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Chapter Text

She’d told Frank and there was nothing else for it.

Mrs. Graham had told her it was time to put her adventure away and move on, and for the baby—if nothing else—she had considered Frank’s ultimatum. Live again as husband and wife, raise the child as their’s and never speak of the past again. It was in the letter of what Jamie had begged of her, the life he’d have for Frank’s via Randall’s back in Paris but not the spirit. To raise Jamie’s child devoid of Jamie’s name on her lips was something Claire could not envision.

Seeing the infant in Frank’s arms, that she could do easily enough. Hearing the child laugh with Frank, look to Frank, take Frank’s hand and be guided safely through the travails of childhood she could do…had done since she imagined the child with brown hair and jumpers and glasses tucked studiously between teeth. But now the child was red-haired like Faith, with Claire’s porcelain skin and Jamie’s mischievously glinting eyes. To imagine that voice naming itself Brian Randall, calling Frank father, none of the Scots burr rolling through it as it did so, none of Jamie’s gàidhlig endearments or curses tripping out unconsciously broke the little remaining pieces of her heart. She couldn’t bring herself to agree.

“I’m sorry, Frank,” she said, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she looked at him no higher than his knees, couldn’t bring herself to see she was causing him yet more pain. “I can’t deny Jamie what little of this child he’ll have. I… it wouldn’t be right to ask you to call the child Fraser and I concede that you would be taking on the biggest burden either way but to never say Jamie’s name, to never acknowledge a man who loved this child enough t—” she felt again his heat at her back, her body lit on fire with fear as he pressed her hands to the stones. She closed her eyes and girded herself against the fresh wash of agony the memory seemed to always bring. One steadying breath and she opened her eyes and looked into Frank’s ashen face. “I thank you for loving me, for honoring our marriage enough to be willing, Frank, truly. It was more than I had any right to ask. That you would only reminds me of how much our life meant to me, of how heartbroken I was to loose you when I fell through the stones. I am heartbroken to loose you now, Frank. I know that this is perhaps the unkindest cut of all. But I,” she felt the tears coming, the need to look away from Frank’s pain, pain she’d caused. She forced herself to steady, to drawn on the strength that had seen her through two wars and endless hardships. “I cannot except your terms.”

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Frank was far from best pleased with Claire’s answer. He’d screamed that she’d meant to ruin him, his reputation, create scandal which would reach all their friends and slammed out of the room, the manse, pounded through the dirt. Her protests had fallen on deaf ears.

Reverend Wakefield came to her after and spoke softly while parsing out tea. “The generosity of spirit it took for him to put aside his hurt and jealousy for the sake of a child was no small thing.”

“I know. I was touched by it, grateful.” She hesitated.

“But?”

“But to not tell the child anything of his father, ever, seemed too cruel to his father, to the child…to…me.”

“The child would have a father in Frank and not need another and the father would not know one way or the other who this child calls da. Is it not just yourself ye are longing for? Is it not just that you cannot put the past in the past?”

The flood of fresh guilt overcame her. Was she doing this simply for herself, to have a way to speak of Jamie, to cherish the memories of their life?

“Roger has chosen to call me his father, to put away the one who is not with him and focus on the one who is—”

“A choice Frank would have me take from my child. Roger knew his parents, may ask you if he wishes to talk of them, to hear their names, see their faces, speak with their friends and listen to the stories of their lives. Why would I deny that to my child as well? I lost my own parents when I was young, Reverend, and the idea that I might never be allowed to speak of them ever after…” She felt her face pale and stiffen in a grimace. “No, it is too cruel.” She half whispered as her hands curled round the stomach she could remember growing bulbous with Faith’s brief life under Jamie’s loving hands.

“I see that you are firm in your resolve on this, Claire.” He blew on his tea, sipped for a moment. “What of your marriage?”

“That will be up to Frank, I imagine. He spoke of Boston. Perhaps there he’ll be insulated from the repercussions of the world realizing I’m with child. And I don’t feel the need to return to London. Perhaps I’ll go north,” She mused, “make a home somewhere I can be accepted, where the woman of the faerie stones doesn’t need to follow me.” She felt a smile brush her face and images of Lallybroch come to the fore, the many villages traveled collecting rents. A small cottage and working as a healer for those nearby while bringing Jamie’s child safely to the world. A measure of much needed peace.

“Is that truly what you want, my dear?”

No, she screamed inside. What she truly wanted was to have never left Jamie, to have run when bloody Bonny Prince Charlie had forged Jamie’s hand and forced them into the conflict. Anything, any horrible thing that they might be safe, still one.

“I’m afraid it will have to do.”

Chapter Text

When Frank returned hours later he was much calmer though Claire was not. She’d had as much of this bloody limbo as she could stand. The whole uprising had been a gamble to change history never knowing if it would be enough. Suddenly her future depended not on the wimbles of a thrown-less prince and his hangers on but on her once and again husband’s wishes. He could quite legally see her shut away in an asylum; just toss her into Bedlam and let her and her child rot. She didn’t think Frank had it in him to do so—kind and warm a man as he was—but his anger when he’d discovered her pregnant with another man’s child, loyal to another man’s memory, was bracing and a tad worrisome.

She and Wakefield had still been at tea in the parlor when he came through looking wind worn.

“I do so beg your pardon. Reginald, my I have a word with my wife, if indeed she is?”

Chastened, Claire looked to her teacup as Wakefield made his assurances and left them alone.

Frank rustled about, pacing here, passing his hat from hand to hand there, perching on the sofa, scrabbling at his pants. “What is it you want of me, Claire?” he asked, the calm and irritation both in his seemingly reasonable voice. “Your freedom?”

“Your forgiveness, Frank. I’ve no real right to it, I know. And I don’t,” her eyes closed, “wish to hurt you further, no matter the love in my heart for you or for him.”

“Do you love me, Claire, truly?” he asked with eyes cutting into Claires in the steady fashion she had first loved him for, in a way that brought a rush of it back to her.

“Yes, Frank. Always a part of me will love you and the life we had.”

“But not enough?”

“Not enough to lie to my child, to keep all knowledge of his father, whom I also love always, from him. Can you understand that Frank? That I love both of you very much but differently?”

“No, Claire, I don’t know that I can. It feels like the difference is only in the amount you love each of us.”

“That’s not fair. I was nearly killed multiple times trying to get back here. I tried for months Frank.” She wiped a tear from her face. “I know you must have been through something awful during that time and I am sorry for it. If it helps at all to know, I knew you were safe here. The war over, a roof over your head, friends to support you. That comforted me.” It sucked the air from her chest that she had no such comfort this time. On this passage through the stones she had left her loved ones to die in a war she could not stop nor win or be bludgeoned by retribution and famine she could not buffer nor end.

“Claire.” Frank murmured in the earnest way that used to warm her chest. He reached out for Claire’s hand, holding it, rubbing his thumb over her fingers, smoothing over the gold band.

“I’ve no wish to bring shame on you, Frank Randall. I know that this looks awful for you but you’ll go to Boston and I’ll hide away in some small cranny where I can use my training from the war. I’ll provide for us and you’ll be free of it.”

“I don’t want to be free of you, Claire.”

She felt a droplet land on her hand and his thumb massage it into her skin. “I cannot give you what you asked, Frank. Can you live with less? Can you love this child, raise this child with less? It is an awful burden for your heart and your pride to bear. I won’t ask it of you,” she said, shaking her head as her own tears dropped on their joined hands and smeared into their flesh.

“Claire,” he said again, repeated it over and over like a prayer without end, in recitations of resignation or hopelessness or pleading.

Chapter Text

In the end Frank went to Boston alone and Claire breathed a sigh of unutterable relief. The decision had been made to stall official divorce proceedings—Claire thought it equal parts Frank’s noble streak trying to shield both her and the child from certain ignominy and his desperate hope that she would change her mind and come to him without the baggage she could not jettison. Should people ask after her Frank had said he would tell them she was still convalescing after her ordeal and would join him later. Reverend Wakefield, for his part, offered up his home as the locale for this not untruth, but Claire and the indomitable Mrs. Graham were able to help him see that once Claire began to show that it would make things more difficult on the innocent parties later.

Claire, with said help was able to locate and visit Lallybroch in the somewhat vain hope that she and Jamie’s bairn might be able to share that with him. To see the beloved home in such abandon was another blow and yet Claire could barely manage to drag herself from it.

“Och, lass, come away from that,” Mrs. Graham chided her that way she did Roger but rather than the begrudging acquiesces of the boy Claire smiled. It was nice to be cared for.

She wouldn’t let it stop her though as she made her way under the chained doors she’d trailed and hauled both Jamie the younger and Jamie the elder through. The woodwork was rotten in places, the floors above having leaked enough of the elements, and looked dried and powdered in other from the mites no longer kept at bay. She tried a stair or two but decided not to risk it. The shells of the rooms seemed to echo with the loss of her once family. Reg—for Claire could no longer call him Reverend after all they had divulged to each other—had found the deed of her tear stained signature dated a year before Culloden. The Murrays had lived on in those smelly and decomposing rooms as the loving hoard she remembered for generations but not Jamie and not Claire and not the child that grew still within her.

“This would have been your home, little one,” she said stroking her stomach and turning, seeing a notch in the wood she’d watched young Jamie put there wrestling with his father. “It may not look like much but it was special, lovely, bonny even.” The word she’d never much adopted came easily with a smile now as did many of the phrases she’d gotten used to hearing and missed. Reg and Graham were teaching Claire bits and pieces of gàidhlig and she welcomed the reminder of those lost to her on the other side of the stones. “It’s a shame there is no one to love it now,” she said more to the walls than the babe. She imagined the work that would be ahead of her—how many months pregnant she might be when a new roof would be strong enough to hold on its own—and how impossible it would be. “I wish it could be us, little one.”

