoulder. It was hard as wood, and her skin was cold. How long had she been lying there uncovered?
“I’m all right,” she said. “I got the rags. I’ll wath—_wash_—my rail in the morning.”
“Don’t trouble about it,” I said, and stroked the back of her head very lightly, as though she was a cat of uncertain temper. I wouldn’t have thought she could become any more tense, but she did. I took my hand away.
“Are you in pain?” I asked, in the business-like voice I used when taking a physical history from someone who’d come to my surgery. She’d heard it before, and the bony little shoulders relaxed, just a hair.
“Not weal—I mean, not _ree_-lee,” she said, pronouncing it very distinctly. It had taken no little practice for her to be able to pronounce words correctly, after I had done the frenectomy that had freed her from being tongue-tied, and I could tell that it annoyed her to be slipping back into the lisp of her bondage.
“It jusst feels _tight_,” she said. “Like a fist squeezing me right there.” She pushed her own fists into her lower abdomen in illustration.
“That sounds quite normal,” I assured her. “It’s just your uterus waking up, so to speak. It hasn’t moved noticeably before, so you wouldn’t have been aware of it.” I’d explained the internal structure of the female reproductive system to her, with drawings, and while she’d seemed mildly repulsed, she _had_ paid attention.
To my surprise, the back of her neck went pale at this, her shoulders hunching up again.
“Fanny?” I said, and ventured to touch her again, stroking her arm. “You’ve seen girls come into their courses before, haven’t you?” So far as we could estimate, she’d lived in a Philadelphia brothel since the age of five or so; I would have been astonished if she hadn’t seen almost everything the female reproductive system could do. And then it struck me, and I scolded myself for a fool. Of course. She _had_.
“Yess,” she said, in that cold, remote way. “It means two things. You can be got with child, and you can start to earn money.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/839918166051021

 

 

and the one that was already mentioned here 

 

“Ye healed me of something a good deal worse, Sassenach,” he said, and touched my hand gently. He’d touched me with his right hand, the maimed one.
“I didn’t,” I protested. “You did that yourself—you had to. All I did was…er…”
“Drug me wi’ opium and fornicate me back to life? Aye, that.”
“It wasn’t fornication,” I said, rather primly—but I turned my hand and laced my fingers tightly with his. “We were married.”
“Aye, it was,” he said, and his mouth tightened, as well as his grip. “It wasna you I was swiving, and ye ken that as well as I do.”
I swallowed, watching the fire-shadows move on the rough-hewn wall and recalling all too vividly the coldness of hard stone against my back and the fire-shot, fractured images that had splintered in my mind as his hands had closed around my neck. I cleared my throat by reflex.
“It was me at the end,” I said softly, and touched his face with my free hand. “You came back--to me.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/853448111364693

 

 

[Glaze Crazy]

Thanks for starting this thread Athena and for collecting all the excerpts Lianau.  I went looking through Diana's FB when she linked the last one on Twitter the other day and didn't see any others that had been posted recently.  I follow her on Twitter and Facebook but my Twitter is pretty busy and I'm not in FB a lot so unless I see her post something I easily miss it. (usually in the wee hours, I guess when she's up writing :-) ) 

 

I like the snippets and don't mind being spoiled a bit.  I don't think she posts real story spoiling stuff, just the little bits of daily life for the characters and such.  I'm one who likes the little glimpses into the future books. 

[WatchrTina]

Well, I'll go ahead and speculate a couple of things:

 

1. It seems clear from Book 8 that Jamie hunted down and killed the rapist -- the one that got away -- the one Claire ran into at the Trading Post.  If he did, Jamie may feel the need to confess it and with no priest nearby, Roger may be the next best thing.

 

2. Jamie's bad dream and the conversation about what happened at the end of book 1 may be linked.  Jamie may be dreaming of Randall.  Maybe killing the rapist reminded him of his own rapist. Maybe he's finally going to remember what happened at Culloden.  And maybe we're finally going to find out how Black Jack Randall came to be lying dead on top of Jamie in that field.  

[CatMack]

That speculation sounds pretty plausible to me. 

 

My speculation for this book isn't based on any of the released excerpts, just the previous books.  I think we spent way too much time with Bree and Roger and the kids in the 60s (or was it 70s by then) with the kidnapping for it to just go away.  It wasn't just whats-his-name, the guy who was fixated on Bree, there was a whole group of strangers who showed up to Lallybroch who were never explained.  I think we're going to see more people come to the past, related to that somehow.  Frank warned in his letter about what would happen if people knew, hinted at conspiracies.  There were just way too many lose threads hanging for me to buy it's over because they're back in the past.  And honestly one of my favorite aspects of this series has been when the 18th century people who know about the time travel, and the time travelers themselves, discuss or otherwise deal with the ramifications of time travel.  So I'm completely OK with more people coming back, though I wonder how they'd be used in the long run. 

 

I know Willie is a polarizing character, but however you feel about him it's clear he's sticking around, so I hope we get more growth from him in this book.  He really is quite young.  A lot of his more annoying qualities are things I remember myself and my friends exhibiting at that age, just not against the back drop of the revolutionary war obviously.  Point is, he has plenty of time to grow up and mature.  I believe when we left him he was committed to finding his missing cousin once and for all, yes?  And Jamie said something to him about how Willie had a claim to his help in whatever venture he deemed worthy, something like that.  I don't see Jamie or Claire leaving the ridge again for an extended time like the last two books, but I do think we'll see at least the occasional short adventure elsewhere (we're too far into the war to just sit out the rest of it on the secluded ridge, completely isolated from the bulk of the carnage yet to come).  I could see Willie ending up at the ridge to ask for Jamie's help again. That might just be wishful thinking though.  I don't dislike Willie, but I also don't find him interesting when he's not interacting with the other main characters I care more about, and I don't see how else he'll be integrated with the rest of the cast.  I can see him having scenes with Lord John, and I do like Lord John a lot on his own, but again if he's completely cut off from the Jamie/Claire family group I start to lose interest pretty quickly.

 

Do you guys think we'll ever see Lord John and/or Willie switch sides?  I'm not super familiar with how relations were between America and England immediately after the war, but I'd hate to think John and/or Willie will end up back in England, cut off from the other main characters.  Even if the books end before they really get to that part, I'd just hate to have that implication that they get separated permanently or semi-permanently. If they don't switch sides but fight for the English to the end, would either be able to stay if they wanted?  If they do go back to England, voluntarily or otherwise, would they be able to come back or even write?  I really don't know how contentious the relationship between America and England was or if there was any trading or commerce or travel or even just mail. 

[Glaze Crazy]

 

Do you guys think we'll ever see Lord John and/or Willie switch sides?  I'm not super familiar with how relations were between America and England immediately after the war, but I'd hate to think John and/or Willie will end up back in England, cut off from the other main characters.  Even if the books end before they really get to that part, I'd just hate to have that implication that they get separated permanently or semi-permanently. If they don't switch sides but fight for the English to the end, would either be able to stay if they wanted?  If they do go back to England, voluntarily or otherwise, would they be able to come back or even write?  I really don't know how contentious the relationship between America and England was or if there was any trading or commerce or travel or even just mail. 

 

I did a quick Wikipedia search for post-revolutionary era and it seems that anyone still loyal to the Crown and living in the Colonies had long since been harassed out  and had either sold out or had their lands and property seized by the state or continental government.  They either moved north to Canada (like Jocasta and Duncan). south to Florida or the West Indies, or back to Great Britain.  I don't expect to see either William or Lord John relinquishing their British citizenship to become Americans.  I would think they will sell or outright lose the property in Virginia by the end of the war, unless they can put it in trust with someone who is a Patriot who subsequently becomes an American citizen.  I couldn't find where there were any limits on travel or correspondence between the countries though, so I would think they could travel between England and the US afterwards.  Commerce returned between the countries, since Great Britain relied on cotton and tobacco from North America, just as before the American Revolution.  The War of 1812, as we call it, is part of Britain's Napoleonic Wars so if William returns to the British Army he could possibly return to North America with that conflict, but I think that timeframe is past what DG has said will be the end of the series.

[lianau]

I have this weird idea of Jamie "buying" Mount Josiah  so William doesn't lose it . And with Fanny at the Ridge William can always claim that he just wants to check up on her . 

[peacefrog]

There are tons of battles that happen in the general vicinity of the Ridge as the war moves to the south in the upcoming timeline. I expect Germaine to maybe have a part in them. I don't see this book spanning a long time especially since DG has said there will be a 10th. 

 

I agree about the nutters showing up from the 80's on the Ridge. I liked the structure of MOBY where we spend a chunk of time in each century but I guess we won't have that in this one.  There is no one to follow in the future, unless we see how Bree and Roger get to the Ridge.

[lianau]

New lines 

 

Jemmy was standing in the dark just outside the door and I nearly crashed into him.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, only just managing to say it in a whisper. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you asleep?”
He ignored this, looking into the dim light of the bedroom and the humped shadow on the wall, a deeply troubled look on his face.
“What happened to Fanny’s sister, Grannie?”
I hesitated, looking down at him. He was only ten. And surely it was his parents’ place to tell him what they thought he should know. But Fanny was his friend—and God knew, she needed a friend she could trust.
“Come down with me,” I said, turning him toward the stair with a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you while I make more tea. And _don’t_ bloody tell your mother I did.”
I told him, as simply as I could, and omitting the things Fanny had told me about the late Captain Harkness’s habits.
“Do you know the word ‘whore’—er…’hoor,’ I mean?” I amended, and the frown of incomprehension relaxed.
“Sure. Germain told me. Hoors are ladies that go to bed with men they aren’t married to. Fanny’s not a hoor, though—was her sister?” He looked troubled at the thought.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Not to put too fine a point on it. But women—or girls—who become whores do it because they have no other way to earn a living. Not because they want to, I mean.”
He looked confused. “How do they earn money?”
“Oh. The men pay them to—er—go to bed with them. Take my word for it,” I assured him, seeing his eyes widen in astonishment.
“I go to bed with Mandy and Fanny all the time,” he protested. “And Germain, too. I wouldn’t pay them money for being girls!”
“Jeremiah,” I said, pouring fresh hot water into the pot. “’Go to bed’ is a euphemism—do you know that word? It means saying something that sounds better than what you’re really talking about—for sexual intercourse.”
“Oh, _that_,” he said, his face clearing. “Like the pigs?”
“Rather like that, yes. Find me a clean cloth, will you? There should be some in the lower cupboard.” I knelt, knees creaking slightly, and scooped the hot stone out of the ashes with the poker. It made a small hissing sound as the cold air of the surgery hit the hot surface.
“So,” I said, reaching for the cloth he’d fetched me, and trying for as matter-of-fact a voice as could be managed, “Jane and Fanny’s parents had died, and they had no way to feed themselves, so Jane became a whore. But some men are very wicked—I expect you know that already,don’t you?” I added, glancing up at him, and he nodded soberly.
“Yes. Well, a wicked man came to the place where Jane and Fanny lived and wanted to make Fanny go to bed with him, even though she was much too young to do such a thing. And…er…Jane killed him.”
“Wow.”
I blinked at him, but it had been said with the deepest respect. I coughed, and began folding the cloth.
“It was very heroic of her, yes. But she—“
“How did she kill him?”
“With a knife,” I said, a little tersely, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. I knew them, thanks to Rachel and Lord John, and wished I didn’t.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/856383897737781

[Glaze Crazy]

From the wee hours this morning:

 

There was not only a quarter of an apple pie and cream to go on it, but a heel of sharp cheese, cold potato pancakes, salt in a twist of paper, and a dish containing the last of the pickled herrings he’d brought from Salem two weeks ago. And a jug of milk. And one of small-beer. And two cups, a knife for the cheese, and a pair of spoons. And an old dish-cloth, in case of spills. I sat down on the bed beside him and spread this tidily over my knees before picking up my own spoon.

“Shall I poke up the fire?” I asked. It was a bit chilly in the room, but Jamie was radiating a sleepy warmth, and I liked the irregular glimmer from the smoored hearth; it gave me a pleasantly dream-like feeling, a sense of midnight secrecy.

“No on my account, Sassenach. I’ll likely be asleep again, directly I’ve finished my supper.” He gave a sudden huge involuntary yawn, then shook his head as though driving off an imminent threat of sleep.

“Do you know a General Lincoln?” I asked. “Benjamin, I think his first name is.”

He paused, a bite of cheese halfway to his mouth and blinked once or twice.
“I wouldna say he’s a personal friend, but I’ve heard the name, aye. He’s commander of the Southern Army.” He ate the cheese slowly, swallowed, and added, “Why?”

“Denzell Hunter told me that the General suffers from narcolepsy. Your yawning just reminded me of it.”

He shot me a mildly suspicious look, and reached for a pickled herring.

“Do I want to know what that is?”

“Probably not. But on the off-chance that you ever meet General Lincoln, it might be helpful to know. It’s a rather fascinating condition wherein the patient falls quite suddenly asleep, no matter what he’s doing.”

That interested him; he ate the bit of herring but didn’t reach for another.

“No matter what? Even if he should be eating? Or in battle? That might be just a wee bit awkward, aye?”

“That appeared to be the possibility that was occupying Denny’s mind, yes.”

He yawned again, without warning.

“Does it come on suddenly? Or is it contagious? I think I may have caught it. Oh, God.” He yawned again and blinked, eyes watering slightly.

“I doubt narcolepsy is catching, but yawning is,” I said, smothering an involuntary gape. “Will you stop doing that?”

He let his head fall back, eyes closed, and gave a faint groan, then straightened up again and reached for the last of the pie.

I wasn’t surprised. He’d left at dawn, going after a hog that had been making repeated nightly efforts to root up my garden fence and devour the last of the neeps and yams. He’d tracked the beast for more than two miles before finding and killing it—and had then dragged it back, single-handed. Even gralloched, the thing weighed more than I did, but there were wolves about and he’d been unwilling to leave the carcass long enough to come home and fetch help. He and the hog had finally arrived, dead-tired and dead, respectively, just after nightfall.

I’d been of two minds about waking him—but he’d been too tired to eat much supper. And then again, it was apple pie. We finished the meal in a companionable silence, and after rinsing his mouth with water and spitting out the window, Jamie came back to bed like a heavy-eyed homing pigeon.

“I think I’ll work for a bit in the surgery,” I said, drawing the quilts up under his chin. His eyes were already half-shut. “I’ll be up in an hour or so.”

“Dinna hurry yourself on my account, Sassenach.” He snaked an arm out from under the covers and drew me down, giving me a sweet, pie-scented kiss with undertones of herring. “I willna be much good to ye in bed for another fortnight or so.”

“That a promise, is it?” I kissed him gently back. “I’ll circle the date on my calendar.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/857241040985400

 

Edited February 11, 2015 by Glaze Crazy

[lianau]

And another excerpt 

 

Roger raised his chin and I reached up carefully, fitting my fingers about his neck, just under his jaw. He’d just shaved; his skin was cool and slightly damp and I caught a whiff of the shaving soap Brianna made for him, scented with juniper berries. I was moved by the sense of ceremony in that small gesture--and moved much more by the hope in his eyes that he tried to hide.
“You know—“ I said hesitantly, and felt his Adam’s apple bob below my hand.
“I know,” he said gruffly. “No expectations. If something happens…well, it does. If not, I’m no worse off.”
I nodded, and felt gently about. I’d done that before, after his injury, tending the swelling and the rope-burn, now a ragged white scar. The tracheostomy I’d performed to save his life had left a smaller scar in the hollow of his throat, a slight vertical depression about an inch long. I passed my thumb over that, feeling the healthy rings of cartilage above and below. The lightness of the touch made him shiver suddenly, tiny goosebumps stippling his neck, and he gave the breath of a laugh.
“Goose walking on my grave,” he said.
“Stamping about on your throat, more like,” I said, smiling. “Tell me again what Dr. MacEwen said.”
I hadn’t taken my hand away, and felt the lurch of his Adam’s apple as he cleared his throat hard.
“He prodded my throat—much as you’re doing,” he added, smiling back. “And he asked me if I knew what a hyoid bone was. He said—“ Roger’s hand rose involuntarily toward his throat, but stopped a few inches from touching it, “—that mine was an inch or so higher than usual, and that if it had been in the normal place, I’d be dead.”
“Really,” I said, interested. I put a thumb just under his jaw and said, “Swallow, please.”
He did, and I touched my own neck and swallowed, still touching his.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s a small sample size, and granted, there may be differences attributable to gender—but he may well be right. Perhaps you’re a Neanderthal.”
“A what?” He stared at me.
“Just a joke,” I assured him. “But it’s true that one of the differences between the Neanderthals and modern humans is that their hyoid bone was much higher; for a long time, scientists didn’t think they even had a hyoid—it’s quite a small bone, and easily overlooked in burials of such an age--and thus concluded that they must have been mute. You rather need one for coherent speech” I added, seeing his blank look. “It anchors the tongue.”
“How extremely fascinating,” Roger said politely.
I cleared my own throat, and circled his neck once again.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/863741513668686

[tcay]

Another excerpt, this one with some tantalizing details that I SO BADLY want to discuss. Part of it is old stuff combined with newer passages.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/868441579865346:0

 

“Sweetheart,” I said, more gently, and put a hand under her chin to lift her face. Her eyes met mine like a blow, their soft brown nearly black with fear. Her chin was rigid, her jaw set tight, and I took my hand away.
“You don’t really think that we intend you to be a whore, Fanny?” She heard the incredulousness in my voice, and blinked. Once. Then looked down again.
“I’m…not good for anything else,” she said, in a small voice. “But I’m worth a lot of money—for…_that_.” She waved a hand over her lap, in a quick, almost resentful gesture.
I felt as though I’d been punched in my own belly. Did she really think—but she clearly did. Must have thought so, all the time she had been living with us. She’d seemed to thrive at first, safe from danger and well-fed, with the boys as companions. But the last month or so, she’d seemed withdrawn and thoughtful, eating much less. I’d seen the physical signs and reckoned them as due to her sensing the imminent change; had prepared the emmenagogue herbs, to be ready. That was apparently the case, but obviously I hadn’t guessed the half of it.
“That isn’t true, Fanny,” I said, and took her hand. She let me, but it lay in mine like a dead bird. “That’s _not_ your only worth.” Oh, God, did it sound as though she had another, and that’s why we had--
“I mean—we didn’t take you in because we thought you…you’d be profitable to us in some way. Not at all.” She turned her face away, with an almost inaudible sniffing noise. This was getting worse by the moment. I had a sudden memory of Brianna as a young teenager, and spending hours in her bedroom, mired in futile reassurances—_no, you aren’t ugly, of course you’ll have a boyfriend when it’s time, no, everybody doesn’t hate you_—I hadn’t been good at it then, and clearly those particular maternal skills hadn’t improved with age.
“We took you because we wanted you, sweetheart,” I said, stroking the unresponsive hand. “Wanted to take care of you.” She pulled it away and curled up again, face in her pillow.
“Do, you didn.” Her voice came thick, and she cleared her throat, hard. “William made Mr. Fraser take me.”
I laughed out loud, and she turned her head from the pillow to look at me, surprised.
“Really, Fanny,” I said. “Speaking as one who knows both of them rather well, I can assure you that no one in the world could make either one of those men do anything whatever against his will. Mr. Fraser is stubborn as a rock, and his son is just like him. How long have you known William?”
“Not…long,” she said, uncertain. “But--but he tried to save J-Jane. She liked him.” Sudden tears welled in her eyes and she turned her face back into the pillow.
“Oh,” I said, much more softly. “I see. You’re thinking of her. Of Jane.” Of course.
She nodded and put her face back in the pillow, small shoulders hunched and shaking. Her plait had unraveled and the soft brown curls fell away, exposing the white skin of her neck, slender as a stalk of blanched asparagus.
“It’th the only t-time I ever thaw her cry,” she said, the words only half-audible between emotion and muffling.
“Jane? What was it?”
“Her firtht—_first_—time. Wif—with--a man. When she came back and gave the bloody towel to Mithess Seacrest. She did that, and then she crawled into bed with me and cried. I held huh and—and petted huh—bu—I couldn’t make her thtop.” She pulled her arms under her and shook with silent sobs.
“Sassenach?” Jamie’s voice came from the doorway, husky with sleep. “What’s amiss? I rolled over and found Jem in my bed, instead of you.” He spoke calmly, but his eyes were fixed on Fanny’s shivering back. He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised, and moved his head slightly toward the door-jamb. Did I want him to leave?
I glanced down at Fanny and up at him with a helpless twitch of my shoulder, and he moved at once into the room, pulling up a stool beside Fanny’s bed. He noticed the blood-streaks at once and looked up at me again—surely this was my business?—but I shook my head, keeping a hand on Fanny’s back.
“Fanny’s missing her sister,” I said, addressing the only aspect of things I thought might be dealt with effectively at the moment.
“Ah,” Jamie said softly, and before I could stop him, had bent down and gathered her gently up into his arms. I stiffened for an instant, afraid that having a man touch her just now—but she turned into him at once, flinging her arms about his neck and sobbing into his chest.
He sat down, holding her on his knee, and I felt the unhappy tension in my own shoulders ease, seeing him smooth her hair and murmur things to her in a _Gaidhlìg_ she didn’t speak, but clearly understood as well as a horse or dog might.
Fanny went on sobbing for a bit, but slowly calmed under his touch, only hiccupping now and then.
“I saw your sister just the once,” he said softly. “Jane was her name, aye? Jane Eleanor. She was a bonny lass. And she loved ye dear, Frances. I ken that.”
Fanny nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks, and I looked at the corner where Mandy lay on the trundle. She was dead to the world, though, thumb plugged securely into her mouth. Fanny got herself under control within a few seconds, though, and I wondered whether she had been beaten at the brothel for weeping or displaying violent emotion.
“She did it fuh me,” she said, in tones of absolute desolation. “Killed Captain Harkness. And now she’th dead. It’th all my fault.” And despite the whiteness of her clenched knuckles, more tears welled in her eyes. Jamie looked at me over her head, then swallowed to get his own voice under control.
“Ye would have done anything for your sister, aye?” he said, gently rubbing her back between the bony little shoulderblades.
“Yes,” she said, voice muffled in his shoulder.
“Aye, of course. And she would ha’ done the same for you—and did. Ye wouldna have hesitated for a moment to lay down your life for her, and nor did she. It wasna your fault, _a nighean_.”
“It _was_! I shouldn’t have made a fuss, I should have—oh, Janie!”
She clung to him, abandoning herself to grief. Jamie patted her and let her cry, but he looked at me over the disheveled crown of her head and raised his brows.
I got up and came to stand behind him, a hand on his shoulder, and in murmured French, acquainted him in a few words with the other source of Fanny’s distress. He pursed his lips for an instant, but then nodded, never ceasing to pet her and make soothing noises. The tea had gone cold, particles of rosemary and ground ginger floating on the murky surface. I took up the pot and cup and went quietly out to make it fresh.
Jemmy was standing in the dark just outside the door and I nearly crashed into him.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, only just managing to say it in a whisper. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you asleep?”
He ignored this, looking into the dim light of the bedroom and the humped shadow on the wall, a deeply troubled look on his face.
“What happened to Fanny’s sister, Grannie?”
I hesitated, looking down at him. He was only ten. And surely it was his parents’ place to tell him what they thought he should know. But Fanny was his friend—and God knew, she needed a friend she could trust.
“Come down with me,” I said, turning him toward the stair with a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you while I make more tea. And _don’t_ bloody tell your mother I did.”
I told him, as simply as I could, and omitting the things Fanny had told me about the late Captain Harkness’s habits.
“Do you know the word ‘whore’—er…’hoor,’ I mean?” I amended, and the frown of incomprehension relaxed.
“Sure. Germain told me. Hoors are ladies that go to bed with men they aren’t married to. Fanny’s not a hoor, though—was her sister?” He looked troubled at the thought.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Not to put too fine a point on it. But women—or girls—who become whores do it because they have no other way to earn a living. Not because they want to, I mean.”
He looked confused. “How do they earn money?”
“Oh. The men pay them to—er—go to bed with them. Take my word for it,” I assured him, seeing his eyes widen in astonishment.
“I go to bed with Mandy and Fanny all the time,” he protested. “And Germain, too. I wouldn’t pay them money for being girls!”
“Jeremiah,” I said, pouring fresh hot water into the pot. “’Go to bed’ is a euphemism—do you know that word? It means saying something that sounds better than what you’re really talking about—for sexual intercourse.”
“Oh, _that_,” he said, his face clearing. “Like the pigs?”
“Rather like that, yes. Find me a clean cloth, will you? There should be some in the lower cupboard.” I knelt, knees creaking slightly, and scooped the hot stone out of the ashes with the poker. It made a small hissing sound as the cold air of the surgery hit the hot surface.
“So,” I said, reaching for the cloth he’d fetched me, and trying for as matter-of-fact a voice as could be managed, “Jane and Fanny’s parents had died, and they had no way to feed themselves, so Jane became a whore. But some men are very wicked—I expect you know that already, don’t you?” I added, glancing up at him, and he nodded soberly.
“Yes. Well, a wicked man came to the place where Jane and Fanny lived and wanted to make Fanny go to bed with him, even though she was much too young to do such a thing. And…er…Jane killed him.”
“Wow.”
I blinked at him, but it had been said with the deepest respect. I coughed, and began folding the cloth.
“It was very heroic of her, yes. But she—“
“How did she kill him?”
“With a knife,” I said, a little tersely, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. I knew them, thanks to Rachel and Lord John, and wished I didn’t.
“But the man was a soldier, and when the British army found out, they arrested Jane.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jem said, in tones of awed horror. “Did they hang her, like they tried to hang Dad?”
I tried to think whether I should tell him not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but on the one hand, he clearly hadn’t meant it that way—and for another, I was a blackened pot in that particular regard.
“They meant to. She was alone, and very much afraid—and she…well, she killed herself, darling.”
He looked at me for a long moment, face blank, then swallowed, hard.
“Did Jane go to Hell, Grannie?” he asked, in a small voice. “Is that why Fanny’s so sad?”
I’d wrapped the stone thickly in cloth; the heat of it glowed in the palms of my hands.
“No, sweetheart,” I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. “I’m quite sure she didn’t. God would certainly understand the circumstances. No, Fanny’s just missing her sister.”
He nodded, very sober.
“I’d miss Mandy, if she killed somebody and got—“ He gulped at the thought. I was somewhat concerned to note that the notion of Mandy killing someone apparently seemed reasonable to him, but then…
“I’m quite sure nothing like that would ever happen to Mandy. Here.” I gave him the wrapped stone. “Be careful with it.”
We made our way slowly upstairs, trailing warm ginger steam, and found Jamie sitting beside Fanny on the bed, a small collection of things laid out on the quilt between them. He looked up at me, flicked an eyebrow at Jem, and then nodded at the quilt.
“Frances was just showing me a picture of her sister. Would ye let Mrs. Fraser and Jem have a look, _a nighean_?”
Fanny’s face was still blotched from crying, but she had herself more or less back in hand, and she nodded soberly, moving aside a little.
The small bundle of possessions she had brought with her was unrolled, revealing a pathetic little pile of items: a nit comb, the cork from a wine-bottle, two neatly-folded hanks of thread, one with a needle stuck through it, a paper of pins, and a few small bits of tawdry jewelry. On the quilt was a sheet of paper, much folded and worn in the creases, with a pencil drawing of a girl.
“One of the punters dwew—_drew_—it, one night in the salon,” Fanny said, moving aside a little, so we could look.
It was no more than a sketch, but the artist had caught a spark of life. Jane had been lovely in outline, straight-nosed and with a delicate, ripe mouth, but there was neither flirtation nor demureness in her expression. She was looking half over her shoulder, half-smiling, but with an air of mild scorn in her look.
“She’s pretty, Fanny,” Jemmy said, and came to stand by her. He patted her arm as he would have patted a dog, and with as little self-consciousness.
Jamie had given Fanny a handkerchief, I saw; she sniffed and blew her nose, nodding.
“This is all I have,” she said, her voice hoarse as a young toad’s. “Just this and her wock—locket.”
“This?” Jamie stirred the little pile gently with a big forefinger, and withdrew a small brass oval, dangling on a chain. “Is it a miniature of Jane, then, or maybe a lock of her hair?”
Fanny shook her head, taking the locket from him.
“No,” she said. “It’s a picture of our muv-mother.” She slid a thumbnail into the side of the locket and flicked it open. I bent forward to look, but the miniature inside was hard to see, shadowed as it was by Jamie’s body.
“May I?” She handed me the locket and I turned to hold it close to the candle. The woman inside had dark, somewhat curly hair like Fanny’s—and I thought I could make out a resemblance to Jane in the nose and set of chin, though it wasn’t a particularly skillful rendering.
Behind me, I heard Jamie say, quite casually, “Frances, no man will ever take ye against your will, while I live.”
There was a startled silence, and I turned round to see Fanny staring up at him. He touched her hand, very gently.
“D’ye believe me, Frances?” he said quietly.
“Yes,” she whispered, after a long moment, and all the tension left her body in a sigh like the east wind.
Jemmy leaned against me, head pressing my elbow, and I realized that I was just standing there, my eyes full of tears. I blotted them hastily on my sleeve, and pressed the locket closed. Or tried to; it slipped in my fingers and I saw that there was a name inscribed inside it, opposite the miniature.
“Faith,” it said.

[Petunia846]

What is it you want to discuss?

For me it was the Faith part. I did some math in my head and then I said...no, surely she wouldn't. Must be a coincidence.

[tcay]

Yes, it's the Faith part. Even before the name was mentioned, the woman in the picture was described as having dark curly hair. Certainly could be a red herring but at some point we have to find out more about Claire's ancestry, right?

[Glaze Crazy]

Thanks for posting that last one, tcay. If you look at the comments on the FB page, someone notes that Faith died in childbirth. Diana replies that more than one person can be named Faith. So other than the name, I don't see that there would be any direct connection. I do suspect that Fergus and Germain will turn out to be Claire's French Beauchamp ancestors though. Too many clues so far for DG not to make that connection eventually.