Mrs. Graham had told her to let the past go, to look to what was in front of her. Her intention had been to reconcile Claire and Frank. Now that Claire had been able to face her grief more than an uncertain future, she found not drowning, desperate sorrow in the memories swirling about her of those long dead but comfort, motivation. She must provide for the one piece of her family that remained all the love of those lost to them. Claire must be Jamie and Murtagh and Fegus and Jenny and Ian and the passel of Scots who’d made their way into her heart for both of them so that their tiny little family of two could hold all the memories of its true breadth.

She stood—smiling at the thought of telling the child, her and Jamie’s child, about the time at the mill Jamie had gone into the frigid water to fix the wheel and come out blustering and flustered to be naked as a jay in front of his sister; she could recall it now without the fear of the redcoats and discovery and see only the sibling discord—when Mrs. Graham puffed up next to her.

“What a squeeze! Lord but you gave me a fright when you didn’t answer. I thought you might have fallen to your death through a rotten board.” She brushed off whatever dust might have had a chance to gather on her suit and Claire put an arm of camaraderie around her.

“I’m fine. Isn’t it lovely though?” she asked gesturing to the once grand dining room.

Mrs. Graham huffed, “Aye, for a ghost tale sure enough.”

Claire could feel a spring winding tight inside her friend and waited for it to pop back with something she’d been waiting days for.

“Dinna you think this is a bit unwise, luv? Are you no’ looking to go waltzing with ghosts yerself by coming back here and day dreaming about a time when these walls weren’t crumbling to dust?”

“It’s not day dreaming; it’s remembering. It’s nice to have something to remember them all by. When I came back… there so little real proof that I wasn’t crazy, that I hadn’t just lost my mind somewhere in the woods for three years.” She sighed, grateful again that Frank had not chosen that option, bitter again that he was afforded it by both society and law. “I think that’s part of why I searched so desperately when I first came to you.” Claire looked at her. “I needed to be sure Jamie lived. Not just after Culloden but at all. That he had drawn breath in some way that was marked by more than just me.” Claire searched her battered, busted heart as she had done so often of late. “I have that now, but I need to keep looking. I need to find more records or evidence, something to hold in my hands of these people before there is nothing left of them just like someday there will be nothing left of this house… unless….”

“Unless, lass?” Mrs. Graham’s voice held misgivings and curiosity.

“Aye, unless I do something about it.”

“Oh… no, Claire ye can’t.”

“Not yet Mrs. Graham but, dinna fash,” She laughed remembering all the times she wanted to sock Jamie for just such a phrase. “I can’t do it now. There’s no way, pregnant or not I’d be able to put in enough time and money to bring this place back up to snuff, but…someday I want my child to walk these rooms and be able to imagine all those who came before, right down to Brian Fraser standing on this turf and deciding that here he would build Lallybroch.” Claire felt the shiver of something right and true slip through her, like an oath, like a promise sealed with more than intentions, like the song of the stones.

Chapter Text

It began as it usually did: Claire could not keep out of it.

A parent with a squalling babe in Mrs. Graham’s kitchen and suddenly she was the woman to see for all sorts of potions. And her patients called them that more of their own choosing than hers. At first she was somewhat worried that history might repeat itself and she’d be pointed to and muttered as being a witch or a faerie. Mrs. Graham though was magic herself and seemed to know just who to send to Claire and who to bat a hand at and say, “Och, ye’d never believe such tales from a child!” It always seemed to do the trick and leave Claire to digging in the wild herb patches around town and setting up her own apothecary like the beaton’s at Castle Leoch in Reg’s basement.

The good-hearted man that he was he continued to insist that Claire stay on, even as she grew. With a business growing under her feet, Claire was loathe to go even as she and Graham worked to re-convince the good reverend that a reputation once lost was hard to repair. He simply called her Mrs. Randall more forcefully in public.

After a time it seemed that her skills outweighed any objection to her somewhat questionable marital status. Even some of the physician’s in the area had sent a few cases to her that she suspected they didn’t feel challenging nor profitable. A pharmacist had taken to calling her in to make a few of her own tisanes and salves with an off hand, “No’ got the time, no’ got the care. Ye ken? Yer making them is just easier all ‘round.” Who was Claire to complain if a little laziness got her that much closer to being able to put a roof over her and her child’s head?

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The items that had been making their way to the guest room at the manse had the freshly oiled wood smell laced over something recently out of storage and brightened up. There was not a doubt in Claire’s mind that Graham was behind it. She was getting all the major items Claire and the baby would need and slipping them into the room while Claire was out in the fields or making visits around town, brewing up the salve that was now being dolled out by two pharmacies in town. It was sweet and Claire did not know how to say “thank you” and “stop” in the same sentence. So she settled for an exuberant “you shouldn’t have.”

Reg had been getting in on the action as well, pulling Roger’s old books and toys from somewhere. Of a Sunday evening the two close-cropped heads could be seen erasing or repairing pages with the intensity of a tin soldier campaign. Rather than making their way into the bins in the church they seemed to appear on the shelves in Claire’s room.

Her patients paid her in a variety of ways and increasingly the care of little aches and coughs were thanked with knit layettes or hand-me-down clothes meant to accommodate a sizable girth—her favorite of which was a gargantuan loose-knit fair isle sweater that made her feel as though a warm arm were round her—or crocheted blanket for the pram Mrs. Graham had tucked into Wakefield’s foyer.

Claire despaired of the lot of them and wondered how she’d ever thank Mrs. Graham’s conspirators properly for the horde.

As charmed as she was by the thoughtfulness of her erstwhile community, it threw into sharp relief the differences between this pregnancy and her last. With Faith the only preparations they’d truly made were the apostle spoons Jamie’d had sent from Lallybroch. One left on her gravestone over two hundred years ago—no matter how fresh the pain was for Claire.

When she thought of what must have become of the spoon, so lovingly placed—And likely greedily stolen, she thought—she yearned for the other eleven. Jamie had secreted them back to Jenny, likely trying to shield Claire from a few more seconds of the hollowing ache. Claire searched through little shops for ones like them as she moved—slower and slower it seemed—to and from patients and a growing number she would also call friends and found none. There were plenty of spoons, even some lonely abandoned apostle spoons but none like those she’d seen shinning on dark velvet, a box in her lap.

Just as she could search the twentieth century from start to finish and not find one like the man who had given those spoons to her for their child.

No, she had to put her foot down. She could barely fit in the room Reg was calling hers, but just as she’d finally worked up a good head of steam over it—she’d lost track of her mouth as she was wont to do—she’d felt something drop in her womb and then she’d felt something drop in her stomach. In a panic Claire grabbed her growing midsection. Both Reg and Graham had been at her side the instant she’d paled. She’d let them take over as she pleaded with God.

She could not survive the loss of another child without the hope of Jamie, without the comfort of his life lived with hers. The child was all that remained of him in her possession save the bits she’d managed to pull with her through the stones—not even the stone in the ring had made it—or to find with Reg’s help in the archives—a dusty registration book for the British army with his name and Ian’s and that deed which bore her signature beside his. Dear God, please. Not again. Not this too.

What else could be taken from her? Her children, her family, her husband. Would the little that remained be enough?

Chapter Text

Between the doctors, Reg, Mrs. Graham, and the many townsfolk she’d gotten to know Claire was allowed to do nothing but assure people she was fine and shoo back to whatever resting place she’d recently vacated.

“How am I to support us this way, little one?”

She heard the awkward throat clearing that usually heralded another one of Reg’s announcements that he had found no new news of the clan of 18th century highlanders Claire was after or another plea for Claire to accept his house as her home truly and stop all the fussing about to leave.

“Reginald,” she snapped, “if you are here to tell me to relax any more than I already am I might finally loose my mind.”

“Ha, no. Claire. I know ye’re following doctor’s orders to the extent that ye can bare it. But I… I want to put your mind at ease about something. I understand if there is some upset and I hope you’ll forgives us not telling ye sooner.”

“What are you talking about, Reg?” She canted her head up to see him as he approached the sofa that was so often her prison.

The reverend sighed, braced himself, and began. “Frank’s been putting aside for ye… both.”

“What?”

“Every few week there’s a deposit made into an account in your name. It comes by way of a few hops and leaps given it’s generally from Boston but…”

“The bloody bastard,” she said to the ceiling almost in awe though mostly in ire.

“Now, Claire, it was done without your knowledge, yes; however, Frank wants to provide for you now until such a time as you no longer need him. You are his wife and he feels it is only right to do.”

“I do not need his bloody money. We’re only still married because—”

“Because he’d like to do right by you in protecting you, and your child, from what little he can before you absolve the marriage. You could not go with him, he couldna stay, but he could set aside for when ye needed it. You might need it soon, Claire. It’s no’ much, but it’s lovingly done.”

Claire didn’t doubt it, didn’t doubt that it was done in what Frank thought as consideration, kindness—despite it smacking of patronizing overprotectiveness. The urge for tears of rage past in moments and there were tears of anguish that flowed freely down her cheeks. “How can he? How can he still love me after everything that has past between us?”

“Och, lass,” Reg said, tucking into her bundles of blankets and pillows—so many bloody pillows just to get comfortable. “I’d have thought you learnt this one in your travels. ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It is not boastful or proud…it is no’ selfish…it keeps no record of wrongs…It protects always, trusts always, hopes always…’ As do ye, Claire. If ye loved him less it would be easy to take from him. It wouldna make ye want to tell him no’ to love ye for his own sake.”

With Reg’s arms around her, rocking her, she let the tears flow. First for Frank and the marriage ties that still pulled at both of them, then for the child stuck it the maelstrom his mother could not shake, and before long for the gaping misery that gnawed at her heart sometime with milk teeth and sometimes with jaws like that mythic great white whale.

That was the nearly constant danger of the rest and medicine the doctors had assigned her: the time she’d had to pour over the parts of her that had been ripped away. Memories brought her comfort and even a measure of joy until the indefatigable truth that there would be no new memories of Jamie, of Faith, tear that away as well.