[Shorty186]

If Diana was going to bring any character back from implausible death, I'd want it to be Jane. She's the only thing that made William interesting.

[Petunia846]

I actually hope she's not going there, but it certainly made my ears perk up.

[auntlada]

On the one hand, that would be neat, but on the other hand, it's a little too soap-operaish. Claire actually held Faith. She was pretty out of it, but surely she would have noticed the difference between a dead baby and a live one. And even if she was only barely alive, at that time, with no nearby NICU, she wasn't likely to live.

[tcay]

Yeah this doesn't seem to be the book series where people come back from the dead, and a switched at birth scenario would be... odd. It was more just that the name jumped out at me, paired with the physical description. There's a deliberate choice behind using it, and now I'm just super curious what that motivation could be.

[peacefrog]

This is the book of blue light healing though...

 

I don't think it's her but there must be a connection to Claire coming from somewhere soon.

[nodorothyparker]

I don't even want to think about this.  Because if Jamie and Claire's Faith somehow magically survived to also be Jane and Fanny's mother, that means William had sex with his niece.  I realize in one of the earlier books Roger and Brianna joked about how she's his six or seven times removed great-aunt, but not even remotely the same thing.  Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, and I'm good with leaving it at that.  At least I hope so.

[Petunia846]

Ha! I didn't even think about that part.

 

I want to stress that I don't think it is their Faith, but I do think that Claire would think about how that could have been, and how therefore Fanny could have been her actual grandchild. They're already raising her and treating her like it, and just seeing that name would bring home how many things could have been. I think that's why it leaves Claire so moved, not just, "Oh, that's the name of our baby." It is a coincidence, but it's not just your average coincidence, it's a coincidence with emotional baggage.

[Dejana]

Faith, alive? That would be some "undoing Erica Kane's abortion" level of soap opera rewriting. Please no, Diana! But seeing the rest of that scene explains the latter part of it, with Jemmy getting so much information.

[Tif]

I didn't get the vibe that it WAS Faith, just that it was the name brought Jamie and Claire to attention.

[lianau]

next parts

 

“I like goats,” Jenny said, shoving aside a pair of questing lips. “[shoo, goat.] Sheep are good-hearted things, save the ram-lambs tryin’ to knock ye over, but they’re no bright. A goat has a mind of its own.”
“Aye, and so do you. Ian always said ye liked the goats because they’re just as stubborn as you are.”
She gave him a long, level look.
“Pot,” she said succinctly.
“Kettle,” he replied, flicking his grass-stem toward her nose. She grabbed it out of his hand and fed it to the goat.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/872016422841195

 

“God, I miss the old bugger,” Jamie said impulsively. Jenny glanced at him and smiled ruefully.
“So do I. I wonder sometimes if he’s with them now—mam and da.”
That notion startled Jamie—he’d never thought of it—and he laughed, shaking his head. “Well, if he is, I suppose he’s happy.”
“I hope that’s the way of it,” Jenny said, growing serious. “I always wished he could ha’ been buried with them, at Lallybroch.
Jamie nodded, his throat suddenly tight. Murtagh lay with the fallen of Culloden, buried in some anonymous pit on that silent moor, his bones mingled with the others. No cairn for those who loved him to come and leave a stone to say so.
Jenny laid a hand on his arm, warm through the cloth of his sleeve.
“Dinna mind it,_ a brathair_,” she said softly. “He had a good death, and you with him at the end.”
“How would you know it was a good death?” Emotion made him speak more roughly than he meant, but she only blinked once, and then her face settled again.
“Ye told me, idiot,” she said dryly. “Several times. D’ye not recall that?”
He stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending.
“I told ye? How? I dinna ken what happened.”
Now it was her turn to be surprised.
“Ye’ve forgotten? “ She frowned at him. “Aye, well…it’s true ye were off your heid wi’ fever for a good ten days when they brought ye home. Ian and I took it in turn to sit with ye—as much to stop the doctor takin’ your leg off as anything else. Ye can thank Ian ye’ve still got that one,” she added, nodding sharply at his left leg. “He sent the doctor away; said he kent well ye’d rather be dead.” Her eyes filled abruptly with tears, and she turned away.
He caught her by the shoulder and felt her bones, fine and light as a kestrel’s under the cloth of her shawl.
“Jenny,” he said softly. “He didna want to be dead. Believe me. I did, aye…but not him.”
“No, he did at first,” she said, and swallowed . “But ye wouldna let him, he said—and he wouldna let you, either.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, roughly. He took hold of it, and kissed it, her fingers cold in his hand.
“Ye dinna think ye had anything to do with it?” he asked, straightening up and smiling down at her. “For either of us?”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/878760172166820

[lianau]

And again

 

“There’s a bear up here, is there?” Jenny asked, turning back to him. “Shall I take the goats back down?”
“It might be. Jo Beardsley saw it a few days ago, here in the meadow, but there’s no fresh sign.”
Jenny thought that over for a moment, then sat down on a lichened rock, spreading her skirts out neatly. The goats had gone back to their grazing, and she raised her face to the sun, closing her eyes.
“Only a fool would hunt a bear alone,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Claire told me that.”
“Did she?” he said dryly. “Did she tell ye the last time I killed a bear, I did it alone, with my dirk? _ And_ that she hit me in the heid wi’ a fish whilst I was doin’ it?”
She opened her eyes and gave him a look.
“She didna say a fool canna be lucky,” she pointed out. “And if you didna have the luck o’ the devil himself, ye’d have been dead six times over by now.”
“Six?” He frowned, disturbed, and her brow lifted in surprise.
“I wasna really counting,” she said. “It was only a guess. What is it, _a graidh_?”
That casual “_O, love_,” caught him unexpectedly in a tender place, and he coughed to hide it.
“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Only, when I was young in Paris, a fortune-teller told me I’d die nine times before my death. D’ye think I should count the fever after Laoghaire shot me?”
She shook her head definitely.
“Nay, ye wouldna have died even had Claire not come back wi’ her wee stabbers. Ye would have got up and gone after her within a day or two.”
He smiled.
“I might’ve.”
His sister made a small noise in her throat that might have been laughter or derision.
They were silent for a moment, both with heads lifted, listening to the wood. The dripping had ceased now, and you could hear a treepie close by, with a call exactly like a rusty hinge opening. Then there was a loud _quah-quah_ as a magpie called from somewhere behind him, and he saw Jenny look up over his shoulder wide-eyed.
“Just one?” he said, keeping his voice calm, but feeling a tightness between his shoulder-blades. _One for sorrow_…
She held up a hand, silencing him, and sat listening, her eyes combing the branches for a second bird. _ Two for mirth_… Her face lightened as a long, shrill _quahhhhhhh_ came from the left and he swung round to see the second magpie clinging to a swaying pine branch, a beady eye fixed on the ground. He relaxed and drew breath.
So did Jenny, and taking up the conversation where she’d left it, asked, “D’ye hold it against me, that I made ye marry Laoghaire?”
He gave her a look.
“What makes ye think ye could make me do_ anything_ I didna want to, ye wee fuss-budget?”
“What the devil is a fuss-budget?” she demanded, frowning up at him.
“A bag of nuisance, so far as I can tell,” he admitted. “Jemmy called Mandy it last week.” A sudden dimple appeared near Jenny’s mouth, but she didn’t actually laugh.
“Aye,” she said. “Ye ken what I mean.”
“I do,” he said. “And I don’t. Hold it against ye, I mean. She didna actually kill me, after all.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/883559828353521

[lianau]

Outlander started in Germany and we got this to celebrate . It's long and contains a few of the lines already posted .

 

The fly spiraled down, green and yellow as a falling leaf, to land among the rings of the rising hatch. It floated for a second on the surface, maybe two, then vanished in a tiny splash, yanked out of sight by voracious jaws. Roger flicked the end of his rod sharply to set the hook, but there was no need. The trout were hungry this evening, striking at everything, and his fish had taken the hook so deep that bringing it in needed nothing but brute force.
It came up fighting, though, flapping and silver in the last of the light. He could feel its life through the line, fierce and bright, so much bigger than the fish itself, and his heart rose to meet it.
“Who taught ye to cast, Roger Mac?” His father-in-law took the trout as it came ashore, still flapping, and clubbed it neatly on a stone. “That was as pretty a touch as ever I’ve seen.”
Roger made a modest gesture of dismissal, but flushed a little with pleasure at the compliment; Jamie didn’t say such things lightly.
“My father,” he said.
“Aye?” Jamie looked startled, and Roger hastened to correct himself.
“The Reverend, I mean. He was really my great-uncle, and by marriage at that.”
“Still your father,” Jamie said, but smiled. He glanced toward the far side of the pool where Germain and Jemmy were squabbling over who’d caught the biggest fish. They had a respectable string, but hadn’t thought to keep their catches separate, so couldn’t tell who’d caught what.
“Ye dinna think it makes a difference, do ye? That Jem’s mine by blood and Germain by love?”
“You know I don’t.” Roger smiled himself at sight of the two boys. Germain was two years older than Jem, but slightly built, like both his parents. Jem had the long bones and wide shoulders of his grandfather—and his father, Roger thought, straightening his own shoulders. The two boys were much of a height, and the hair of both glowed red at the moment, the ruddy light of the sinking sun setting fire to Germain’s blond mop. “Where’s Fanny, come to think? She’d settle them.”
Frances was twelve, but sometimes seemed much younger—and often startlingly older. She’d been fast friends with Germain when Jem had arrived on the Ridge, and rather stand-offish, fearing that Jem would come between her and her only friend. But Jem was an open, sweet-tempered lad, and Germain knew a good deal more about how people worked than did the average eleven-year-old ex-pickpocket, and shortly the three of them were to be seen everywhere together, giggling as they slithered through the shrubbery, intent on some mysterious errand, or turning up at the end of churning, too late to help with the work, but just in time for a glass of fresh buttermilk.
“Ach, the poor wee lassie started her courses last night.” Jamie lifted a shoulder in an economical shrug that conveyed acknowledgement of the situation, regret, and resignation. “She’s no feeling just that well in herself.”
Roger nodded, threading the stringer through the fish’s dark-red gill slit. He knew what Jamie meant. Jem’s arrival hadn’t stopped Fanny’s friendship with Germain—but this might. Or alter it irrevocably, which would likely come to the same thing, so far as Fanny was concerned.
There was nothing to be done about it, though, and neither man said more.
The sun came low through the trees, but the trout were still biting, the water dappling with dozens of bright rings and the frequent splash of a leaping fish. Roger’s fingers tightened for a moment on his rod, tempted--but they had enough for supper and next morning’s breakfast, too. No point in catching more; there were were a dozen casks of smoked and salted fish already put away in the cold-cellar, and the light was going.
Jamie showed no signs of moving, though. He was sitting on a comfortable stump, bare-legged and clad in nothing but his shirt, his old hunting plaid puddled on the ground behind; it had been a warm day for (September, October?) and the balm of it still lingered in the air. He glanced at the boys, who had forgotten their argument and were back at their poles, intent as a pair of kingfishers.
Jamie turned to Roger then, and said, in a quite ordinary tone of voice, “Do Presbyterians have the sacrament of Confession, _mac mo chinnidh_?”
Roger said nothing for a moment, taken aback both by the question and its immediate implications, and by Jamie’s addressing him as “son of my house”—a thing he’d done exactly once, at the calling of the clans at Mt. Helicon some years before.
The question itself was straight-forward, though, and he answered it that way.
“No. Catholics have seven sacraments but Presbyterians only recognize two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” He might have left it at that, but the first implication of the question was plain before him.
“D’ye have a thing ye want to tell me, Jamie?” He thought it might be the second time he’d called his father-in-law ‘Jamie’ to his face. “I can’t give ye absolution—but I can listen.”
He wouldn’t have said that Jamie’s face showed anything in the way of strain. But now it relaxed and the difference was sufficiently visible that his own heart opened to the man, ready for whatever he might say. Or so he thought.
“Aye.” Jamie’s voice was husky and he cleared his throat, ducking his head, a little shy. “Aye, that’ll do fine. D’ye remember the night we took Claire back from the bandits?”
“I’m no likely to forget it,” Roger said, staring at him. He cut his eyes at the boys, but they were still at it, and he looked back at Jamie. “Why?” he asked, wary.
“Were ye there wi’ me, at the last, when I broke Hodgepile’s neck and Ian asked me what to do with the rest? I said, ‘Kill them all.’”
“I was there.” He had been. And he didn’t want to go back. Three words and it was all there, just below the surface of memory, still cold in his bones: black night in the forest, a sear of fire across his eyes, chilling wind and the smell of blood. The drums—a _bodhran_ thundering against his arm, two more behind him. Screaming in the dark. The sudden shine of eyes and the stomach-clenching feel of a skull caving in.
“I killed one of them,” he said abruptly. “Did you know that?”
Jamie hadn’t looked away and didn’t now; his mouth compressed for a moment, and he nodded.
“I didna see ye do it,” he said. “But it was plain enough in your face, next day.”
“I don’t wonder.” Roger’s throat was tight and the words came out thick and gruff. He was surprised that Jamie had noticed—had noticed anything at all on that day other than Claire, once the fighting was over. The image of her, kneeling by a creek, setting her own broken nose by her reflection in the water, the blood streaking down over her bruised and naked body, came back to him with the force of a punch in the solar plexus.
“Ye never ken how it will be.” Jamie lifted one shoulder and let it fall; he’d lost the lace that bound his hair, snagged by a tree branch, and the thick red strands stirred in the evening breeze. “A fight like that, I mean. What ye recall and what ye don’t. I remember everything about that night, though—and the day beyond it.”
Roger nodded, but didn’t speak. It was true that Presbyterians had no sacrament of Confession—and he rather regretted that they didn’t; it was a useful thing to have in your pocket. Particularly, he supposed, if you led the sort of life Jamie had. But any minister knows the soul’s need to speak and be understood, and that he could give.
“I expect ye do,” he said. “Do ye regret it, then? Telling the men to kill them all, I mean.”
“Not for an instant.” Jamie gave him a brief, fierce glance. “Do ye regret your part of it?”
“I—“ Roger stopped abruptly. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about it, but… “I regret that I had to,” he said carefully. “Very much. But I’m sure in my own mind that I did have to.”
Jamie’s breath came out in a sigh.
“Ye’ll know Claire was raped, I expect.” It wasn’t a question, but Roger nodded. Claire hadn’t spoken of it, even to Brianna—but she hadn’t had to.
“The man who did it wasna killed, that night. She saw him alive last month, at Beardsley’s.”
The evening breeze had turned chilly, but that wasn’t what raised the hairs on Roger’s forearms. Jamie was a man of precise speech—and he’d started this conversation with the word “confession.” Roger took his time about replying.
“I’m thinking that ye’re not asking my opinion of what ye should do about it.”
Jamie sat silent for a moment, dark against the blazing sky.
“No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”
“Grand-da! Look!” Jem and Germain were scrambling over the rocks and brush, each with a string of shimmering trout, dripping dark streaks of blood and water down the boys’ breeks, the swaying fish gleaming bronze and silver in the last of the evening light.
Roger turned back from the boys in time to see the flicker of Jamie’s eye as he glanced round at the boys, the sudden light on his face catching a troubled, inward look that vanished in an instant as he smiled and raised a hand to his grandsons, reaching out to admire their catch.
_Jesus Christ_, Roger thought. He felt as though an electric wire had run through his chest for an instant, small and sizzling. _He was wondering if they were old enough yet. To know about things like this._
“We decided we got six each,” Jemmy was explaining, proudly holding up his string and turning it so his father and grandfather could appreciate the size and beauty of his catch.
“And these are Fanny’s,” Germain said, lifting a smaller string on which three plump trout dangled. “We decided she’d ha’ caught some, if she was here.”
“That was a kind thought, lads,” Jamie said, smiling. “I’m sure the lassie will appreciate it.”
“Mmphm,” said Germain, though he frowned a little. “Will she still be able to come fishin’ with us, Grand-pere? Mrs. Wilson said she wouldn’t, now she’s a woman.”
Jemmy made a disgusted noise and elbowed Germain. “Dinna be daft,” he said. “My mam’s a woman and she goes fishin’. She hunts, too, aye?”
Germain nodded, but looked unconvinced.
“Aye, she does,” he admitted. “Mr. Crombie doesna like it, though, and neither does Heron.”
“Heron?” Roger said, surprised. Hiram Crombie was under the impression that women should cook, clean, spin, sew, mind children, feed stock and keep quiet save when praying. But Standing Heron Bradshaw was a Cherokee who’d married one of the Moravian girls from Salem, and settled on the other side of the Ridge. “Why? The Cherokee women plant their own crops and I’m sure I’ve seen them catching fish with nets and fish-traps by the fields.”
“Heron didna say about catching fish,” Jem explained. “He says women canna hunt, though, because they stink o’ blood, and it drives the game away.”
“Well, that’s true,” Jamie said, to Roger’s surprise. “But only when they’ve got their courses. And even so, if she stays downwind…”
“Would a woman who smells o’ blood not draw bears or painters?” Germain asked. He looked a little worried at the thought.
“Probably not,” Roger said dryly, hoping he was right. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t suggest any such thing to your Auntie. She might take it amiss.”
Jamie made a small, amused sound and shooed the boys.
“Get on wi’ ye, lads. We’ve a few things yet to talk of. Tell your grannie we’ll be in time for supper, aye?”
They waited, watching ‘til the boys were safely out of hearing. The breeze had died away now and the last slow rings on the water spread and flattened, disappearing into the gathering shadows. Tiny flies began to fill the air, survivors of the hatch.
“Ye did it, then?” Roger asked. He was wary of the answer; what if it wasn’t done, and Jamie wished his help in the matter?
But Jamie nodded, his broad shoulders relaxing.
“Claire didna tell me about it, ken. I saw at once that something was troubling her, o’ course…” A thread of rueful amusement tinged his voice; Claire’s glass face was famous. “But when I told her so, she asked me to let it bide, and give her time to think.”
“Did you?”
“No. “ The amusement had gone. “I saw it was a serious thing. I asked my sister; she told me. She was wi’ Claire at Beardsley’s, aye? She saw the fellow, too, and wormed it out of Claire what the matter was.
“Claire said to me—when I made it clear I kent what was going on—that it was all right; she was trying to forgive the bastard. And thought she was makin’ progress with it. Mostly.” Jamie’s voice was matter-of-fact, but Roger thought he heard an edge of regret in it.
“Do you…feel that you should have let her deal with it? It _is_ a—a process, to forgive. Not a single act, I mean.” He felt remarkably awkward, and coughed to clear his throat.
“I ken that,” Jamie said, in a voice dry as sand. “Few men ken it better.”
A hot flush of embarrassment burned its way up Roger’s chest and into his neck. He could feel it take him by the throat, and couldn’t speak at all for a moment.
“Aye,” Jamie said, after a moment. “Aye, it’s a point. But I think it’s maybe easier to forgive a dead man than one who’s walkin’ about under your nose. And come to that, I thought she’d have an easier time forgiving me than him.” He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “And…whether she could bear the thought of the man living near us or not—I couldn’t.”
Roger made a small sound of acknowledgment; there seemed nothing else useful to say.
Jamie didn’t move, or speak. He sat with his head slightly turned away, looking out over the water, where a fugitive light glimmered over the breeze-touched surface.”
“It was maybe the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he said at last, very quietly.
“Morally, do you mean?” Roger asked, his own voice carefully neutral. Jamie’s head turned toward him, and Roger caught a blue flash of surprise as the last of the sun touched the side of his face.
“Och, no,” his father-in-law said at once. “Only hard to do. “
“Aye.” Roger let the silence settle again, waiting. He could feel Jamie thinking, though the man didn’t move. Did he need to tell it to someone, re-live it and thus ease his soul by full confession? He felt in himself a terrible curiosity, and at the same time, a desperate wish not to hear. He drew breath and spoke abruptly.
“I told Brianna. That I’d killed Boble—and how. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Jamie’s face was completely in shadow, but Roger could feel those blue eyes on own face, fully lit by the setting sun. With an effort, he didn’t look down.
“Aye?” Jamie said, his voice calm, but definitely curious. “What did she say to ye? If ye dinna mind telling me, I mean.”
“I—well. To tell the truth, the only thing I remember for sure is that she said, ‘I love you.’” That was the only thing he’d heard, through the echo of drums and the drumming of his own pulse in his ears. He’d told her kneeling, his head in her lap. She’d kept on saying it then; “I love you,” her arms wrapping his shoulders, sheltering him with the fall of her hair, absolving him with her tears.
For a moment, he was back inside that memory, and came to himself with a start, realizing that Jamie had said something.
“What did you say?”
“I said—and how is it Presbyterians dinna think marriage is a sacrament?”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/904423732933797