Chapter Text

Laying in the sun, in a nest of cushions and blankets it must have taken Mrs. Graham and a small army—very small as it was one boy of no more than eight—to haul outside and arrange for her. The sun and fresh air felt heavenly against her skin and she dozed, the wind rustling her hair. Somewhere in the unminded wanderings of her nearly slumbering brain a memory tickled at the ruffle against her scalp and she could almost feel the light touch of his hand as it slipped over her curls, wanting to feel her but not wake her. How often had she felt just this touch, and yet how many more still countless times had she been too gone with sleep or sickness to sense the nearness of his flesh to hers? The light gusting off the side of the outbuildings almost seemed like his breath and the sun on her back the furnace he seemed to keep blazing inside his ribs. She drifted in this half-him and was woken out of the daze by his name on her own lips.

The sudden cruelty of her own mind surprised her. It wasn’t that she hadn’t felt as though Jamie was beside her or near or with her in some way. It was his touch, how very much she missed being touched in love, not simply to make love—though that was surely also true—but the little ways they could lean against one another, touch to comfort, to seduce, to reassure or for no purpose or reason. She felt the familiar tears well and uttered his name again, a plea.

“Mistress Claire,” came a stage whisper—interrupting her grief—from under a bush.

Claire wiped her face and tried to calm her sobs through a bout of hiccups. She looked up to see the one boy army who had created her lap of luxury. “Roger,” she sniffled, discreetly trying to set herself to rights. “What are you doing over there?”

“Hiding, mistress.”

“Whatever for?”

“I sneaked a treat. I dinna ken it was for your tea today. I’m sarry.”

Claire pushed a smile for him to her face and turned to look at him more fully. “It’s alright. One biscuit or another, its all the same to me,” she said with a shrug.

“Ye may feel that way but,” he shivered, “Graham does no’.” His eyes grew wide with the fear of a child when punishments of a moment are far worse than any imaginable.

“Ah. So, is it banishment then, exile?”

“Aye, milady, until the beast slumbers again and I’ve a chance of escape.”

And her heart bled so for Fergus. They had sent him from the battle with important enough a mission that he would see it through, but what of after? What would the young warrior do when he heard his milord was dead on the field and milady nowhere to be seen? Surely Jenny and Ian would do all that they could to keep him from harm’s way as they had with Rabbie. But when with the brave little pickpocket had that ever been enough? Claire closed her eyes and imagined the boy beside her had long, curly hair, much like her own, a regal face, and a heavy accent. “What shall you do in the years until then, my lord?”

“I was hoping, ye might tell me a story. The one with the king and the parritch?” His voice still shouting a whisper fairly well dripped merriment and conspiracy.

“Ah, yes. Once there was a king. Barely more than a boy and a grand and rich country looked to him for rule. He relished his duties and his power. Christening ships, building grand monuments, waving as parades of brave and glittering troops saluted him. But all was not well in his kingdom for an illness had befallen the king.”

She heard Roger and her phantom Fergus laugh, knowing the next turn of the tale.

“It was an illness so terrifying that it had no name. It’s ghastly symptoms, no known remedy. In the years since this once singular ailment has moved through the lands and we now have the words to say, his majesty was stopped up.”

She let the childish glee wash over her, not removing her grief, not replacing it but pushing the eddy of it, helping to move it out into the many currents of the wine dark sea.

Chapter Text

The surprise, in the end, was that she hadn’t socked someone sooner.

The doctor had asked repeatedly for Frank before he would tell Claire what was wrong with the pregnancy. It was like some brain injury where every time he looked down at the page his memory of their conversation vanished. She’d told him at least half a dozen times that Frank was in Boston and not joining them any time soon. Then he persisted in calling Reg Frank like Claire had been lying about it the entire time. He even called back to Reg as she was wheeled out of the room, “Don’t worry, we’ll get your wife back to you.”

If it hadn’t been her life and her child in the great lummox’s hands she’d have been happy to deliver his comeuppance right there. As the telegraph of her body thrummed in an alarming series of short, short, short; long, long, long; short, short, short, she grew too panicked, too desperate to push it down and stay calm for the child. She tossed a frantic prayer at Jenny for her focus and cool during labor. But then the moron was ordering injections of Claire knew not what, nor trusted him to understand either as the world slipped and her hands were retrained from her child-ripe belly.

She fought against as she had fought against Culloden, against Randall, against letting Jamie’s memories go. Her mind felt wet somehow, unable to grasp like soap in a tub, through pain and memory and fear. She heard Mother Hildegarde’s guttural murmur, felt the stab of a knife to her throat, the breathlessness of drowning in the Nile, and the terrible weightlessness of being thrown at speed. It all swirled and pitched and peaked within her until on one particular heave she came bolt upright in a quiet room with agony in her body and mind.
Panting, she moaned, collapsed forward and then slid to the side, wrapping her arms around her once again too small abdomen.

“Doctor, before you go, this one,” came cool clipped tones piercing Claire’s horror before she could catch her breath.

She tried to call out, to speak, to beg, to demand but lost the contents of her lungs once more.

“Ah,” Claire registered the voice of pompous ass who’d locked up her mind while he did terrible things to her, to her child. “Yes, she’ll be in pain for a while. I’ll write a prescription,” he said to the nurse. “I’m afraid the scarring from the failed pregnancies will make another unlikely but fatal.”

Failed.

She reached blindly, grapped his arm and—even as he shook her off—“Where—” she ground out painfully. “Where is my baby?”

“Nurse,” he said, retreating. “Call, would you? Have someone send in the husband, too.”

Claire felt fresh grief roll through her, sobs to match. That was it then. Jamie truly lost, every bit of himself. Cold, hollow paper and pearls, a band or two of metal could not keep her warm not in the sudden tundra of heartbreak she felt around her.

The movements of the nurse could not reach Claire where she was. Time had ceased to exist there as well. It might have been moments or days that she stumbled, lost through the biting frost before Mrs. Graham’s arms found her.

The warm press of Graham’s body was not enough to penetrate the freeze locked around her but a voice cracked the ice, “Och, my gràdh. What canna be wrong, ye wail so? Nurse! Nurse!”

Chapter Text

Claire had not been far wrong in her images of the child she would give birth to: red hair, fair skin, wide mouth. The eyes might change color but their blue was so striking that the overall effect was she felt she looked at Jamie’s specter. She could not tear her eyes from the child once it was finally given her. So like Faith in tiny perfection but with pink lustered skin and gentle huffs of breath…the ache in her soul receding that little bit.

Claire yearned to show her husband the child, to introduce this new brand of wonder to Jamie. She imagined the way he would cradle life in his large hands, so gently; the voice he would use to speak of all the things he’d been holding inside, so soft; the shimmer to his eyes as he was overwhelmed with all the love his tender heart could produce, so tremulous; and the smile to his lips he could not stop, so grateful.

There had been one thing Claire was significantly wrong about: it was a girl.

Brianna Ellen Fraser Randall.

Chapter Text

Claire’s life had changed drastically so many times in a single lifetime: The death of her parents. Losing Uncle Lamb. Finding Frank. The war. The end of the war. The stones. Culloden. Her return to Frank. And now Brianna.

So much of her waking hours involved pain—her body recovering from the trauma of Bree’s birth and working to produce the things Brianna needed to grow—but Claire felt lighter than she had since that time in France where all things seemed on the verge of being possible again. Jamie had finally let her back in after all Randall had done to him, they had made such progress toward what they hoped would save them all from Culloden, and she’d felt less like a child’s doll and more of a worthy and useful soul. It had been so brief, that near peace.

This un-peace—because infants are often far from peaceful and Bree certainly had her aunt’s angry voice—often felt just a fragile. Small things could often push Claire back into that darkness she had felt so often during her pregnancy, after her delivery when she had believed her second child to be lost. She came out of them more quickly, and with the bustle of Graham and Reg and Roger around her she felt almost secure that no darkness could grip her tightly enough to take her from her child. Certainly there were times where Brianna’s likeness to Faith and her father were not a comfort, even when they were a barrier, but there was always a loving embrace to see to the babe.

Mrs. Graham of course was the most constant. Magic again and being always by Claire’s side and Brianna’s even when Claire could not bear to be near the child for all she was and yet could never be. Graham’s mystic abilities continued to extend to the villagers who were often coming by both the see the fresh bundle of life Claire had brought home and pick up a vial of this or that tonic.

It was in the visits, nestled up against the hours of elated and bereaved exhaustion, that a pattern began to emerge. They’d smile, the curious townspeople, and coo at Brianna cheerfully, say surely the labor and delivery of such a perfect bairn was smooth and easy. But when Claire contradicted them a litany of stories the same or worse followed. Like a chain reaction through a colliding steamer, one story of medical rudeness or mishap, especially for women, mothers, led to another. It wasn’t uncommon after for Claire to feel a fire in her belly.

“It sounds like it would have been bloody well safer if I’d done it myself in a surgery tent on the battlefield!” she could be heard to exclaim after Roger was in bed and she’d spent the hours since tea brewing up herself.

It wasn’t until later that Claire came to realize that in those moments another layer of the glacier that had cocooned Claire in the hospital recovery room had been broken up and begun falling away.

Chapter Text

Life looped around and through Claire in the routines that came with caring for children. Naps, feedings, and nappies were all punctuated by the milestones of thriving, young life. Brianna rolled over on a Wednesday (Graham was strangely distressed by it), smiled at Claire (rather than gas) on a Sunday, and managed her first escape on a Tuesday (such basic panic and fear Claire had never felt before, ever). Life was seemingly moving on, threads of different stories interwoven and seemingly pointless but—like time itself—inexorable.

Claire’s bonny bouncing babe became a constant companion on her visits to see the patients who relied on her more affordable care. Claire worried the number of sweets snuck to the child as she treated a fever, set a bone, or lanced a boil would cause the girl gout before she was three. Happy though she was to have Brianna greeted with so many loving arms, and despite Claire’s still occasional feelings of inadequacy (which Mrs. Graham told her repeatedly was normal), Claire longed for her true highland family.

The mutual adoration of her daughter brought Claire even closer to the villagers, which likewise increased the tension she felt with some of the doctors who also cared for them. Poor or meager care infuriated Claire with each mistreated patient who turned to her. Why could the doctors who had every modern convenience Claire did not, and had not two centuries earlier, still manage to bungle the diagnoses or handling of so many? Lines were crossed as time dragged Claire on without either of the families she had expected and deeper into the ones she had never thought to know.

Battles with medical personnel were not uncommon as she continued the care of those who needed and asked for her. She grew so tired of arguing with a physician through a patient that she attended an appointment with him where the doctor refused to budge on his treatment for a urinary tract infection when Claire was positive it was an enlarged prostate. The doctor and nurse were so scandalized by her insistence on a rectal exam to prove her theory that they had her escorted out. On another occasion a patient in the hospital sent her young son to ask if it was possible that doctor was wrong that her debilitating headaches were more serious than the doctor had told her as she was loosing vision. When Claire, on visiting, discovered the doctor in question had insisted that the headaches were psychosomatic and could be cured by remarrying and gaining the healthy attention of a man, she removed the woman from his care, took her to a doctor who had no knowledge of her marital status and had him check her eyes. The second doctor quickly diagnosed her as having too much pressure in one orbital socket. A resulting operation was unable to fully restore the woman’s vision, but she was able to remain independent and care for her family. These little battles were nothing to the ones looming just in front of Claire.

One elderly woman did not understand a word the doctor had used to explain why her grandchild—alone as Claire had been in her youth—was failing as she lie in a hospital bed. She’d come to Claire by way of Mrs. Graham. Perplexed by the muddled story and half grasped concepts, Claire had marched into the child’s room in the ward and begun asking questions. Nurse after orderly could not explain things to her satisfaction, contradicting each other and the evidence Claire had seen on the chart until she demanded to see the doctor in charge.

Said doctor never materialized, but his temporary coverage sent up from the medical University in Edinburgh did. Dr. Mac Allister sighed, pulled the girl’s chart out of the proprietary hands of the charge nurse and huffed away. At the time Claire had been furious, grateful, and insulted on behalf of the head nurse—later she would amend this understanding considerably.

What lay within the chart and in her own examination of the weak child sent her careening after the seemingly rude and dismissive man.

“He’s bloody waiting for her to die,” she exclaimed at his back when she finally found him trying to set a young man’s knee to rights in its socket.

The lad was squirming and the orderly and two nurses were not enough—Claire could tell at a glance they wouldn’t be as no one had a hold on his hips and he was able to still get leverage in his desperation and agony, poor boy. “Right; would you?” Mac Allister asked with a nod at the child in his hands.

She dropped the chart and all her weight on his pelvis. “He’s said she’s in renal failure,” she continued, “with the nearest dialyzer in London. He didn’t tell the grandmother to try to get her into treatment there—”

“How,” he began giving the leg a fruitful yank (quickly followed by a popping crunch and a shout of misery and relief), “might this grandmother be able to get the girl to London and on the experimental treatment’s books, would you say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she blurted, releasing the now still and lax hips. “She’s not in renal failure, or at least she won’t be if we can get enough penicillin into her fast.”

“Why should I trust your diagnosis when I’ve no knowledge of you other than you are loud, can possibly make heads or tails of a chart, and aren’t afraid of a lad in pain, but I know the other diagnosis came from a trained physician?” he asked coolly raising a brow at her while he washed his hands.

“Because I’m not a sotted moron. It’s Weil’s. She’d been staying with school friends, crofters, and got lost for a whole day before they found her. She came down with flu-like symptoms which resolved after a couple days but then turned quickly for the worse with headaches, fever, muscle pain, as well as blood in her urine and mucus. If we don’t treat her quickly her kidneys will fail.”

He looked at her, tired, and, dismissing her with slitted eys hidden behind low sitting glasses, walked off narrowly cutting around her to swoop up the chart. “What’s next, Reid?” he asked the nurse as he handed her the child’s chart.

“Sutures in a fourteen year old female. Injury sustained falling off the back of a lorry, also severe abdominal pain and headache. Other minor abrasions and—” she rattled off only glancing at the new chart in her hand.

“Right,” he said marching out. “And get room 25 some bloody penicillin.”

It was the last Claire had seen of Dr. Mac Allister for the week it took young Elsea to recover. Her urine wasn’t the clear lemon of perfect health but with all her kidneys had been through Claire doubted if it would ever again. She’d been smiling at the story the girl was telling of being lost in the woods behind the east field of her crofter friend’s, falling into a small pond and coming up to find a lamb peeing right in it, sweet as you please.

Suddenly Elsea brightened further and called, “Dr. Mac!”

“My fair Elseanor,” he returned and the doctor she’d watch set a dislocated knee appeared ten years younger than he had days prior. The powdery skin, deep wrinkles in his brow, the furrows bracketing his mouth, and squinting eyes were all vague references to what they had been. His eyes were no longer behind glasses and dull but bright, wide, and taking in the company around him. The brusque demeanor and gruff voice were also gone. It dawned on Claire that whatever she had witnessed the day she demanded his attention for Elsea he’d been worked to the brink of collapse. What state had he found the ward in, she wondered, when he’d arrived to take it over?

He charmed both child and grandparent during his visit and—as the other two were saying their farewells for the last night Elsea would spend in the wards—Dr. Mac Allister turned to ask offhandedly of Claire, “Where were you stationed?”

“Pardon?” she replied.

“During the war?”

“Amiens.”

He merely nodded, seeming to pay more attention to the family chatter than Claire. “If you get bored with your…plants, I could use another pair of steady hands around here if I am ever to get back to Edinburgh and my students.”

That feeling of inevitability that had gripped Claire so firmly at the stones, saying yes to Jamie, taking Bree to see Lallybroch, had her again.

Chapter Text

She wasn’t used to the full sun anymore and it hurt her eyes.

“I really do wish you’d told me sooner, Reg.”

“You always say that,” he said squinting painfully, lips pursing towards his nose in a move Claire often suspected he’d learned from Roger.

“And I always mean it.” She nudged him with her shoulder to show she wasn’t terribly angry with him. Put out certainly, but how annoyed and how much she’d rake him over the coals depended on how the holiday went.

Well, Frank’s holiday anyway.

Which in the end wasn’t terribly eventful. Awkward in the extreme? Yes. From the moment Frank came through the arrivals and stopped and started to hug Claire, drop a kiss on her check too close to her mouth to be quite as platonic as she’d hoped, things had been like a sweater too tight in the shoulders and to short through the middle. Claire made small talk in the car out to the manse and tried to look like she hadn’t noticed the trouble Frank was having not watching her and disappeared as soon as they’d arrived at that destination to “check in with Mrs. Graham” by which she meant hid in her room with Brianna.

That was her plan: let the boys play with their toys (and given this particular pairing that meant dusty old tomes on Scottish history and Claire only cared about those if Jamie might be in them) and take Bree with her on as many work related outings as she could. Certainly there were homes Bree could not enter because of the illnesses within to which her tiny body was too susceptible. Nevertheless it was too valid a reason to move both herself and the evidence of her unfaithfulness out of Frank’s line of sight, out of his hearing.

It was working too until Reg called her on it. “He knows your avoiding him.”

“I—”

“He doesn’t think you’re doing it to be hurtful so no excuses are necessary. I certainly won’t be repeating them to him on your behalf. Regardless, Claire, they are hurting him. He… he’s not happy,” Reg said, having to look away.

“And that’s my fault.”

“He’s a man who’s lost all the purpose he’d had in life.”

“Because of me? What about his job at an excellent university? From his letters, you he’s all but made professor. Surely them giving him a grant to come here and research for yet another article is a sign of that.”

“Yes, of course but he thought that his work was going to serve the purpose of caring for a family. His family. But the woman he thought he’d been raising a family with is raising another man’s child on her own to the extent that she can barely be in the room with him.”

“I’m trying not to hurt him,” she protested. “I don’t know what else you all expect of me.”

“No matter what you do here Claire, you will hurt him. Just as no matter what we do being here hurts you.”

Her eyes snapped to his.

“We all see it, you know. It still haunts you. I know you’re still looking for proof of life, of death for the life you knew. Mrs. Graham and I are well aware that the only thing that keeps you anchored here is Brianna. Even your patients barely hold a candle to the past for you. And that’s alright. Brianna is happy, your work saves and improves the lives of God’s children and your own. But what would you give to return to Fraser?”

My very soul, she answered without thought or hesitation.

It must have flashed across her face because Reg tilted his head and grimaced. “You’re his Fraser, Claire. There’s naught he wouldn’t give to be with you as miserable as it is making him.”

“I can’t give him what he wants. I can’t go back to our marriage like Jamie never existed, like my daughter isn’t another man’s.”

“Aye, he knows. But what he really wants is to talk with ye, feel you still know and see him the way he still feels he knows and sees you.”

So it was with guilt and the worry that she’d only make the stay worse for Frank that she agreed to an awkward dinner.

They were settling in to an even more awkward cheese course, Claire listening as Frank detailed the records of indentured servants who’d poured into the colonies four hundred years earlier and how it had slowed to a trickle as cheaper labor had come from the south, when the tempest arose. Claire was out of her seat, launching towards the cry that always seemed to sound within her just as much as without her when Brianna was injured or scared—as any active parent will explain is a separate cry from all the others. Graham met her at the threshold, and pressed the girl into Claire’s arms just as much as the child pressed herself.

“Oh my darling,” she whispered, bounced the child to a rhythm that had worked since she was a colicky babe. “What is it, mo chridhe. Mummy’s got you. Mummy’s here,” she crooned a litany of other things she’d said so often already in Brianna’s short life that they ceased to register—though hadn’t lost meaning. As she soothed her sweet, young lass hands guided Claire to sit on the settee in the library where shortly Reg and Frank joined her and Bree with whiskeys and cake.

They talked for a time, Brianna’s eyes finding Frank’s, curiously pulling on her mother, and giggling at last as Claire pulled faces and tucked her close. Before too much longer the cups were empty, Bree was slumbering safely, and Reg was making his way to bed. Claire thought she’d only have to wait a moment for Frank to do the same before she could abandon all pretense and simply stare dazedly at the face of her daughter in the firelight—it still knocked her breathless, the perfection of this not as tiny life.