[lianau]

I figured I'd do another daily lines collection 

 

“Does my touch feel warm to you now?” It should, I thought; his skin was cool from the evaporation of shaving.
“Yes,” he said, not opening his eyes. “But it’s on the outside. It was on the inside when MacEwan…did what he did.” His dark brows drew together in concentration. “It…I felt it…here—“ Reaching up, he moved my thumb to rest just to the right of center, directly beneath the hyoid. “And….here.” His eyes opened in surprise, and he pressed two fingers to the flesh above his collarbone, an inch or two to the left of the suprasternal notch. “How odd; I hadn’t remembered that.”
“And he touched you there, as well?” I moved my lower fingers down and felt the quickening of my senses that often happened when I was fully engaged with a patient’s body. Roger felt it, too—his eyes flashed to mine, startled.
“What--?” he began, but before either of us could speak further, there was a high-pitched yowl outside. This was instantly followed by a confusion of young voices, more yowling, then a voice immediately identifiable as Mandy in a passion, bellowing, “You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re _bad_ and I hate you! You’re bad and youse going to HELL!”
Roger leapt to his feet and thrust aside the makeshift gauze screen that covered the window.
“Amanda!” he bellowed. “Come in here right now!” Over his shoulder, I saw Amanda, face contorted with rage, trying to grab her doll, Esmeralda, which Germain was dangling by one arm, just above her head, dancing to keep away from Amanda’s concerted attempts to kick him.
Startled, Germain looked up, and Amanda connected full-force with his shin. She was wearing the stout half-boots Jamie had bought for her from the cobbler in Salem, and the crack of impact was clearly audible, though instantly superceded by Germain’s cry of pain. Jemmy, looking appalled, grabbed Esmeralda, thrust her into Amanda’s arms, and with a guilty glance over his shoulder, ran for the woods, followed by a hobbling Germain.
“Jeremiah!” Roger roared. “Stop right there!” Jem froze as though hit by a death-ray; Germain didn’t, and vanished with a wild rustling into the shrubbery.
I’d been watching the boys, but a faint choking noise made me glance sharply at Roger. He’d gone pale, and was clutching his throat with both hands. I seized his arm.
“Are you all right?”
“I…don’t know.” He spoke in a rasping whisper, but gave me the shadow of a pained smile. “Think I—might have sprained something.”
“Daddy?” said a small voice from the doorway. Amanda sniffled dramatically, wiping tears and snot all over her face. “Is you mad at me, Daddy?”
Roger took an immense breath, coughed, and went over, squatting down to take her in his arms.
“No, sweetheart,” he said softly—but in a fairly normal voice, and something clenched inside me began to relax. “I’m not mad. You mustn’t tell people they’re going to hell, though. Come here, let’s wash your face.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/908934545816049

 

 

 

 

 

William carried his pistol loaded, but not primed in case of accident. He took an instant to prime it now, thrusting it back into its holster before walking around the corner of the house.
It _was_ Indians—or one, at least. A half-naked man squatted in the shade of a huge beech tree, tending a small firepit covered with damp burlap; William could smell the sharp scent of fresh-cut hickory logs, mingled with the tang of blood and char. The Indian—he looked young, though large and very muscular--had his back to William and was deftly stripping the carcass of a small hog, slicing off ragged strips of meat and tossing them into a pile on a flattened burlap sack that lay beside the fire.
“Hallo, there,” William said, raising his voice. The man looked round, blinking against the smoke and waving it out of his face. He rose slowly, the knife he’d been using still in his hand, but William had spoken pleasantly enough, and the stranger wasn’t menacing. He also wasn’t a stranger. He stepped out of the tree’s shadow, the sunlight hit his hair, and William felt a jolt of astonished recognition.
So did the young man, by the look on his face.
“Lieutenant?” he said, disbelieving. He looked William quickly up and down, registering the lack of uniform, and his big dark eyes fixed on William’s face. “Lieutenant…Lord Ellesmere?”
“I used to be. Mr. Cinnamon, isn’t it?” He couldn’t help smiling as he spoke the name, and the other’s mouth twisted wryly in acknowledgement. The young man’s hair was no more than an inch long, but only shaving it off entirely would have disguised either its distinctive deep reddish-brown color or its exuberant curliness. A mission orphan, he owed his name to it.
“John Cinnamon, yes. Your servant…sir.” The erstwhile scout gave him a presentable half-bow, though the “sir” was spoken with something of a question.
“William Ransom. Yours, sir,” William said, smiling, and thrust out his hand. John Cinnamon was a couple of inches shorter than himself, and a couple of inches broader; the scout had grown into himself in the last two years and possessed a very solid hand-shake.
“I trust you’ll pardon my curiosity, Mr. Cinnamon—but how the devil do you come to be here?” William asked, letting go. He’d last seen John Cinnamon two years before, in Canada, where he’d spent much of a long, cold winter hunting and trapping in company with the half-Indian scout, who was near his own age.
He wondered briefly if Cinnamon had come in search of him, but that was absurd. He didn’t think he’d ever mentioned Mount Josiah to the man—and even if he had, Cinnamon couldn’t possibly have expected to find him here.
“Ah.” To William’s surprise, a slow flush washed Cinnamon’s broad cheekbones. “I—er—I…well, I’m on my way south.” The flush grew deeper.
William cocked an eyebrow. While it was true that Virginia was south of Quebec and that there was a good deal of country souther still, Mount Josiah wasn’t on the way to anywhere. No roads led here. He had himself come upriver on a barge, then obtained a small canoe in Richmond and paddled on above the Breaks, that stretch of falls and turbulent water where the land suddenly collapsed upon itself. He’d seen perhaps three people during his time above the Breaks—all of them headed the other way.
Suddenly, though, Cinnamon’s wide shoulders relaxed and the look of wariness was erased by relief.
“In fact, I came to see my friend,” he said, and nodded toward the house. William turned quickly, to see another Indian picking his way through the raspberry brambles littering what used to be a small croquet lawn.
“Manoke!” he said. Then shouted “Manoke!”, making the older man look up. The older Indian’s face lighted with joy, and a sudden uncomplicated happiness washed through William’s heart, cleansing as spring rain.
The Indian was lithe and spare as he’d always been, his face a little more lined. His hair smelt of woodsmoke when William embraced him, and the gray in it was the same soft color, but it was still thick and coarse as ever—he could see that easily; he was looking down on it from above, Manoke’s cheek pressed into his shoulder.
“What did you say?” he asked, releasing Manoke.
“I said, ‘My, how you have grown, boy,” Manoke said, grinning up at him. “Do you need food?”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/917709234938580

 

 

 

 

[Here are Jamie and Jenny in a meadow above the Big House. They’ve been having a serious conversation about all kinds of things, but Jenny had mentioned bringing her rosary because she liked to pray while watching her goats.]
They sat for a little while, not speaking. The sun had come well above the treetops by now, and while the air was still fresh and sweet, there was no longer any chill in it.
“Aye, well,” he said, at last, standing up. “Do ye still want to pray?” For she still held the pearl rosary, dangling from one hand. He didn’t wait for her reply, but reaching into his shirt and drew out the wooden rosary that he wore about his neck.
“Oh, ye’ve got your beads after all,” she said, surprised. “Ye didna have your rosary in Scotland, so I thought ye’d lost it. Meant to make ye a new one, but there wasna time, what with Ian…” She lifted one shoulder, the gesture encompassing the whole of the terrible months of Ian’s long dying.
He touched the beads, self-conscious. “Aye, well…I had, in a way of speaking. I…gave it to William. When he was a wee lad, and I had to leave him at Helwater. I gave him the beads for something to keep—to…remember me by.”
“Mmphm.” She looked at him with sympathy. “Aye. And I expect he gave them back to ye in Philadelphia, did he?”
“He did,” Jamie said, a bit terse, and a wry amusement touched Jenny’s face.
“Tell ye one thing, _a brathair_—he’s no going to forget you.”
“Aye, maybe not,” he said, feeling an unexpected comfort in the thought. “Well, then…” He let the beads run through his fingers, taking hold of the crucifix. “I believe in one God…”
They said the Creed together, and the three Hail Marys and the Glory Be.
“Joyful or Glorious?” he asked, fingers on the first bead of the decades. He didn’t want to do the Sorrowful Mysteries, the ones about suffering and crucifixion, and he didn’t think she did, either. A raven called from the maples, and he wondered briefly if it was one they’d already seen, or a third. _Three for a wedding, four for a death…_
“Joyful,” she said at once. “The Annunciation.” Then she paused, and nodded at him to take the first turn. He didn’t have to think.
“For Murtagh,” he said quietly, and his fingers tightened on the bead. “And Mam and Da. Hail Mary, full o’ grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blest is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Jenny finished the prayer and they said the rest of the decade in their usual way, back and forth, the rhythm of their voices soft as the rustle of grass.
They reached the second decade, the Visitation, and he nodded at Jenny—her turn.
“For Ian Òg,” she said softly, eyes on her beads. “And Ian Mòr. Hail Mary….”
The third decade was William’s. Jenny glanced at him when he said so, but only nodded and bent her head.