He didn’t though, Frank. He sat quietly looking at the fire, at Claire, at the baby in her arms.

After a time her comfort faded and she began to feel leery of Frank’s lingering. The feeling born out when he at last gasped out a broken, “Claire,” with tears in his eyes and on his face.

She was heartsick for him. It would have gutted her to see Jamie so love the child with another woman, knowing Claire could never win him back from her.

“I’m sorry, Frank,” she returned. She tried to speak further but could and eventually stumbled out with, “She’s Jamie.” Her hair, her eyes, the smile that slanted across her face even in slumber. The slight burr to her soft snore.

“She’s you.” He breathed wetly. “Certainly the color’s not but the curl, her laughter, that light in her eyes. She’s you, Claire. I’d…” he rolled his eyes to God and seemed to not dare look away. “I’d hoped she’d look so like him that I could never see you, that it would be easy to never wonder again if we could have made a family, the three of us. But now,” his breath was equal parts hiccough and sob, “I can’t not see him but I can’t not want to see how she would grow to be like you more and more. Would she be as bold as you are? Unafraid to follow where her heart and the needs of those in peril led? I can’t help but think yes, she would indeed. Claire please—”

“Stop, Frank. Don’t say something you can’t take back.” She had an ill defining feeling about what would come next given the shattered and bleeding look of his eyes.

“What could that even be now? What is it possible for us to say that would be too much? Your arms are around your child with another man who bears my name as much as his.”

“Frank—”

“I love you, Claire. I love you and I’m here. Now. I’m not relegated to the shadows. I can hold you, I can hold the child—”

“His child.”

“Your child. She could be our child.”

“How Frank? For how long? Say I agree, I come back to you and then what? You care for her until she reminds you more of him than me? Until she defies you and you let slip your secret fears, until they grow to resentments? I cannot risk her. She is everything to me and for her to be harmed ever would gut me. But for her to be harmed by you, under my arm… I could never forgive you, I could never forgive myself,” she finished with her face hard and her arms sharpening to steel as they banded her child.

Frank smiled slightly and sniffed a laugh as he looked away from her, “I never doubted you would be a fierce mother. I guess I’m only sorry it isn’t our child you’re protecting.”

She felt herself softening. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as the truth, not flattery.”

“If we’re being our better selves, Frank, then thank you. It means a lot to me that you would try to love her.”

“I cannot say I would be the same. I do not know, you might be right and the bits of someone else would be too much for me to bear. But… please Claire, if… if you will not let me offer the protection of my love at least let me offer the protection of my name.”

“Frank—”

“It hurts nothing, no one.”

“It hurts you. Frank, it’s time. It’s time to let us go, let the life we both thought we’d have together go. You deserve someone whose love you don’t question, whose heart you don’t share as you would always have to share mine.”

“And what happens to her?” he asked looking at Bree in the most clinical way he had during his whole trip. “What becomes of the young girl in the school yard with no father? Whose mother works for a pound here, a shilling there, and fresh eggs hither? A girl living on the mercy of the church and old ladies, who maybe had a father, but maybe that’s just a lie? Come Claire, you’re not a child. People are cruel and I do not wish them to be cruel to you, to this innocent child of yours. I cannot save you if you will not let me but at least let me…”

“I don’t need saving!”

“Of that I am well aware! She has yet to grow your thick skin and hard head,” he fired back, “let me give her a measure of time to develop them.”

“I—”

“If it’s all you will take from me, let me freely give it.”

Chapter Text

“Nurse Randall,” Cormac Mac Allister said in his regulated and staid fashion, “a moment, please.”

Claire hung back while the rest of the staff made for their posts and to relive those whose shifts were changing. Unsure of what Dr. Mac Allister wished to discuss—likely just a patient or an orderly he wanted her to keep an eye on as he had once or twice in the past—she raised an eyebrow to his bland expression. As he so often did, he neglected to look at the person he was conversing with while doing some bit of work (jotting notes in charts, writing ‘scripts, filling his pockets with the paraphernalia one needs on hand when dealing with ailing children, emptying his pocket of detritus one acquires while dealing with ailing children, etc.) and so was completely oblivious of her expression. “Yes, sir?”

“I saw you out with your family the other day. Not quite who I imagined for you, I must say.”

“Excuse me, sir?” She thought through the last few days. Who might she have walked with that he might refer to as her family? Brianna obviously, Graham and Roger perhaps…

“I can’t say if I’m more surprised that a vicar chose you or that you chose a vicar. I may not sound much like it by comparison, but I am a Scot. I know what they call you. An odd mix,” he said finally looking to her, “God and magicks.”

“Some would say God is all magicks.”

“Ah, yes. But would a vicar?”

Her back was up now, both for Reg and for this assumption that Ma Allister’d made that he had any idea who or what she was. “Is this going somewhere, sir?”

“I supposed I am just trying to understand your relationship. It throws my plans into a bit of a turmoil…possibly.” He said with the closest expression to a smirk she had ever seen on his face.

She took a deep breath, girding for battle. “Doctor—”

“I should very much like you to assist me in a class next week, if your husband and children might spare you for six days. The travel to Edinburgh necessitates more time than would otherwise be required. Your evenings would, of course, be your own and the university would have a place for you to stay while you were of use. During your stay you might perhaps visit friends or take in the theatre.”

She swallowed her deep breath accidentally and nearly chocked on it. “Assist you?”

“Yes,” he looked away again dropping one chart for another, “I’ve need of someone who will not flinch at what is before them or shy from the reactions of less accustomed students.”

So she’d agreed to consider it with the idea that she would be holding a patient during some sort of procedure in front of first years who couldn’t yet be trusted not to muddy their own shoes in the process. Claire was not sure why a suitable person did not already exist in Edinburgh.

Graham agreed with her that it stood to reason he might have ulterior motives but both she and Reg were so excited for her to have the chance to see the medical school properly that they at once agreed to care for Bree and see to her herb gardens. Claire also went straight to work writing up instructions on those she was caring for directly, what symptoms should send them straight for a doctor and not linger waiting for her return.

The train ride itself seemed interminable as she had to switch multiple times to get round Perth and Stirling, but to exit the train in a proper city, her first proper city since the Paris of 1744. She was dazed by it at first, overwhelmed almost as she had been by Inverness when she’d come through the stones. There was more charm in the swell of noise and sounds and people this time though as it wasn’t so close on the heels of the pre-electric quiet.

She moved through the city, following signs and the conjoined directions of Reg and Dr. Mac Allister until she found McEwan Hall and reception delivered her to an unassuming wood door the other side of which found her entering through a hallway and onto the floor of a lecture hall. The curved rows of seats rose up around her and she felt like she had entered into a gladiatorial arena. No one had yet spotted her; the men in suits and lab coats all seemed to be mingling, reviewing notes, jostling for seats, and pencil sharpening.

“Ah, Randall,” came Mac Allister’s quiet, even tones. “You’re a bit early, but I supposed these boys will benefit from your presence as well.”

“I—” she started, still entirely unsure what it was she was here to do.

“Lab coats are there,” he nodded towards the hall she just past through even as he looked down at what she assumed were his lecture notes.

Not wanting to appear unprepared in front of the largest horde of all men she’d been surrounded by since she was at war, she fairly scurried to drop her travel blazer and don a lab coat hoping that the day had not left her too visibly wrinkled.

“Gentlemen,” she heard the doctor begin. “I had originally called our guest down to Edinburgh for my later class on paediatrics but she is also singularly qualified to discuss a very real and never addressed area of our pathology work. Randall?” he called over his shoulder and Claire stood next to him, feeling every one of the eyes shift to her either in confusion, interest, or dismissal. “You’ve been cossetted to need the many tools in our laboratories here to diagnose through tubes and chemicals what is going on inside a patient. In the field there is not always the time to wait on those results, or—as many of your fathers will be all too aware—the resources my simply not exist. Claire Randall has practiced medicine intensively in both situations on a routine basis. Having worked with her in a location up north where both time and resources are at the ready, I have seen her diagnose faster and more accurately than any physician at this university, faculty or student.”

Claire looked at him hoping her stupefaction did not show as clearly on her face as she suspected it might.

“My first question for you, madam: what tools do you employ when a laboratory would be inefficient?”

She boggled a moment looking for something to say but bumbled out, “The same things I always use.” There was a titter in the amphitheater at her expense. “Your body is a tool you should use regardless of what else is available. Your eyes may not see microscopic organisms in the blood but your hand can just as easily feel the flush of infection, smell the sourness of rash, even taste. When a person’s life is bleeding from them out on to your hands you cannot wait to discover the cause. You must know enough about what ailments looks like, sound like, smell like to have a chance at saving that life. For instance, a person comes to you,” she saw his face in her mind, “there’s been a serious trauma, a car crash say, and yet there is no real registering of pain, perhaps there is a patient seemingly in greater need of care. Having the presence of mind to also check the upright patient thoroughly might quickly reveal heat and tenderness in the abdomen, rapid bruising and swelling. An internal bleed far worse than the compound fracture on the table.” She prayed again for their souls. “Talking to patients, actually listening to the stories they tell you—and they are stories with characters and events that inform what comes after—can change your course of treatment considerably.” She heard a rare chuckle—outside of talking to the children in the ward—from Mac Allister. “As I am sure your teacher here would tell you. Ignoring that a patient had suffered a wound in the woods, gone swimming in questionable water, could change the course of action from a plaster and cookie to an anti-toxin or penicillin injections.”

“So, gentlemen, what pathology questions have you for our most noteworthy guest,” he asked. While the men in question were rapidly flipping through notebooks and texts, furiously crafting their trials for her, he leaned over and said in a voice lower than usual, “If you’ve not made plans, I’ve found a theatre you might wish to take in this evening.”

And though she had a slight misgiving she nodded as he began calling on students who worked to ask how she might determine an illness from a specific symptom or a symptom of an illness. Said misgivings grew as he took her from his last class—it had been interesting to debate the psychological behaviors of children in a room full of people who would never be expected to truly raise one—to this show he said he’d gotten her tickets to, though he hadn’t said it that way. They bustled through the corridors of the school passing students and surgeons of all ages but very few stripes. Dr. Mac Allister nodded at many of them in acknowledgement as his legs carried him at a speed she expected of few men his age, save Dougal.

Ushered through yet another door, Claire found herself pushed past a knot of yet more men and into a seat at the rail of a theatre—Had he meant her to take in a show after all?—only below her was an operating table surrounded by heavily garbed surgeons and nurses as they called and responded with forceps and swaps. “What…?” she asked confused again for the seventy-fifth time that day.

“Look close, Randall.”

She stopped listening too the words and just followed the actions. The blue bedecked bodies were deep into the chest cavity. It looked like every rib had been split. Claire breathed in as she realized that their hands were working furiously right in the center of him, her, whoever the body on the table might have been.

“Amazing isn’t it, Randall?”

She could not look away to see what his motives might have been, if he was hoping she was dazzled, for she needed all her power to make up with her mind and her eyes the distance her body could not cross to see it.

He laughed at her and laughed at her again as he pulled her out while they closed up the cracked open chest—everyone still praying the patient would make it through the night. “I would imagine you’ve never seen so much of the inside of a human being who’ll live before.”

“No,” she said looking back over her shoulder, knowing there was no way to see what was being done on the operating level.

“What do you think?”

“It’s amazing.”

“The surgery, yes I know that. Not that. This,” he said eyes up to the buildings around them as he took her across a quad.

“It seems to be an excellent school.”

“And medicine?”

“A way to save lives, heal people.”

“And?”

“And what?” She was so weary of being taken off guard despite how she had spent the entire day on her guard. “What are you after here, doctor?”

“Call me Cormac,” he said turning to her and looking her in the face for the first time possibly with his eyes clear and his face bright like a child’s. “Do you think they’ll forgive you?”

“What? Who?”

“You’re children.”

“Doctor—”

“Call me Cormac.”

“Cormac—”

“Yes, Claire.”

“What are you bloody well after?” she barked.

And he laughed. He laughed and she was ready to throw something. “You to take over in Inverness.”

“What?”

“You’ll have to get through the Surgeon’s Hall,” he said still not making much sense to Claire, “but women have done it before.”

“What? Who?”

“My aunts were Isabel and May Thorne—you’re not from here, you won’t know. They were physicians, Claire. Properly and so should you be.”

“Doctor—”

“Cormac.”

“Cormac, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. You want me to become a physician and take over for you?”

“Yes. Well, obviously not right away. We’ve got so much to do. You’ve a great deal of experience and training already and that will go along way with the applicant board. If we take a page out of Jex-Blake’s book and say you just want to audit some courses, assist me from time to time, before long we’ll have you through the program and sitting your boards.”

Claire went still. It was not the future she had planned ten years ago when she dreamed she would wed Frank and bear him children to sit in his study and listen to him rehearse his lectures. It was not the dream she’d had five years ago of the killing and blood ending so that she could sit in a peaceful patch of sun and not hear the whistle of bombs. It wasn’t the dream she’d had three years ago of growing old in a world she would not be born in for 150 years loving a man who’d be dead for 150 before she was born. It was not the life she’d imagined six months ago, yesterday, watching her daughter grow and longing for a world that was destroyed because she could not change history, hoping that her preoccupation with the past did not keep her child from having a bright future.

“It’s too much, is it? You couldn’t bear your husband and children to hate you for putting this first. Because you would have to Claire. There can’t be a halfway if you want this.”

She knew he had the wrong impression but he wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t in its heart true. She did have a husband—two actually—a child, and while there was already a measure of heartache surrounding them all, the parts of Claire that were just for herself, the parts that had rejoiced at L’Hôpital des Anges, in the wars, when she’d been in her gilded cage at Leoch, rejoiced anew at this challenge.

She knew she would promise Cormac Mac Allister to think on it, knew she would take the idea to Graham and Reg, knew they would agree to whatever was needed, knew that she, Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser, would study medicine in Edinburgh.

Chapter Text

The usual weighed-down feeling Claire walked around in constantly lifted to the point where she felt like she was soaring over the meadow just watching her daughter run through the tall grass along the bank of the river not far from where the now wheel-less mill still stood. Bree was chasing the butterflies with a net in the soft summer breeze, which kept bringing the girl’s sweet laughter back to where Claire sat curled by the remaining drabs of luncheon. With her eyes closed Claire could almost pretend that it was a different time, that Jamie lie just to the side of her on the blanket in his kilt, twirling a piece of grass between his fingers and contemplating the sky—How long would the weather stay dry? Shall I pack up the lasses now and head back? Is there time to dip the wee one’s feet in the water? Get her to slash her mam? The world she quickly built up around herself was rich with color and happiness, the darkness bleached out of it by the bright sun. It had been a day for such thoughts.

Brianna had enjoyed her visit to Lallybroch and its environs as she usually did. She was of an age now where she had a memory of the place between such visits. It was rarer now that Claire could get them both up for a day because of her coursework in Edinburgh. The summer holiday finally upon them, and Claire intended to make the most of being back in Inverness, of being able to spend days in a row with her daughter. Certainly she would still need to study and prepare for the courses that would begin all too soon. In the mean time she and Brianna would dig and plant her medicinal garden, which had still been surrounded by a low stone wall made mostly of stones she herself had pulled out of the earth as she tilled the soil upon her return from Paris. She’d teach the girl to fish in the bùrn, prepare and cook what she caught. Claire wanted to build a fire with her and tell stories rapped in the Fraser plaid that Graham had given her for Christmas a couple years back.

The dream of happy, warm moments that made Claire feel she and Brianna were close to Jamie, closer than all the other heavy days, was interrupted when the lass herself plopped down beside her mother, exhausted from her adventures. “Hello darling.” Claire beamed at Brianna. “Having fun?”

The gleaming red head bobbed on the blanket, frizzy curls becoming only more tangled—Claire just didn’t have the heart to braid it back on days like this.

“What are you reading?” the little voice asked eventually, having caught her breath. “’Natomy?”

“No, a leannan. This one is a book about magic.” The girl’s blue eyes turned to her, incredulous, too aware that her mother’s books were often dry and every picture pertaining to the human organism. “It’s true. A little girl finds a magic wardrobe that is a doorway to another world.” Claire watched Bree’s eyes go wide and her heart bled. She often felt guilty for the choices, no matter what they meant to Claire in other ways, that lead to their relationship being more serious, being more about Claire’s work and Claire’s sadness. And though she had bought the book especially on Roger’s very grown-up sounding recommendation for just this contrived purpose, she rejoiced at the happy surprise in her daughter’s face but mourned that it was indeed a surprise. “You want to read with me?”

Brianna did not nod, did not reply, but scrambled into her mother’s lap post haste—easily nestling into just the same sprawl she’d found most comfortable as a toddler despite the change in her size—ready to follow Claire’s finger as her primary school teachers had shown her and her mother so that she might learn to read more than just simple sight words.

“'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' by C. S. Lewis. ‘Chapter one: Lucy looks into a wardrobe. Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor—”

“Like Frank?”

Claire smiled, sure Frank wouldn’t quite care for the moniker, “Yes, an old professor like Frank.” She cleared her throat to continue, “They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. Macready—”

“Like Mrs. Graham!” Brianna called out again and Claire chuckled this time.

“Yes, just like Mrs. Graham.”

“Does he have a Roger? And a Rev’nd?”

“I rather think Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are his Rogers, but I do not know about a Reverend Wakefield.”

“Oh.” She paused to think about it, and Claire waited knowing that, like her father, Brianna needed some time to mull things over before coming to some clever solutions to whatever had given her pause. “Does he have a Brianna? The old Frank?”

“Hmm, well since he has more than one child staying with him I would guess that one of them is more like Roger and that Lucy is rather a bit like you.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. You see Lucy is curious and adventurous and brave and you my braw lass are as well,” Claire explained while rubbing her nose into Bree’s neck making her giggle and seeking out that bare bit of baby smell that still just barely lingered.

“Keep going, mama,” her daughter fidgeted.

“…with a housekeeper called Mrs. Mcready…” Claire continued to read, doing her best to come up with funny voices for the characters—though had rather a time of remembering which funny voice went to which character—while Brianna snuggled into her body. The girl’s thumb drifted into her mouth—a habit Claire didn’t have the heart to break with the little pieces of her baby growing day by day—her head nestled, her eyes turning droopy.

It wasn’t terribly far into the book with the child’s weight shifted from warm and solid to boneless and heavy. Claire read on, interested in the tale herself for a while and then eased Bree onto the blanket. She lay watching Brianna sleep, remembering all of the slightly different forms of her already in her brief life.

Time was slipping so quickly past Claire. How could it be that it was years ago already she and Jamie had conceived the bundle of energy resting beside her? She prayed in her heart of hearts that Jamie—spirit or fetch or angel on high—was able to watch as their little child grew. That he and faith were some how together and slumbering in the grass with them, a family though not quite one.

“You’d love her so, Jamie. She’s worth all of it. She’ll never know. But she was worth Culloden; she was worth Paris. She’s worth us, even now.” Claire felt the tears sting her eyes, her heart and become the rapidly appearing Scottish clouds. “Still, for all that, I’d give everything to have you here,” she closed her eyes against the guilt, the feeling of selfishness, “with us. To have stayed with you.” She stifled a sob she felt sure would wake Bree and ventured off to cry where she wouldn’t disturb a well earned kip.

She cried for a time back beside the water then began trying to distract herself from the worst of the pain by gathering wood for a fire. It wouldn’t do to still be red-faced and weepy when Bree woke; Claire had promised herself that this trip would be free of Brianna’s worry over Claire’s sadness. It had been too present in the time without Jamie. No matter what she had done after those first early months to hide it, Claire’s longing for the past, her loneliness could still have like a pall over their little half-family.