He didn’t try to avoid thinking of William, but he didn’t deliberately call the lad to mind, either; there was nothing he could do to help, until or unless William asked for it, and it would do neither of them good to worry about what the lad was doing, or what might be happening to him.
But…he’d said “William,” and for the space of an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be, William must perforce be in his mind.
“_Guide him_,” he thought, between the words of the prayer. “_Give him good judgment. Help him to be a good man. Show him his way…and Holy Mother…keep him safe, for your own Son’s sake_… world without end, Amen,” he said, reaching the final bead.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/922736424435861

 

 

 

 

I was somewhere deeper than dreams, and came to the surface like a fish hauled out of water, thrashing and flapping.
“Whug—“ I couldn’t remember where I was, who I was, or how to speak. Then the noise that had roused me came again, and every hair on my body stood on end.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” Words and sense came back in a rush and I flung out both hands, groping for some physical anchor.
Sheets. Mattress. Bed. I was in bed. But no Jamie, empty space beside me. I blinked like an owl, turning my head in search of him. He was standing naked at the window, bathed in moonlight. His fists were clenched and every muscle visible under his skin.
“”Jamie!” He didn’t turn, or seem to hear—either my voice, or the thump and agitation of other people in the house, also roused by the howling outside. I could hear Mandy starting to wail in fear, and her parents’ voices running into each other in the rush to comfort her.
I got out of bed, and came up cautiously beside Jamie, though what I really wanted to do was dive under the covers and pull the pillow over my head. That _noise_… I peered past his shoulder, but bright as the moonlight was, it showed nothing in the clearing before the house that shouldn’t be there. Coming from the wood, maybe; trees and mountain were an impenetrable slab of black.
“Jamie,” I said, more calmly, and wrapped a hand firmly round his forearm. “What is it, do you think? Wolves? A wolf, I mean?” I _hoped_ there was only one of whatever was making that sound.
He started at the touch, swung round to see me and shook his head hard, trying to shake off…something.
“I—“ he began, voice hoarse with sleep, and then he simply put his arms around me and drew me against him. “I thought it was a dream.” I could feel him trembling a little, and held him as hard as I could. Sinister Celtic words like “_ban-sidhe_” and _tannasq_ were fluttering round my head, whispering in my ear. Custom said that a _ban-sidhe_ howled on the roof when someone in the house was about to die. Well…it wasn’t on the bloody roof, at least…
“Are your dreams usually that loud?” I asked, wincing at a fresh ululation. He hadn’t been out of bed long; his skin was cool, but not chilled.
“Aye. Sometimes.” He gave a small, breathless laugh, and let go of me. A thunder of small feet came down the hallway, and I hastily flung myself back into his arms as the door burst open and Jem rushed in, Fanny right behind him.
“Grand-da! There’s a wolf outside! It’ll eat the piggies!”
Fanny gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth, eyes round with horror. Not at thought of the piglets’ imminent demise, but at the realization that Jamie was naked. I was shielding as much of him from view as I could with my nightgown, but there wasn’t a great deal of nightgown and there was a great deal of Jamie.
“Go back to bed, sweetheart,” I said, as calmly as possible. “If it’s a wolf, Mr. Fraser will deal with it.”
“_Moran taing, Sassenach_,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. _Thanks a lot_. “Jem, throw me my plaid, aye?”
Jem, to whom a naked grandfather was a routine sight, fetched the plaid from its hook by the door.
“Can I come and help kill the wolf?” he asked hopefully. “I could shoot it. I’m better than Da, he says so!”
“It’s no a wolf,” Jamie said briefly, swathing his loins in faded tartan. “The two of ye go and tell Mandy it’s all right, before she brings the roof down about our ears.” The howling had grown louder, and so had Mandy’s, in hysterical response. From the look on her face, Fanny was all set to join them.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/927717493937754

[lianau]

Time for some more excerpts 

 

Manoke was his father’s friend; Lord John had never called him anything else. The Indian came and went as he pleased, generally without notice, though he was at Mt. Josiah more often than not. He wasn’t a servant or a hired man, but he did the cooking and washing-up when he was there, kept the chickens—yes, there were still chickens; William could hear them clucking and rustling as they settled in the trees near the house—and helped when there was game to be cleaned and butchered.
“Your hog?” William asked Cinnamon, with a brief jerk of the head toward the muffled firepit. They’d chosen to take their supper on the crumbling porch, enjoying the soft evening air, and keeping an eye on the drying meat, in case of marauding raccoons.
“Oui. Up there,” Cinnamon said, waving a big hand toward the north. “Two hours walk. A few pigs in the wood there, not many.”
William nodded. “Do you have a horse?” he asked. It was a fairly small hog, maybe sixty pounds, but heavy to carry for two hours—especially as Cinnamon presumably hadn’t known how far he’d have to go. He’d already told William that he’d never visited Mt. Josiah before.
Cinnamon nodded, his mouth full, and jerked his chin in the direction of the ramshackle tobacco barn. William wondered how long Manoke had been in residence; the place looked as though it had been deserted for years—and yet there were chickens…
The clucking and brief squawks of the settling birds reminded him suddenly and sharply of Rachel Hunter, and in the next breath, he found the scent of rain, wet chickens—and wet girl.
_ “…the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual."
"Perverse?" Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description, and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.
"The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a rainstorm. Perverse." She pulled out a linen towel, and began to dry her hair with it.
The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel against the shutters.
"Hmph," said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. "I expect she will be knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve her right." She flapped the folded towel open and began to dry her hair with it. "No great matter. I shall be pleased never to see any of those chickens again."
The scent of Rachel’s wet hair was strong in his memory, and the sight of it, dark and straggling in tails down her back, the wet making her worn shift transparent in spots, with shadows of her soft pale skin beneath.
“What? I mean—I beg your pardon?” Manoke had said something to him, and the smell of rain vanished, replaced by hickory smoke, fried cornmeal and fish.
Manoke gave him an amused look, but obligingly repeated himself.
“I said, have you come to stay? Because if so, maybe you want to fix the chimney.”
William glanced over his shoulder; the vine-shrouded rubble was just visible, past the edge of the porch.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. Manoke nodded and went back to his conversation with Cinnamon; the two of them were speaking French. William couldn’t make the effort to listen, suddenly overcome by a tiredness that sank to the marrow of his bones.
_Would_ he stay? He didn’t know what he’d intended by coming here; it was just the only place he could think of to go where he wouldn’t be obliged to make explanations.
He’d had some vague notion of thinking. Making sense of things, deciding what to do. Rising up and taking action then, to make things right.
“Right,” he said under his breath. “Hell and death.” _Nothing_ could be made right. An overlooked fish-bone caught in his throat and he choked, coughed, choked again.
Manoke looked briefly at him, but William waved a hand and the Indian returned to his intense conversation with John Cinnamon. William got up and went, coughing, round the corner of the house to the well.
The water was sweet and cold, and with a little effort, he dislodged the bone and drank, then poured water over his head. As he sluiced the dirt from his face, he felt a gradual sense of calm come over him. Not peace, not even resignation, but a realization that if everything couldn’t be settled right now…perhaps it didn’t need to be. He wouldn’t be twenty-one until January. The estate was still administered by factors and lawyers; all those tenants and farms were still someone else’s responsibility.
He _would_ stay, he thought, wiping a hand over his wet face. Not think. Not struggle. Just be still for a little while.
It was deep twilight now; one of his favorite times of day here. The forest settled with the dying of the light, but the air rose, shedding the burden of the day’s heat, passing cool as a spirit through the murmuring leaves, touching his own hot skin with its peace.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/945573228818847

 

They were heading northwest. Roger had learned to steer by sun and stars, when he’d surveyed the boundary lines of Jamie’s land, years before, but it wasn’t a skill he’d needed much in Scotland. He thought they were near the edge of the land grant now; he thought he recalled this rocky outcropping. Granted, there were thousands of similar rock formations in western North Carolina, but something about this one rang a mental bell.
“It smells like grapes,” Jemmy said, sniffing deep. “Smell ‘em, Dad?”
“Aye, I do.” That was it; the whole hillside was a tumble of pale, huge boulders, unusual among the dark rock of the nearby ground—but more unusual for the vast tangle of wild grapevines that crawled over the boulders and climbed the sparse trees that sprouted among them. The grapes had long since ripened and gone, most of them scavenged by birds, insects, wolves, bears and anything else with a sweet tooth. Still, the faint perfume of raisins lay like a veil on the air and the bitter tang of the drying vines was sharp beneath it.
Jamie had pulled loose a length of the tough, woody vine, and was engaged in chopping it into several gnarled sticks, each about three feet long. He handed one to Jem and another to Roger, with the terse adjuration, “Snakes.”

 

 

“Ye dinna need to tell me, Sassenach,” he said, and leaning forward, kissed my mouth very gently. Despite myself, I found that I’d pressed my lips so tightly together that they’d nearly disappeared; at the touch of his mouth, they reluctantly relaxed.
“You _say_ that,” I said, eyeing him warily.
“D’ye not believe me?”
“No. If you told _me_ something like that, I wouldn’t rest ‘til I’d got it out of you, and I don’t for an instant think you’re any less curious than I am.”

 

 

“And do Presbyterians have martyrs?” Jamie asked dubiously. “I mean—ye havena got saints, do ye?”
“Why this sudden interest in Presbyterian doctrine?” Roger said, taking care to make the question a light one. “Thinking of converting?”
He heard a brief grunt of amusement.
“I am not. It’s only that I’ve been thinking of late.”
“Ye want to watch that sort of thing,” Roger said, pausing to unsnag a briar that had grabbed the leg of his breeks. “All right in moderation, I mean, but too much of it will give you the indigestion—mental and physical.”
“Ye’re no wrong there,” Jamie said dryly. “Tell me a way to make it stop that doesna include excessive drink.”
A faint hooting, as of a distant troop of gibbons, floated through the gathering dusk.
“Well, a close proximity to bairns will certainly do it,” Roger said, smiling at the sound. “When Jem learned to talk, Bree used to tell me she couldn’t manage two consecutive thoughts unless she stuffed something into his mouth. It was a wonder he didn’t burst from over-feeding.”
“Aye, that’s so,” Jamie said, his own tone lightening. “Your wee maid’s clishmaclaver would take a man’s mind off his own hanging.”
That particular image startled Roger, though Jamie’s words had been off-hand.
“Is that the direction of your recent thoughts, then?” he asked, after a brief pause.
After a longer one, Jamie replied, “Aye, some of them.”
_Ah. Hence the question about martyrs_… He didn’t say anything, but lengthened his stride a little, coming even with Jamie.

 

 

 

 

 

[lianau]

Still having an identity crisis it seems 

 

“What do you mean, I can’t? Whose business is it whether I renounce my title or not?”
Uncle Hal looked at William with an affectionate impatience.
“I’m not speaking rhetorically, blockhead. I mean it literally. You can’t renounce a peerage. There’s no means set down in law or custom for doing it, ergo, it can’t be done.”
“But you—“ William stopped, baffled.
“No, I didn’t,” his uncle said dryly. “If I could have at the time, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. The most I could do is stop using the title of “Duke,” and threaten to physically maim anyone who used it in reference or address to me. It took me several years to make it clear that I meant that,” he added off-handedly.
“Really?” William asked cynically, glancing at his uncle. “Who did you maim?”
He actually _had_ supposed his uncle to be speaking rhetorically, and was taken aback when the once and present Duke furrowed his brow in the effort of recall.
“Oh…several scribblers—they’re like roaches, you know; crush one and the others all rush off into the shadows, but by the time you turn round, there are throngs of them back again, happily feasting on your carcass and spreading filth over your life. “
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words, uncle?”
“Yes,” his uncle said briefly. “But beyond punching a few journalists, I called out George Washcourt—he’s the Marquess of Clermont now, but he wasn’t then—Herbert Villiers, Viscount Brunton, and a gentleman named Radcliffe. Oh, and a Colonel Phillips, of the 34th—cousin to Earl Wallenberg.”
“Duels, do you mean? And did you fight them all?”
“Certainly. Well—not Villiers, because he caught a chill on the liver and died before I could, but otherwise…but that’s beside the point.”

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/976768562365980

[chocolatetruffle]

BWAAAHAHAHA!  I love Uncle Hal.

[GHScorpiosRule]

BWAAAHAHAHA!  I love Uncle Hal.

 

Agreed! Who knew someone who came off so pompous when I first met him, would end up being the one Grey I actually like?

[WatchrTina]

I have a theory that Hal's backstory -- his being known originally by the title of Earl while actually being entitled to the tile of Duke  -- is something that Diana dreamed up AFTER she created the characters of Hal and John.  I think Hal was elevated in the books from the Earl we meet in Book 2 to the Duke he is revealed to be in later books because someone told Diana that only the son of a Duke can be addressed as Lord <insert first name> in the manner that Lord John is addressed.  The son of an Earl would (I believe) be knows as Viscount <insert family name> if he happened to be the heir but younger sons would only be known as the Honorable <insert name>.  Daughters of an Earl are known as the Lady <insert first name> as we have seen from Downton Abbey (Lady Mary, Lady Edith and Lady Sybil) but if the Earl of Grantham had had a son I'm pretty sure he would have been known as Viscount so-and-so and not Lord George and a younger son would have been the Honorable Jim-Bob Grantham.

 

So I think the whole convoluted history of John's family,

with the suspected suicide of Hal's father, later revealed to be murder, after which Hal begins using the title of Duke

was constructed as a work-around for an error in how Lord John was named in the book.

 

I put that last bit behind the spoiler bars because I'm never sure how much of this is revealed in the big books and how much comes form the Lord John novels.