She was successful in her ruse and the knighted ended with them wrapped in the bedding Claire had hauled along, under the stars where she’d first fallen for the girl’s father. They snuggled down together, practically nose to nose next to the dwindling fire.

“Tell me a story about when you were here ‘fore, mama,” came the still, small voice so near to her ear.

“Hmm let me see...” Claire said as her turn in the game they had taken to playing at Lallybroch. “When I first saw Lallybroch, your father and I were riding horses over a rise…” she looked about for it, the moonlight bouncing off it somewhere in the distance, “…over there, and suddenly I realized he was urging his horse faster and I urged mine to keep up. It wasn’t long before Jamie and the horse were at full gallop and then the trees parted. I could see the lands and the house and suddenly it was like the world fell off his shoulders. He turned back over one to look at me with a smile. Proud to be presenting it to me for the first time, nervous to see if would Iove it as he did, curious to see how it had changed in his absence. He looked a bit like you do before you see the tree, excited to see what Santa has brought, worried it will be a great lump of coal.” She ran a finger down her daughter’s straight nose noting how it already was losing the elfin snub to become like her father’s.

“Mum!” the high pitch giggle sounded. “Now the ‘tatoes.”

“Ah yes, you’re Aunt Jenny was a force to behold and anything she decided on… that was it.” Claire eyed her daughter, thought of the way she still refused to have anything to do with mushy peas. “The Fraser strong-mindedness is something you also inherited, my love. Jenny was determined to cook the most delicious potatoes you had ever tasted the first time we made them for supper. Now you have to remember most of the people at the dinner table had never had a potato of any kind before and so it was a pretty big deal to be eating potatoes we’d grown ourselves…”

Soon—as the babe had earlier in the day—Brianna drifted off listening to tales of adventures her parents, relatives, and a cadre of princesses had gone on. Claire kissed her goodnight as was her wont, whispering, “One kiss to dream on my darling—”

“’N one for da,” the sleepy child mumbled as Claire placed another, sighing.

Chapter Text

Brianna was quite the precocious young lass and had wrapped the many adults in her life around her wee fingers one way or another. Even the increasingly adolescent Roger was often manipulated into whatever game—no matter how many dolls were involved—Brianna might be interested in playing. Frank was by no means an exception. He too could be had for a weepy-eyed stare or an excitedly extolled begging. Since he was rarely in Scotland and even more rarely at the manse he seemed to have no difficulty with parting from his dignity on the behalf of such as Bree. And while the child herself was delightfully pleased to be so her mother despaired of the spoiling and its various ill affects.

On the night Brianna successfully cajoled Frank into telling ghost stories around the fire place. Claire had discouraged the idea, soundly explaining that any resultant nightmares were Frank’s to deal with. His response had been to shrug and happily take the fault as he so infrequently got to spend pre-dawn hours with cheerful little imps who needed a friend and would not be able to do so again for quite some time. Graham had tutted as well but to no avail. Frank’s stories were outlandish and increasingly unbelieveable.

“No, a real story,” Bree pleaded misunderstanding in her youth the oxymoron of her request. “Didn’t you ever see a spirit?”

Frank seemed unexpectedly taken aback. He opened his mouth and closed it. “Maybe, I don’t know...” a smile—which teased at the memories of Captain Randall and brought disease to Claire—slowly moved on to his face. “It’s possible I did… once.”

There of course was much bleating and desperation and soon Frank relented and began to speak of that long ago trip to Inverness where both of Frank and Claire’s lives were irrevocably changed. The platonic terms in which he spoke made it seem as though they had only ever been friends and Claire was grateful again that they had been able to find a way to morph into it.

“…and your mother, Miss Brianna, had stayed behind. It wasn’t long until I wished I had as well—terribly dull,” Frank said winking at Reg who blushed and looked to Roger’s eager face. “Anyway, the weather was wet and dreary just as it is tonight, with a ghost of fog hanging around every lamppost. Your shoes tapped against the cobbles of the mercat with the snap of water and squelch of muck if you didn’t watch where you were going. As I was coming across I saw one particular halo of light that seemed brighter than all the others: a window. It was on the far side of the square at Mrs. Baird’s. It was just as I realized that it was Claire—the best mum in the world,” he said winking at Brianna, “that, without a gust of wind, I felt suddenly that all the warmth had been taken away, the color leeched out, and replaced with gray. I looked away from the window to see what had caused such a strange turn in the weather.

“Nothing seemed amiss, dull and wet, and empty, not a soul around. Except. Except over by the monument, there was a shadow. At first I thought it was just a part of the buttress fanning out beneath the lion. But then something shifted and I realized whatever it was had some sort of fabric wrapped around it. Slowly with each step to details began to immerge but the figure was all in colors lost to the shadow of the stones and I could only just make out a skirt... then no, a jacket of some length. I realized the figure was a man and as I grew closer that he had wide shoulders, enough to carry a boat alone. It seemed he was in a kilt and what little color there was to his clothing seemed to be all grays and browns, even the cap on his head, slouched to the side like a béret was a dingy brown around his long hair.

“This figure of a man was turned away, the direction I was headed but stock still beside the monument, his head up as though he were looking…” Frank paused, whether for the children’s benefit or his own Claire could not tell. “The window. I looked to at it was Claire. Claire in the only warm light of the window brushing out her hair. He was watching her. Just as I came near, asked what he could be doing he turned away into the night and… vanished. For, before I had even finishes turning to watch him go, he was already gone. Like a will o’ the wisp or an apparition.” Frank blow out a breath on his fingers as though they had held something true but ephemeral and scattered as easily to the four corners. “And then the power went out and the whole square, Claire’s window included was plunged into absolute darkness.”

The rapt silence sat for a moment before Graham said, “Aye the Bonaid Odhair was always fond of a warm window on a cold night, here in Inverness.”

“Wot?” Roger spat half addled and half inhaling the last biscuit which had sat forgotten in his hand until Frank’s story had reached its conclusion.

“Laddie,” Mrs. Graham easily scolded.

“Yer pardon,” he boy asked in return as he tried to wipe the crumbs from his face and jumper.

“Aye, the Bonaid Odhair was a soldier last at Culloden. He hid himself by becoming one with the forests and caves in the highlands and protecting those that cared for him but wandering, lost, having given up his home and his name. Sightings of him lasted all around Inverness-shire long after he was said to have finally been felled by Cumberland’s men. Some say he’s looking for the Bonny Prince to warn him of the price to be paid after Culloden and others that he’s still searching for the lass he left to fight on that moor at Prince Charlie’s side. Whate’er the case, ye can always tell it’s him by the dun bonnet on his head and the tartan at his hips, for it was death and starvation to wear it after Culloden.”

“What a rare story, Mrs. Graham,” Claire said, covering her ache over all that was lost for the people of the highlands and her own family because of Culloden.

“Yes, but what interest would such a ghost have in Claire? It was her window he was watching.”

The tumblers fell at last into place for all those grown around the fire, for they all knew too well what tartan-clad apparition would most certainly be interested in Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser.

Epiphanies are not for parents as the time it takes to fully embrace one is always curtailed by those more immediate needs such as the brushing of teeth, and the in-tucking. The question lingered nevertheless as Claire moved through the evening routine with Brianna (fighting a brush through her curly mane to braid it, swapping out long socks for thick ones, washing faces and nails and teeth, praying for the souls of the departed). With Bree’s tiny little voice sleepily running through her litany—“God bless Graham and Rog, Rev’nd Reg and Frank, mum and Janie’s pup Kip. God bless and keep Aunt Jenny and Ian, Wee Jamie and Maggie, Faith and Da, all the grandpas and grandmas and all the others who have gone like Amos the fish. Amen.”—Claire thought back to that night the power had gone out. Standing at the mirror, fighting with her hair had she felt him, even then, the haunted feeling she welcomed so now, his nearness?

Kisses and last drinks of water done, Claire descended the stairs in a daze.

She landed unceremoniously in her spot on the sofa and remained apart from the conversation for some time. Only turning, interrupting whatever Frank and Reg had been discussing at that point to ask, “What would have become of a survivor?”

The conversation stopped dead. Both men knew what she was asking, why. They looked to each other to silently confer and Claire felt her back going up.

“After Culloden, what would have happened to a survivor?”

“Claire,” Reg began, clearly the one drawing the short straw. “You’ve said it a thousand times yerself: he meant to die on the field of battle.”

“But what if he didn’t? What if he’d survived that hour of fighting? What then?”

Reg made a whimpering sound as though he did not know how to protest a punishment without incurring more wrath.

“He’d have likely been killed Claire,” Frank stated baldly. “If he’d been laying injured on the moor, men would have done the job that time itself would do without modern medical care. You’ve been to war, you know what it is like. A bayonet would have been a mercy. And if he’d been hale he would have been hung or faced a firing squad in due process. He’d been dead Claire.”

“Like the… what did she call him?”

“Bonaid Odhair. Dun Bonnet. Ye canna listen to it, Claire. It’s just one of Mrs. Graham’s old stories. A faerie tale.”

“Like mine? Like the lady of Balnain? What if it’s not just a tale? I wasn’t the only one to go through those stones. What if…”

“Ye said he was right with ye and couldn’t hear them, lass,” Graham offered. “He couldna come with ye. That’s not how it works.”

“How does it work?” she turned on the one person who had always believed her, believed more in the stones than Claire herself.

“I dinna ken.” Mrs. Graham sighed. “Nobody knows, Claire.”

“So then what would have happened? Say Jamie survived the field, wasn’t killed in the immediate retaliation, then what?”

The men silently conferred again and this time it was Frank who drew the short straw. “The story has the right of it. Cumberland’s men pursued any known Jacobite’s for years. Years, Claire. They were brutal and ruthless trying to punish people they saw as traitors. He would have had to hide, and hide well, or his life would have been forfeit just as those who survived Culloden. If he’d managed to stay hidden long enough for some of the vengeance to cool, He might have been among the indentured penitents who were shipped out to the colonies.”