[WatchrTina]

Latest excerpt:

“Hand me that, will you?” Amaranthus shifted the child expertly from one shoulder to the other and nodded toward another wadded cloth that lay on the ground near her feet. William picked it up gingerly, but it proved to be clean—for the moment.
“Hasn’t he got a nurse?” he asked, handing the cloth over.
“He did have,” Amaranthus said, frowning slightly as she mopped the child’s face. “I sacked her.”
“Drunkenness?” he asked, recalling what Lord John had said about the cook.
“Among other things. Drunk on occasion—too many of them--and dirty in her ways.”
“Dirty as in filth, or…er…lacking fastidiousness in her relations with the opposite sex?”
She laughed, despite the subject.
“Both. Did I not already know you to be Lord John’s son, that question would have made it clear. Or, rather,” she amended, gathering the banyan more closely around her, “the phrasing of it, rather than the question itself. All of the Greys—all those I’ve met so far—talk like that.”
“I’m his lordship’s stepson,” he replied equably. “Any resemblance of speech must therefore be a matter of exposure, rather than inheritance.”
She made a small interested noise and looked at him, one fair brow raised. Her eyes were that changeable color between gray and blue, he saw. Just now, they matched the gray doves embroidered on her yellow banyan.
“That’s possible,” she said. “My father says that a kind of finch learns its songs from its parents; if you take an egg from one nest and put it into another some miles away, the nestling will learn the songs of the new parents, instead of the ones who laid the egg.”
Courteously repressing the desire to ask why anyone should be concerned with finches in any way, he merely nodded.
“Are you not cold, madam?” he asked. They were sitting in the sun, and the wooden bench was warm under his legs, but the breeze playing on the back of his neck was chilly, and he knew she wasn’t wearing anything but a shift under her banyan. The thought brought back a vivid recollection of his first sight of her, milky bosom on display, and he looked away, trying to think instantly of something else.
“What is your father’s profession?” he asked at random.
“He’s a naturalist—when he can afford to be,” she replied. “And no, I’m not cold. It’s always much too hot in the house, and I don’t think the smoke from the hearth is good for Trevor; it makes him cough.”
“Perhaps the chimney isn’t drawing properly. You said, ‘when he can afford to be.’ What does your father do when he cannot afford to pursue his…er…particular interests?”
“He’s a bookseller,” she said, with a slight tone of defiance. “In [New York? New Jersey? Philadelphia?] “That’s where I met Benjamin,” she added, with a slight catch in her voice. “In my father’s shop.” She turned her head slightly, watching to see what he made of this. Would he disapprove of the connection, knowing her now for a tradesman’s daughter? _Not likely_, he thought wryly. _Under the circumstances_.
“You have my deepest sympathies on the loss of your husband, madam,” he said. He wondered what she knew—had been told, rather—about Benjamin’s death, but it seemed indelicate to ask. And he’d best find out just what Papa and Uncle Hal knew about it, before he went trampling into unknown territory.
“Thank you.” She looked away, her eyes lowered, but he saw her mouth—rather a nice mouth—compress in a way suggesting that her teeth were clenched.
“Bloody Continentals!” she said, with sudden violence. She lifted her head, and he saw that, far from being filled with tears, her eyes were sparking with rage. “Damn them and their nitwit philosophy! Of all the obstinate, muddle-headed, treasonous twaddle…I—“ She broke off suddenly, perceiving his startlement.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said stiffly. “I…was overcome by my emotions.”
“Very…suitable,” he said awkwardly. “I mean—quite understandable, given the…um…circumstances.” He glanced sideways at the house, but there was no sound of doors opening or voices raised in farewell. “Do call me William, though—we _are_ cousins, are we not?”
She smiled fully at that. She had a lovely smile.
“So we are. You must call me Cousin Amaranthus, then—it’s a plant,” she added, with the slightly resigned air of one frequently obliged to make this explanation. “Amaranthus palmeri. Of the family Amaranthaceae. Commonly known as pigweed.”

[lianau]

Decided to collect a few more excerpts

 

My breath steamed white in the dimness of the smoke-shed. No fire had been lit in here for over a month, and the air smelt of bitter ash and the tang of old blood.
“How much do you think this thing weighs?” Brianna put both hands on the shoulder of the enormous black and white hog lying on the crude table by the back wall and leaned her own weight experimentally against it. The shoulder moved slightly—rigor had long since passed, despite the cold weather—but the hog itself didn’t budge an inch.
“At a guess, it originally weighed somewhat more than your father. Maybe three hundred pounds on the hoof?” Jamie had bled and gralloched the hog when he killed it; that had probably lightened his load by a hundred pounds or so, but it was still a lot of meat. A pleasant thought for the winter’s food, but a daunting prospect at the moment.
I unrolled the pocketed cloth in which I kept my larger surgical tools; this was no job for an ordinary kitchen knife.
“What do you think about the intestines?” I asked. “Usable, do you think?”
She wrinkled her nose, considering. Jamie hadn’t been able to carry much beyond the carcass itself—and in fact had dragged that—but had thoughtfully salvaged twenty or thirty pounds of intestine. He’d roughly stripped the contents, but two days in a canvas pack hadn’t improved the condition of the uncleaned entrails, not savory to start with. I’d looked at them dubiously, but put them to soak overnight in a tub of salt water, on the off chance that the tissue hadn’t broken down too far to prevent their use as sausage casing.
“I don’t know, Mama,” Bree said reluctantly. “I think they’re pretty far gone. But we might save some of it.”
“If we can’t, we can’t.” I pulled out the largest of my amputation saws and checked the teeth. “We can make square sausage, after all.” Cased sausage was much easier to preserve; once properly smoked, they’d last indefinitely. Sausage patties were fine, but took more careful handling, and had to be packed into wooden casks or boxes in layers of lard for keeping…
“Lard!” I exclaimed, looking up. “Bloody hell--I’d forgotten all about that. We don’t have a kettle, bar the kitchen cauldron, and we can’t use that.” Rendering lard took a long time, and the kitchen cauldron supplied at least half our cooked food, to say nothing of hot water.
“Can we borrow one?” Bree glanced toward the door, where a flicker of movement showed. “Jem, is that you?”
“No, it’s me, auntie.” Germain stuck his head in, sniffing cautiously. “Mandy wanted to visit Rachel’s _petit bonbon_, and _Grand-pere_ said she could go if Jem or me would take her. We threw bones and he lost.”
“Oh. Fine, then. Will you go up to the kitchen and fetch the bag of salt from Grannie’s surgery?”
“There isn’t any,” I said, grasping the pig by one ear and setting the saw in the crease of the neck. “There wasn’t much, and we used all but a handful soaking the intestines. We’ll need to borrow that, too.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/1011778205531682

 

At least we _had_ a roof. The sheet of canvas overhead rippled like the skin of a horse with flies, then rose suddenly, swelling with wind, and before I could say a word, it ripped free of the wooden framing and flapped off like an ungainly gray vulture. An iron tack dropped at my feet, landing with a tiny _ping_!
“[ Gaelic ] !” Jamie said, glaring up at the empty space where the tarpaulin had been.
“Misbegotten spawn of a…what on earth is [ Gaelic ]?” I said. I’d heard [Misbegotten spawn] often enough to recognize that much, but the rest of the curse was novel.
“A mangy hide,” he said succinctly. “And a skunk. _Ifrinn_!” He turned on his heel, and suddenly punched the door jamb. I flinched. He hissed through his teeth and clutched his knuckles with his other hand, but didn’t say anything further.
“I’ll…um…go and fetch it, shall I?” I said, looking up through the empty space where the tarpaulin had been. The sky was dark with bulbous clouds, filled with imminent menace, and the storm wind was swirling round the half-built room, restlessly picking up small items and dropping them.
“I’ll get it,” he said tersely, and vanished through the open door-frame, sticking his head back in for an instant to say, “Chickens?” before vanishing again.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/1022500834459419

 

It was a sapphire, a raw one. A misty, cloudy blue little thing, half the size of his little finger’s nail. He shook it free of its wrappings and it landed silently but solidly in the hollow of his hand.
“Ye said it maybe doesna matter whether it’s cut or not,” Buck said, nodding at it.
“I think not. I hope not. I wish I could say I can’t take it.” Roger closed his fingers gently on the little rock, as though it might burn him. “Thank you, a charaidh. Where did ye find it?”
“Ach…” Buck said vaguely, with a slight wave of his hand. “Just saw it and picked it up, ken?”
“Holy Lord,” Roger said, squeezing the little pebble involuntarily. Too late, he remembered the castle in Strathpeffer, him talking with the factor about Jemmy and Rob Cameron—the earl being away from home—and Buck gone, disappeared with a handsome young housemaid. And the factor offering to show him Cromartie’s collection of agates and rare stones…he’d declined, thank God. But—
“You didn’t,” he said to Buck. “Tell me ye didn’t.”
“Ye keep saying that,” Buck said, frowning at him. “I will, if ye want me to, but I shouldna think a minister ought to be encouraging folk to tell lies. A poor example for the bairns, aye?”
He nodded toward the stable-yard, where Jem was playing with a boy who had a hoop, the two of them trying to drive it with sticks over the bumpy ground, with a marked lack of success. Mandy was throwing pebbles at something in the dry grass—probably some hapless toad trying its best to hibernate against the odds.
“Me, a poor example? And you their own great-great-great-great-grandfather!”
“And should I not be lookin’ out for their welfare, then? Is that what ye’re sayin’ to me?”
“I—“ His throat closed suddenly and he cleared it, hard. The boys had left their hoop and were poking at whatever Mandy had found in the grass. “No. I’m not. But I didn’t ask ye to steal for them. To risk your bloody neck for us!” _That’s my job_, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
“May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Buck gave him a direct stare. “Ye need it, aye? Take it, then.” Something that wasn’t quite a smile touched the edge of his mouth. “With my blessing.”
On the far side of the yard, Mandy had picked up the hoop and put it about her solid little waist. She waggled her bottom, in a vain attempt at getting it to spin.
“Look, Daddy!” she called. “Hula hoop!”
Jem froze for a moment, then looked at Roger, his eyes big with concern. Roger shook his head slightly—_don’t say anything_—and Jem swallowed visibly and turned his back to his sister, shoulders stiff.
“What’s a hula hoop, then?” Buck asked quietly, behind him.

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/1023570994352403

 

“But you told Frances—you _promised_ her that no one would take advantage of her. And I could have sworn she believed you!”
“Aye,” Jamie said quietly. He picked up the piece of rock maple and his knife, and began mechanically cutting slivers. “Aye, I thought so, too—hoped so, at least.”
I sat still, watching him.
“I suppose it was foolish,” I said at last. “To think that reassurances and promises would be enough. I imagine we don’t know the half of what she saw, being raised in a brothel like a—a prize calf.”
“And one knowing it was bound for slaughter?” he put in quietly. “Aye.”
We lapsed into a strained silence, both thinking of Fanny. After a few moments, Jamie’s hands resumed their work, slowly, and a few moments later, he glanced at me.
“How many times did ye tell me Jack Randall was dead, Sassenach? How many times did I tell myself that?” The wood shavings fell in small, fragrant curls around his feet. “Some ghosts dinna leave ye easily—and ye ken fine that it’s her sister who’s haunting wee Frances.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said unhappily. It wasn’t quite a shiver that I felt at mention of Jane—but a cold sadness that seemed to sink through my skin. “But surely there’s _something_ we can do to help?”
“I expect there is.” He set the cleaned stick of wood aside, and bent to sweep the shavings onto a sheet of paper. “Were we in reach of a priest, I should have a Mass said for the repose of her sister’s soul, to start with. If I can find one in Wilmington, we’ll do that. But otherwise…I’ll speak to Roger Mac about it.” His mouth twisted wryly.
“I daresay Presbyterians dinna believe in exorcism, or prayers for the dead, either. But he’s a canny man, and he kens the heart; he may call it something else, but he’ll know what I mean—and he can speak wi’ Frances, and pray for _her_, I’m sure.”
He shook the wood shavings into the fire, where they caught at once, curling into brightness and sending up a clean, sweet smoke. I came to stand behind him, watching them burn, and put my hands on his shoulders, warm and solid under my fingers. He leaned his head back against me and sighed, closing his eyes as he relaxed in the warmth. I bent my head and kissed the whorl of the cowlick on his crown.
“Mmphm,” he said, and reached up a hand to take mine. “Ken, it works the other way, too.”
“What does?”
“The stubbornness of a mind that willna let go.” He squeezed my hand and looked up at me. “While we were parted, how many times did ye tell yourself I was dead, Sassenach?” he asked softly. “How often did ye try to forget me?”
I stood motionless, hand curled round his, until I thought I could speak.
“Every day,” I whispered. “And never.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon/posts/1034022559973913

 

[WatchrTina]

Today's posting from Diana on Facebook is just an embellishment of something she posted earlier about William's "identity crisis".

 

Miss England?” Hal asked abruptly.
“Sometimes,” William answered honestly. “But I don’t think about it much,” he added, with less honesty.
“I do.” His uncle’s face looked relaxed, almost wistful in the fading light. “But you haven’t a wife there, or children. No establishment of your own, yet.”
“No.”
The sounds of the camp were still audible, but muted by the rhythm of the surf at their feet, the passage of the silent clouds above their heads.
The trouble with silence was that it allowed the thoughts in his head to take on a tiresome insistence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room. Cinnmon’s company, disturbing as it occasionally was, had allowed him to escape them when he needed to.
“How does one go about renouncing a title?”
He hadn’t actually been intending to ask that just yet, and was surprised to hear the words emerge from his mouth. Uncle Hal, by contrast, didn’t seem surprised at all.
“You can’t.”
William glared down at his uncle, who was still looking imperturbably out to sea, the wind pulling strands of his dark hair from his queue.
“What do you mean, I can’t? Whose business is it whether I renounce my title or not?”
Uncle Hal looked at him with an affectionate impatience.
“I’m not speaking rhetorically, blockhead. I mean it literally. You can’t renounce a peerage. There’s no means set down in law or custom for doing it, ergo, it can’t be done.”
“But you—“ William stopped, baffled.
“No, I didn’t,” his uncle said dryly. “If I could have at the time, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. The most I _could_ do is stop using the title of “Duke,” and threaten to physically maim anyone who used it in reference or address to me. It took me several years to make it clear that I meant that,” he added off-handedly.
“Really?” William asked cynically. “Who did you maim?”
He actually _had_ supposed his uncle to be speaking rhetorically, and was taken aback when the once and present Duke furrowed his brow in the effort of recall.
“Oh…several scribblers—they’re like roaches, you know; crush one and the others all rush off into the shadows, but by the time you turn round, there are throngs of them back again, happily feasting on your carcass and spreading filth over your life. “
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words, uncle?”
“Yes,” his uncle said briefly. “But beyond punching a few journalists, I called out George Washcourt—he’s the Marquess of Clermont now, but he wasn’t then—Herbert Villiers, Viscount Brunton, and a gentleman named Radcliffe. Oh, and a Colonel Phillips, of the 34th—cousin to Earl Wallenberg.”
“Duels, do you mean? And did you fight them all?”
“Certainly. Well—not Villiers, because he caught a chill on the liver and died before I could, but otherwise…but that’s beside the point.” Hal caught himself and shook his head to clear it. Evening was coming on, and the offshore breeze was brisk. He wrapped his cloak about his body and nodded toward the town.
“Let’s go. The tide’s coming in and I’m dining with Sir Henry in half an hour.”

Edited February 20, 2016 by WatchrTina

[WatchrTina]

I typed up the excerpt from Book 9 that was included in this week's edition of Entertainment Weekly (the one with Cait & Sam on the cover.)

 

 

He took a deep breath, and his fists flexed briefly, then relaxed.

 

“No. Forgiveness doesna make things go away. Ye ken that as well as I do.” He turned his head to look at me, in curiosity. “Don’t ye?”

 

There were no more than a few inches between us, but the aching distance between our hearts reached miles. Jamie was silent for a long time. I could hear my heart, beating in my ears . . .

 

“Listen,” he said at last.

 

‘I’m listening.” He looked sideways at me, and the ghost of a smile touched his mouth. He held out a broad, pitch-stained palm to me.

 

“Give me your hands while ye do it, aye?”

 

“Why?” But I put my hands into his without hesitation, and felt his grip close on them. His fingers were cold, and I could see the hairs on his forearm ruffled with chill where he’d rolled up his sleeves to help Fanny with the gun.

 

“What hurts you cleaves my heart,” he said softly. “Ye ken that, aye?”

 

“I do,” I said, just as softly “And you know it’s true for me too. But – “ I swallowed, and bit my lip. “It – it seems . . .”

 

“Claire,” he interrupted, and looked at me straight. “Are ye relieved that he’s dead?”

 

“Well . . . yes,” I said unhappily. “I don’t want to feel that way, though; it doesn’t seem right. I mean –“ I struggled to find some clear way to put it. “On the one hand – what he did to me wasn’t . . . mortal. I hated it, but it didn’t physically hurt me; he wasn’t trying to hurt me or kill me. He just . . .”

 

“Ye mean, if it had been Harley Boble ye met at Beardsley’s, ye wouldna have minded my killing him?” he interrupted, with a tinge of irony.

 

“I would have shot him myself, on sight.” I blew out a long, deep breath. “But that’s the other thing. There’s what he – the man – do you know his name, by the way?”

 

“Yes, and you’re not going to, so dinna ask me,” he said tersely.

 

I gave him a narrow look, and he gave it right back. I flapped my hand, dismissing it for the moment.

 

“The other thing” I repeated firmly, “Is that if I’d shot Boble myself – you wouldn’t have had to. I wouldn’t feel that you were . . . damaged by it.”

 

His face went blank for a moment, then his gaze sharpened again.

 

“Ye think it damaged me to kill him?”

 

I reached for his hand, and held it.

 

“I bloody know it did,” I said quietly. And added in a whisper, looking down at the scarred, powerful hand in mind, “what hurts you cleaves my heart, Jamie.”

 

His finger curled tight over mine.

[emilyplum]

So, I saw something recently (can't remember if it was DG's twitter, or possibly FB, anyway) where someone was harping on how Frank threatened to take Brianna away to Europe and DG responded with "But you don't know WHY, do you?"  We know he knew about the Fraser prophecy (which, I have to admit I think is just the silliest plotline, but anyway)...so I think that he was taking her away to hide her from whoever else knew of the prophecy as well.  Although why he'd take her to Europe in that case, I don't know.  But anyway, my speculation is that Frank's death wasn't an accident. 

[WatchrTina]

New excerpt from Diana:

 

[in which a massive storm breaks on Fraser’s Ridge, and Claire rushes out to rescue the chickens.]
I stood gasping for a moment, wiping sweat off my face with my apron, but a premonitory spatter of raindrops against the hide covering the window sent me running for the back door, seizing a large covered basket on my way.
Fourteen Nankin hens, four Scots Dumpys and two roosters. The Nankin hens liked to roost in the low branches of the hornbeam near their coop, but the roosters could be anywhere…
Sure enough, a number of round, wind-ruffled shapes were huddled together in clumps amid the lower branches of the hornbeam. One, two, three, four, five… I counted as I snatched them out of the tree and stuffed them ruthlessly into my basket. They squawked but didn’t really resist; chickens are not bright, but I thought they might have enough sense to be thankful at being rescued from the coming storm. The air temperature had dropped a good ten degrees in the last few minutes.
Eight so far….where were the others?
“Chook-chook-chook-chook-chook!” I called, my voice scarcely audible above the wind. A faint squawk, torn away, but enough to turn my attention toward the hen-coop. Yes, two more underneath, the big red hen, huddling over her brood of tiny chicks, and one of the roosters, feathers standing out like quills and his yellow eyes quite mad—he pecked savagely at my wrist when I reached for the red hen, drawing blood.
I said a few things under my breath and seized him by the neck. I was tempted to wring it then and there, but instead stood up, jerked open the door of the coop and tossed him into it, narrowly avoiding being ripped by his spurs. I decanted the contents of the basket after him, dropped to my knees and grabbed the red hen, threw her into the coop as well, then slammed the door, fell to my knees and scrabbled madly after the chicks.
The rain was starting to fall in earnest now, no more of this playful pattering. Cold drops struck my back, hard as pebbles. How many chicks were there? I was tossing them into my apron, trying to keep count as I reached into the deep shadows under the coop. My fingers struck something hard that rolled—a stray egg. Heartened by that, I stuck it into my pocket and with a last inquiring, “chook-chook?” decided I had them all and shook the little balls of fluff into the warm dark of the reeking coop, where they dashed about like so many crazed ping-pong balls before zeroing in on their clucking mother.
I closed the door and dropped the latch, then stood breathing heavily for a moment, realizing that the reason the raindrops fell so cold and heavily was that they were in fact hailstones. Tiny white spheres were bouncing off my head and dancing on the ground, rapidly covering the scattered bits of cracked corn and chicken droppings.
I pulled the shawl over my head and searched under the [ ] bushes near the coop, then further up the path toward Malva’s Garden—the hens loved to go in there and eat the ghastly tomato hookworms off the wild vines, more power to them—but there was no sign of movement among the pokeweeds and [ ], other than the wind. The hail stopped as abruptly as it had started, and I shook melting bits of ice off my shoulders, wondering where the hell to look next.
I threw back my head and shouted, “Cock-a-doodle-dooooo!” several times, as loudly as I could; sometimes you could induce a pugnacious rooster to answer you, but not today.
I felt an increasing sense of panic. The wind was whipping my skirts around my legs and I could feel the spatter of fine drops against my cheeks; Jamie hadn’t been wrong in his predictions of what would happen to the hens—I’d lost many, over the years, to foxes and other predators, but many more to the vagaries of the weather. If they weren’t blown away, they might well freeze to death sitting in a tree overnight, their feathered carcasses thumping to the ground at dawn like cannon balls.
I ran down the path to the spring-house—no sign of chickens—then up and across to the privy; the Dumpys liked to shelter in the honeysuckle vines sometimes…
The door stood ajar—some thoughtless male had doubtless neglected to close it properly—and I pulled it open, though gingerly. I’d once opened a privy door and surprised an enormous rattlesnake, coiled on the seat. The surprise had been sufficiently mutual that I’d never again opened such a door without caution.
The caution was justified on this occasion, though the privy luckily contained neither chickens nor snakes. It did contain a startled red squirrel, who ran up the wall and clung to the rooftree, tail bushed out and chattering angrily at me.
“If you think you’re storing nuts in _here_ for the autumn,” I said, leveling a forefinger at him, “think again.”
A sudden thunder of fresh hail on the tin roof galvanized me back into action and I ran toward the barn through a small blizzard. If any of those damned hens were out in this, they’d be killed—these hailstones were the size of unripe gooseberries and almost as hard, stinging where they struck my unprotected hands and face.
The barn door was halfway open; I glimpsed Clarence the mule’s gray bulk in the gloom, and he brayed companionably at me when I stepped in, breathless with running through a hailstorm. He wasn’t in a stall; he’d evidently leapt the fence and walked sensibly into the barn when he felt the weather coming on. He was casually plucking mouthfuls of hay from the pile on the floor, despite the fact that another refugee from the storm was using the hay as well. The white sow was reclining majestically in the scattered heap, accompanied by two black-spotted daughters, each about half her size, all of them looking pleased with themselves.
I hadn’t come this close to the white sow in a couple of years, and stopped dead at sight of her, so near at hand. She was immense—I gauged her at something between five and six hundred pounds at the moment—and well-known for her irascible temperament.
“Fancy meeting _you_ here,” I said, pressing myself against the wall and trying not to make any move she might regard as threatening. Even Clarence was maintaining a respectful distance from the porcine trio. I glanced to and fro—if the chickens were in here, they could bloody well stay here--but nothing moved along the walls or scrabbled for grain on the hard-packed dirt of the floor. Possibly the pigs had eaten them.
I edged back out, carefully leaving the door half-open. If a pig that size had a mind to leave a place, it left, and the presence or absence of a door was immaterial.
The hail had turned back into rain, and it was pissing down. What now? I wrapped the shawl more tightly round my body and prepared to make a run for the house. If the remaining chickens hadn’t found shelter by now, it was likely too late.

[WatchrTina]

And another

Spoiler

“Did your Mam ever tell ye of the dream I had? Soon after ye…went away.” He couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder, to be sure no one was in earshot.

“No.” She was looking at him with deep interest, a small line between her brows, and he couldn’t help smiling at her. “Was it a funny dream?” she asked.

“Och, no. I was only smiling because ye looked so much like Claire, there. When she’s trying to puzzle out what’s the matter with someone, I mean.”

She didn’t laugh, but the transitory dimple that sometimes appeared in her right cheek flashed for an instant.

“Nobody ever says I look like Mama,” she said. “They carry on all the time about how much like _you_ I look.”

“Oh, ye look like your mother often,” he assured her. “It’s just that it’s no a matter of hair or eyes or how tall ye are. It’s the look on your face when ye touch Jem or Mandy—or when ye’re talkin’ with Roger Mac in the evening on the porch, and the light of the moon in your eyes.” 

His own voice had gown soft and husky, and he looked down at the ground, the plastering of layer upon layer of dead leaves, like dying stars beneath his boots.

“Ye look like your mother in love, is all I mean. Exactly like her.”

[WatchrTina]

The latest from Diana's Facebook page.  William & Amaranthus.

Spoiler

 

Still, he took his hand off the latch and turned back. He’d wait for a quarter of an hour, he decided. If anything terrible was going to happen, it would likely be quick. He couldn’t linger in the tiny front garden, let alone skulk about beneath the windows. He skirted the yard and went down the side of the house, toward the back.

The back garden was sizable, with a vegetable-patch, dug over for the winter, but still sporting a fringe of cabbages. A small cook-shed stood at the end of the garden, and a pruned-back grape arbor at one side, with a bench inside it. The bench was occupied by Amaranthus, who held little Trevor against her shoulder, patting his back in a business-like way.

“Oh, hullo,” she said, spotting William. “Where’s your friend?”

“Inside,” he said. “Talking to Lord John. I thought I’d just wait for him—but I don’t wish to disturb you.” He made to turn away, but she stopped him, raising her hand for a moment before resuming her patting.

“Sit down,” she said, eyeing him with interest. “So you’re the famous William. Or ought I to call you Ellesmere?”

“Indeed. And no, you oughtn’t.” He sat down cautiously beside her. “How’s the little fellow?”

“Extremely full,” she said, with a small grimace. “Any minute—whoops, there he goes.” Trevor had emitted a loud belch, this accompanied by a spew of watery milk that ran over his mother’s shoulder. Apparently such explosions were common; William saw that she had placed a napkin over her banyan to receive it, though the cloth seemed inadequate to the volume of Trevor’s production.

“Hand me that, will you?” Amaranthus shifted the child expertly from one shoulder to the other and nodded toward another wadded cloth that lay on the ground near her feet. William picked it up gingerly, but it proved to be clean—for the moment.

“Hasn’t he got a nurse?” he asked, handing the cloth over.

“He did have,” Amaranthus said, frowning slightly as she mopped the child’s face. “I sacked her.”

“Drunkenness?” he asked, recalling what Lord John had said about the cook. 

“Among other things. Drunk on occasion—too many of them--and dirty in her ways.”

“Dirty as in filth, or…er…lacking fastidiousness in her relations with the opposite sex?”

She laughed, despite the subject.

“Both. Did I not already know you to be Lord John’s son, that question would have made it clear. Or, rather,” she amended, gathering the banyan more closely around her, “the phrasing of it, rather than the question itself. All of the Greys—all those I’ve met so far—talk like that.”

“I’m his lordship’s stepson,” he replied equably. “Any resemblance of speech must therefore be a matter of exposure, rather than inheritance.”

She made a small interested noise and looked at him, one fair brow raised. Her eyes were that changeable color between gray and blue, he saw. Just now, they matched the gray doves embroidered on her yellow banyan.

“That’s possible,” she said. “My father says that a kind of finch learns its songs from its parents; if you take an egg from one nest and put it into another some miles away, the nestling will learn the songs of the new parents, instead of the ones who laid the egg.”

Courteously repressing the desire to ask why anyone should be concerned with finches in any way, he merely nodded.

“Are you not cold, madam?” he asked. They were sitting in the sun, and the wooden bench was warm under his legs, but the breeze playing on the back of his neck was chilly, and he knew she wasn’t wearing anything but a shift under her banyan. The thought brought back a vivid recollection of his first sight of her, milky bosom and prominent nipples on display, and he looked away, trying to think instantly of something else.

“What is your father’s profession?” he asked at random.

“He’s a naturalist—when he can afford to be,” she replied. “And no, I’m not cold. It’s always much too hot in the house, and I don’t think the smoke from the hearth is good for Trevor; it makes him cough.”

“Perhaps the chimney isn’t drawing properly. You said, ‘when he can afford to be.’ What does your father do when he cannot afford to pursue his…er…particular interests?”

“He’s a bookseller,” she said, with a slight tone of defiance. “In [New York? New Jersey? Philadelphia?] “That’s where I met Benjamin,” she added, with a slight catch in her voice. “In my father’s shop.” She turned her head slightly, watching to see what he made of this. Would he disapprove of the connection, knowing her now for a tradesman’s daughter? _Not likely_, he thought wryly. _Under the circumstances_.

“You have my deepest sympathies on the loss of your husband, madam,” he said. He wondered what she knew—had been told, rather—about Benjamin’s death, but it seemed indelicate to ask. And he’d best find out just what Papa and Uncle Hal knew about it, before he went trampling into unknown territory.

“Thank you.” She looked away, her eyes lowered, but he saw her mouth—rather a nice mouth—compress in a way suggesting that her teeth were clenched.

“Bloody Continentals!” she said, with sudden violence. She lifted her head, and he saw that, far from being filled with tears, her eyes were sparking with rage. “Damn them and their nitwit philosophy! Of all the obstinate, muddle-headed, treasonous twaddle…I—“ She broke off suddenly, perceiving his startlement.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said stiffly. “I…was overcome by my emotions.”

“Very…suitable,” he said awkwardly. “I mean—quite understandable, given the…um…circumstances.” He glanced sideways at the house, but there was no sound of doors opening or voices raised in farewell. “Do call me William, though—we are cousins, are we not?”

She smiled fully at that. She had a lovely smile.

“So we are. You must call me Cousin Amaranthus, then—it’s a plant,” she added, with the slightly resigned air of one frequently obliged to make this explanation. “_Amaranthus palmeri_. Of the family Amaranthaceae. Commonly known as pigweed.”

 

[Dust Bunny]

A Memorial Day-themed excerpt of Book 9.

Spoiler

For those of our number who have paid for our freedom with their bodies, their lives, and their souls.

‪#‎DailyLines‬ ‪#‎BookNine‬ ‪#‎MemorialDay2016‬

“No. Mind,” Roger added in fairness, pushing aside a pine branch, thick with a pungent sap that left his palm sticky, “John Adams, Ben Franklin, all the thinkers and talkers—they’re risking their necks as much as you—as we--are.”

“Aye.” The ground was rising steeply now, and nothing more was said as they climbed, feeling their way over the broken ground of a gravel-fall.

“I’m thinking that maybe I canna die—or lead men to their own deaths—only for the notion of freedom. Not now.”

“Not now?” Roger echoed, surprised. “You could have—earlier?”

“Aye. When you and the lass and your weans were…there.” Roger caught the brief movement of a hand, flung out toward the distant future. “Because what I did here then would be—it would _matter_, aye? To all of you—and I can fight for you.” His voice grew softer. “It’s what I’m made to do, aye?”

“I understand,” Roger said quietly. “But ye’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

Jamie made a sound in his throat, half-surprised.

“Dinna ken when I knew it,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Maybe at Leoch, when I found I could get the other lads into mischief—and did. Perhaps I should be confessing that?”

Roger brushed that aside.

“It will matter to Jem and Mandy—and to those of our blood who come after them,” he said. _Provided Jem and Mandy survive to have children of their ow_n, he added mentally, and felt a cold qualm in the pit of this stomach at the thought.

“How old were you, the first time you saw a man killed?” Roger asked abruptly.

“Eight,” Jamie replied without hesitation. “In a fight during my first cattle raid. I wasna much troubled about it.”

Jamie stopped quite suddenly, and Roger had to step to the side to avoid running into him.

“Look,” Jamie said, and he did. They were standing at the top of a small rise, where the trees fell away for a moment, and the Ridge and the north side of the cove below it spread before them, a massive chunk of solid black against the indigo of the faded sky. Tiny lights pricked the blackness, though; the windows and sparking chimneys of a dozen cabins.

“It’s not only our wives and our weans, ken?” Jamie said, and nodded toward the lights. “It’s them, as well. All of them.” His voice held an odd note; a sort of pride—but rue and resignation, too.

_All of them._

Seventy-three households in all, Roger knew. He’d seen the ledgers Jamie kept, written with painful care, noting the economy and welfare of each family who occupied his land—and his mind.

“_Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel_.” The quote sprang to mind and he’d spoken it aloud before he could think.

Jamie drew a deep, audible breath.

“Aye,” he said. “Sheep would be easier.” Then, abruptly, “Claire and Brianna say the war is coming to the south. I canna shield them, should it come close.” He nodded toward the distant sparks, and it was clear to Roger that by “them,” he meant his tenants—his people. He didn’t pause for a reply, but re-settled the creel on his shoulder and started down.

The trail narrowed. Roger’s shoulder brushed Jamie’s, close, and he fell back a step, following his father-in-law. The moon was late in rising tonight, and sliver-thin. It was dark and the air had a bite in it now.

“I’ll help you protect them,” he said to Jamie’s back. His voice was gruff.

“I ken that,” Jamie said, softly. There was a short pause, as though Jamie was waiting for him to speak further, and he realized that he should.

“With my body,” Roger said quietly, into the night. “And with my soul, if that should be necessary.”

He saw Jamie in brief silhouette, saw him draw breath deep and his shoulders relax as he let it out. They walked more briskly now; the trail was dark, and they strayed now and then, the brush catching at their bare legs.

At the edge of their own clearing, Jamie paused to let Roger come up with him, and laid a hand on his arm.

“The things that happen in a war—the things that ye do…they mark ye,” he said at last, quietly. “I dinna think bein’ a priest will spare you, is what I’m sayin’, and I’m sorry for it.”

_They’ve marked you. And I’m sorry for it_. But he said nothing; only touched Jamie’s hand lightly where it lay upon his arm. Then Jamie took his hand away and they walked home together, silent.

[WatchrTina]

Another post copied from Diana's Facebook page

‪#‎DailyLines‬  ‪#‎BookNINE‬  ‪#‎ImWorkingOnIt‬  ‪#‎AllInGoodTime‬  ‪#‎JamieAndClaire‬‪#‎SomeThingsNeverChange‬

Spoiler

 

“…the night we made Faith.”

I lifted my head in surprise.

“You _know_ when she was conceived? _I_ don’t know that.”

He ran his hand slowly down my back, fingers pausing to rub circles in the small of it. If I’d been a cat, I would have waved my tail gently under his nose.

“Aye, well, I suppose I could be wrong, but I’ve always thought it was the night I came to your bed at the Abbey.”

For a moment, I groped among my memories. That time at the Abbey of Ste. Anne, when he’d come so close to self-chosen death, was one I seldom revisited. It was a terrifying time of fear and confusion, despair and desperation. And yet when I did look back, I found a handful of vivid images, standing out like the illuminated letters on a page of ancient Latin.

Father Anselm’s face, pale in candlelight, his eyes warm with compassion and then the growing glow of wonder as he heard my confession. The abbot’s hands, touching Jamie’s forehead, eyes, lips and palms, delicate as a hummingbird’s touch, anointing his dying nephew with the holy chrism of Extreme Unction. The quiet of the darkened chapel where I had prayed for his life, and heard my prayer answered.

And among these moments was the night when I woke from sleep to find him standing . a pale wraith by my bed, naked and freezing, so weak he could barely walk, but filled once more with life and a stubborn determination that would never again leave him.

“You remember her, then?” My hand rested lightly on my stomach, recalling. He’d never seen her, or felt her as more than random kicks and pushes from inside me.

He kissed my forehead briefly, then looked at me.

“Ye ken I do. Don’t you?”

“Yes. I just wanted you to tell me more.”

“Oh, I mean to.” He settled himself on one elbow and gathered me in so I could share his plaid.

“Do you remember that, too?” I asked, pulling down the fold of cloth he’d draped over me. “Sharing your plaid with me, the night we met?”

“To keep ye from freezing? Aye.” He kissed the back of my neck. “It was me freezing, at the Abbey. I’d worn myself out tryin’ to walk, and ye wouldna let me eat anything, so I was starving to death, and—“

“Oh, you _know_ that’s not true! You—“

“Would I lie to ye, Sassenach?

“Yes, you bloody would,” I said, “You do it all the time. But never mind that now. You were freezing and starving, and suddenly decided that instead of asking Brother Roger for a blanket or a bowl of something hot, you should stagger naked down a dark stone corridor and get in bed with me.”

“Some things are more important than food, Sassenach.” His hand settled firmly on my arse. “And finding out whether I could ever bed ye again was more important than anything else just then. I reckoned if I couldn’t, I’d just walk on out into the snow and not come back.”

“Naturally, it didn’t occur to you to wait for a few more weeks and recover your strength.” 

“Well, I was fairly sure I could walk that far leaning on the walls, and I’d be doin’ the rest lying down, so why wait?”

 

[Petunia846]

I love this most recent one so much. I love characters reminiscing about their past. Love the quiet times.

[WatchrTina]

I know what you mean Petunia846.  I'm re-reading DIA right now (well behind the action of the TV show) and I'm at Lallybroch right now.  Almost nothing is going on.  Claire goes to visit some cotters and then sits under a tree when she gets overheated.  She runs into Jamie who points out the gate where he used to get his arse skelped in public when he was a boy.  Totally undramatic.  It was lovely.

As for the quote above, I did have to laugh a bit at Claire's first line.  She really didn't know?  *I* knew.  (Or at least I made the same assumption Jamie did so I assumed everyone, including Claire, came to the same conclusion.)

[theschnauzers]

From the newest Daily Lines Diana posted this morning: We have a title!

Quote

#‎DailyLines‬ ‪#‎BookNine‬ ‪#‎GoTellTheBeesThatIAmGone‬ ‪#‎Yesthatsthetitle‬ ‪#‎WhyWeFight‬ ‪#‎HappyFourthOfJuly‬

Spoiler

“And do Presbyterians have martyrs?” Jamie asked dubiously. “I mean—ye havena got saints, do ye?”

“Why this sudden interest in Presbyterian doctrine?” Roger said, taking care to make the question a light one. “Thinking of converting?”

He heard a brief grunt of amusement.

“I am not. It’s only that I’ve been thinking of late.”

“Ye want to watch that sort of thing,” Roger said, leaning down to unsnag a briar that had grabbed the knee of his breeks. “All right in moderation, I mean, but too much of it will give you the indigestion—mental _and_ physical.”

“Ye’re no wrong there,” Jamie said dryly. “Tell me a way to make it stop that doesna require excessive drink. I need the whisky to sell.”

A faint hooting, as of a distant troop of gibbons, floated through the gathering dusk.

“Well, a close proximity to bairns will certainly do it,” Roger said, smiling at the sound. “When Jem learned to talk, Bree used to tell me she couldn’t manage two consecutive thoughts unless she stuffed something into his mouth. It was a wonder he didn’t burst from over-feeding.”

“Aye, that’s so,” Jamie said, his own tone lightening. “Your wee maid’s clishmaclaver would take a man’s mind off his own hanging.”

That particular image startled Roger, though Jamie’s words had been off-hand.

“Is that the direction of your recent thoughts, then?” he asked, after a brief pause.

After a longer one, Jamie replied, “Aye, some of them.”

_Ah. Hence the question about martyrs_… He didn’t say anything, but lengthened his stride a little, coming even with Jamie. He didn’t say anything, though; plainly his father-in-law wasn’t done talking.

“I dinna ken,” Jamie said finally, obviously taking care with his words, “if I could bring myself to die for an idea. No that it isn’t a fine thing,” he added hurriedly. “But…I asked Brianna whether any o’ those men—the ones who thought of the notions and the words ye’d need to make them real—whether any of them actually did the fighting.”

“I don’t think they did,” Roger said dubiously. “Will, I mean. Unless you count George Washington, and I don’t believe he does so much talking.”

“He talks to his troops, believe me,” Jamie said, a wry humor in his voice. “But maybe not to the King, or the newspapers.”

“No. Mind,” Roger added in fairness, pushing aside a pine branch, thick with a pungent sap that left his palm sticky, “John Adams, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, all the thinkers and talkers—they’re risking their necks as much as you—as we--are.”

“Aye.” The ground was rising steeply now, and nothing more was said as they climbed, feeling their way over the broken ground of a gravel-fall.

“I’m thinking that maybe I canna die—or lead men to their own deaths—only for the notion of freedom. Not now.”

“Not now?” Roger echoed, surprised. “You could have—earlier?”

“Aye. When you and the lass and your weans were…there.” Roger caught the brief movement of a hand, flung out toward the distant future. “The idea would be there for ye. Because what I did here then would be—it would _matter_, aye? To all of you—and I can fight for you.” His voice grew softer. “It’s what I’m made to do, aye?”

“I understand,” Roger said quietly. “But ye’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

Jamie made a sound in his throat, half-surprised.

“Dinna ken when I knew it,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Maybe at Leoch, when I found I could get the other lads into mischief—and did. Perhaps I should be confessing that?”

Roger brushed that aside.

“It will matter to Jem and Mandy—and to those of our blood who come after them,” he said. _Provided Jem and Mandy survive to have children of their own_, he added mentally, and felt a cold qualm in the pit of this stomach at the thought.

“How old were you, the first time you saw a man killed?” Roger asked abruptly.

“Eight,” Jamie replied without hesitation. “In a fight during my first cattle raid. I wasna much troubled about it.”

Jamie stopped quite suddenly, and Roger had to step to the side to avoid running into him.

“Look,” Jamie said, and he did. They were standing at the top of a small rise, where the trees fell away for a moment, and the Ridge and the north side of the cove below it spread before them, a massive chunk of solid black against the indigo of the faded sky. Tiny lights pricked the blackness, though; the windows and sparking chimneys of a dozen cabins.

“It’s not only our wives and our weans, ken?” Jamie said, and nodded toward the lights. “It’s them, as well. All of them.” His voice held an odd note; a sort of pride—but rue and resignation, too.

_All of them_.

Seventy-three households in all, Roger knew. He’d seen the ledgers Jamie kept, written with painful care, noting the economy and welfare of each family who occupied his land—and his mind.

“_Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel_.” The quote sprang to mind and he’d spoken it aloud before he could think.

Jamie drew a deep, audible breath.

“Aye,” he said. “Sheep would be easier.”

Edited July 4, 2016 by theschnauzers

[DittyDotDot]

Well, isn't that a cheery title? ;)

[theschnauzers]

A new #Daily Lines

#‎DailyLines‬ ‪#‎BookNine‬ ‪#‎GoTellTheBeesThatIAmGone‬ ‪#‎Noitisntdoneyet‬ ‪#‎Nowherenear‬ ‪#‎GobingewatchSeasonTwo‬ ‪#‎BriannaAndIan‬ ‪#‎GoneAHunting‬“

Spoiler

 

Oh, aye,” Ian said, and smiled, but his eyes were intent on her hands. “How long since ye’ve fired a gun, cousin?”

“Not that long,” she said tersely. She hadn’t expected it to come back. “Maybe six, seven months.”

“What were ye hunting then?” He asked, head on one side.

She glanced at him, made the decision and pushing the ramrod carefully home, turned to face him.

“A gang of men who were hiding in my house, waiting to kill me and take my kids,” she said.

Both his feathery brows went up.

“Did ye get them?” His tone was so interested that she laughed, in spite of the memories. He might have been asking if she’d caught a large fish.

“No, alas. I shot out the tire on their truck, and one of the windows in my own house. I didn’t get them. But then,” she added, with affected casualness, “they didn’t get me or the kids, either.”

He nodded, accepting what she’d said with a rapidity that would have astonished her—had it been any other man.

“That would be why ye’re here, aye?” He glanced around, quite unconsciously, as though scanning the forest for possible enemies, and she wondered quite suddenly what it would be like to live with Ian, never knowing whether you were talking to the Scot or the Mohawk—and now she was _really_ curious about Rachel.

“Mostly, yes,” she answered, a little tersely. He picked up her tone and glanced sharply at her, but nodded again.

“Will ye go back, then, to kill them?” This was said seriously, and it was with an effort that she tamped down the rage that seared through her when she thought of Rob Cameron and his bloody accomplices. It wasn’t fear or flashback that had made her hands shake now; it was the memory of the overwhelming intent to kill that had possessed her when she touched the trigger.

“I wish,” she said shortly. She flapped a hand, pushing it all away. “I’ll tell it to you later; we only came last night.” As though reminded of the long, hard push upward through the mountain passes, she yawned suddenly, hugely.

Ian laughed, and she shook her head, blinking.

“Do I remember Da saying you have a baby?” she asked, firmly changing the subject.

The huge grin came back.

“I have,” he said, his face shining with such joy that she smiled, too. “I’ve got a wee son. He hasna got his real name yet, but we call him Oggy. For Oglethorpe,” he explained, seeing her smile widen at the name. “We were in Savannah when he started to show. I canna wait for ye to see him!”

“Neither can I,” she said, though the connection between Savannah and the name Oglethorpe escaped her. “Should we—“

The sound of a distant noise cut her short and Ian was on his feet instantly, looking.

“Was that Da?” she asked.

“I think so.” Ian gave her a hand and hauled her to her feet, snatching up his bow almost in the same motion. “Come!”

She grabbed the newly-loaded gun and ran, careless of brush, stones, tree-branches, creeks, or anything else. Ian slithered through the wood like a fast-moving snake; she bulled her way through behind him, breaking branches and dashing her sleeve across her face to clear her eyes.

Twice Ian came to a sudden halt, grasping her arm as she hurtled toward him. Together they stood listening, trying to still their pounding hearts and gasping breaths long enough to hear anything above the sough of the forest.

The first time, after what seemed like agonized minutes, they caught a sort of squalling noise above the wind, tailing off into grunts.

“Pig?” she asked, between gulps of air. It was autumn; there would be herds of wild hogs in the forest, rooting through the chestnut mast. Some of them were big, and very dangerous.

Ian shook his head.

“Bear,” he managed, and seizing her hand, pulled her into a run.

 

 

Quote

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by theschnauzers

[Petunia846]

Always love Bree and Ian together.

[morgan]

Oh wow.  I try to stay away from the excerpts because I want to read the book unspoiled when it finally comes out.  But I couldn't resist.  Love Bree and Ian together.