“Aye,” Reg agreed, “he’d have served a term somewhere for from his people in Scotland and, if he’d survived that as well, been shipped away rather than allowed to be free on Scottish soil, lest they reform and plan another uprising.”

Claire fought against the feeling in her chest, gripped her hands together in her lap and she wished she could around the hope trying so desperately to bubble inside her.

“The chances are astronomically low, Claire. In all the research you and Reg have done there’s been no word of him.”

“What would it hurt to check the roles at the prisons of Jacobites, look at the outgoing manifests of indentured? Nothing.”

Reg whimpered again, but Frank reached out and laid his hand on her twisted ones. “Claire, it might harm you. More than you realize.”

“Aye, lass, to think of what ye went through the last time you’d lost all hope—even for just that wee moment—I canna see how you’d survive it again. And this time with Brianna not a babe in arms but… Lass, she’d remember seeing you in pieces this time.”

Claire closed her eyes, thought of the Dun Bonnet, how tenuous the strands that tied that tale to Jamie were and shouted at the feeling exploding slowly out of her hear. “If there’s a chance,” she looked again at the loved ones around her, tears on her face, “if there’s a chance he’s alive I have to try for me, yes, but also for Bree. I can’t listen to her pray for a dead father every night if I think we’ve just abandoned him alone. If he’d died at Culloden I could stand it, but not if he’d died old and alone.” As she would die without him, she kept herself from adding.

Frank, hand still over hers, thumb rubbing over knuckles, said, “As you wish, darling,” and gave her fingers a squeeze as he rose to fetch his research from the library. “No time like the present.”

Chapter Text

The intervening months were a veritable minefield of emotions, memories, and devastations for Claire.

When first unearthed from Frank’s piles in Reg’s library, Claire found comfort in not finding Jamie’s name listed among the seemingly endless stream of the surviving Jacobites to the Americas. There was no one she recognized outright from the various rolls, each haling from a different prison. The rolls from Wentworth were of course the most stressful despite Reg’s insistence that it would have been too near Jamie’s known associates and therefore too risky. Though why anyone thought the Scots would have it in them to rebel again after Culloden, Claire hadn’t any idea.

Then, after all that searching, all the many names—Frasers and MacKenzies and Murrays among them—the disappointment started to settle in again. There was no record of him being alive to leave the jails; was that proof then that he hadn’t survived the first bloody battle and its weeping days and months after, where lives seemed shed indiscriminately?

To pick her up out of the lows she’d been finding herself in increasingly, Reg took her for a drive, a surprise he called it. He’d tooled around the roads outside the village for a while before stopping at a long low building not far from the moors where it was possible her second husband’s body lie, long decomposed. Inside she found dusty shelves with large board boxes labeled and catalogued as though James Murray might be housing a second scriptorium within.

“What is this?” she asked, not sure she entirely wanted the answer.

“You remember when ye first came back to us Frank and I sent your costume away. Sorry. The clothes you’d come through the stones in. A fellow historian dated them and was so impressed by the condition he kept begging to get them into a collection, to know where on earth we’d found them,” Reg explained as he pushed open his own car door. “Turned out he had a rather indiscrete time trying to locate where it might be himself. Word got round and I started getting some interesting letters of my own asking after the garments and any other artifacts.

“As it happens, there’s a museum in the works. A few private collectors of the ’45 artifacts are getting on in years. The interest in the past wars is less popular with the ones we have now being so… well,” Reg fumbled in that way of his for the right word to phrase things, “I guess unromantic, ‘tis waning. So, they’ve been putting up their stores here. Several museums hid their prized possessions out here during the blitz. Not the BM mind, but it was remote enough and well kept. They made some adjustments to ensure things would be stored safe. Now the other collections are here, waiting for the time and funding to be a new museum. As student of history, I find the concept fascinating.

“I thought,” he looked up over his slightly flushed cheeks, “you might like to talk to the caretakers a bit. Look at some of it. Maybe even tell them something they don’t know,” he smiled at her lopsidedly.

She had wanted to see it. At first she hadn’t known what she was looking for, she hadn’t realized she was looking for anything. She’d wandered behind those who knew the various collections letting them show her what they thought she’d find interesting—jewelry with the prince’s face or secret Jacobite symbols in embroidery or tapestries, a ladies gown from some painting or event she hadn’t even registered—items they thought Reverend Wakefield would find interesting—bibles and crosses, a pile of rosaries collected from the dead—but none of it had truly caught Claire’s interest. It was as a passing thought that did not succeed in distracting her over her anxiety about Jamie’s true demise.

“You know, Claire,” Reg said as yet another holy rood carved into yet another dirk failed to capture her, “I wonder if there’s anything about the medicine used to treat the poor lads.” He turned towards those men showing them about. “She’s a doctor, you see? Training to be a surgeon down in Edinburgh.”

Claire smiled. Reg was like a proud cat, dropping her kittens in your lap so that you too might be impressed.

“How… singular. Never had a woman doctor, meself.”

“Ye’re n-n-not one for the doctor, man or woman, MacInstosh,” said a man in whom Claire saw any one of a dozen of her former soldiers. What she might call gun shy, still hearing them fire off in the distance, afraid of where the shells might fall. “This way ma’m. I’ve just the thing for ye.”

There were old, rusted surgeon’s tools (not all that different from one’s she’d had in med tents in Amiens), crutches and rudimentary prosthetics that put her in mind of the stump she hadn’t been able to improve for Ian were in amongst some stretchers and a few redcoat with clear battle wounds—mostly not fatal based on the placement and amount of blood. Tucked in, a uniform half covering it, was a wooden box Claire would know the weight and feel of anywhere, in the dark, with mortars or arrows whizzing by.

“What’s that?” she asked knowing better than the young man who was prattling on about typical wounds what it was. He pulled it forwards and her hands moved inside it, around and found her willow bark and arrowroot not quite where she’d left them but there.

A piece of her she hadn’t realized was missing—there were so many after all—slotted back into place and the relief it brought her was almost like being weightless. There had been other pieces of evidence that her journey through the stones had been real, Brianna, the deed, the gown and accouterments that had brought them to the warehouse full of a moment two hundred years ago that she had lived, but this was different. A piece of her life that had been dragged hither and yon around the highlands and even into England and Paris on that campaign to stop Culloden arrived just at this place to await Claire to find it again by drifting from hand to hand for lifetimes. She knew she wouldn’t be able to take such a thing with her, nor could she slip the note Jamie had written her early in their marriage out of its hiding place and into the non-existent folds of her twentieth century skirt.

“This is lovely,” she told the young man, smiling. “Have you any other curiosities?”

The man had seemed shocked that she was moved to tears—for she’d discovered she had been quietly crying—over such an item and tried, unsuccessfully to cheer her from what he thought was sadness by taking her to see the costumes and replicas of Bonny Prince Charlie’s campaign attire. She’d tried to be kind about it but she’d seen it first hand and it wasn’t very charming the first time. At one point though she’d slipped up and muttered, looking at one ghastly reincarnation, “Oh, that’s all wrong.” Reg had stifled a laugh and mentioned getting back for tea.

On their way out they passed back through some offices. Once nearly empty, they were now full of bustling cheerful academics bantering about the veracity of one authentication versus another—Reg lifted a brow at her as if to say, Give it a go, school them—and leafing through some mail and packages ostensibly just delivered.

“I say,” said one terribly English chap Claire felt might be out of a film from before the war, “what a rock,” he continued and lifted a piece of amber out of a small parcel.

Claire’s world stopped moving, all she could hear was the rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart overwhelming the sound of her rapid breath. When the swirl subsided after a few moments she heard the same too-proper tones read, “’I can’t prove its provenance as there was no documentation. The family lore is that Private Archibald Anderson of Muirkirk in Aryshire, my late husband’s direct ancestor, had been combing the fields after Culloden in the ’45 when he found, in a sporran on a highlander Jacobite, the enclosed piece of amber. Rare it ‘tis indeed to find so beautiful a specimen so clearly captured as this. ‘Twas treasured and handed from father to son as the lad approached the age when such wonders are miracles worthy of hours of pondering.

“Having now buried first a husband and then a son in distant, foreign soil I ken now what this piece must have meant for a lad to have had it with him still as he lay dead or dying on that field. I cannot look upon it now knowing as I do the poor boy’s mother’s heartbreak. What had she left of her bairn to mourn? What have any of us? The highlander’s clan did not survive the retelling of the tale but please, if you’ve any heart left to you, put this with the lads. And may they all rest in peace. Yours in—'”

The near hysteria that Claire was consumed by garnered no comfort from the strangers with whom she had passed the afternoon. Reg, however, whisked her into the car and back to the manse. Much to Claire’s self-imposed shame Graham and Reg knew how to handle her when one of these bouts descended. There was tea and cheerfulness and the frantic edge to their worry that she would not recover in time to return to Edinburgh with Bree to see to her studies when the holiday was over.

Reg, thinking it might bring Claire a measure of comfort, wrote to the archivists at the warehouse inquiring if, since the amber’s origin was unclear, Claire might have it since it reminded her so strongly of a loved one she’d lost.

No response ever came.

Chapter Text

It was the first time Claire had been cast low in front of Frank, still on his sabbatical to research in Scotland and Northern Yorkshire. She hadn’t the presence of mind to feel embarrassed for a couple of days. When she’d come back to herself enough she couldn’t bare to have him in her rooms and, should she venture out, she avoided him. She could feel his distress, his need to comfort her more than her desire to be comforted by him. To Claire’s mind there was no comfort. It was all too possible that she had been robbed of the thing she had only just found again: hope.

For Frank’s part—though Claire wasn’t to know this until later—her despair served as motivation. His heart was still enough with her, with the vows they had taken what should have felt like lifetimes ago but instead felt more than real in Frank’s chest, that he needed to ease her pain more than his own. He’d come to Scotland because there were records missing that couldn’t be located via a graduate student he’d known or had recommended to him. It took him a week of Claire’s first nearly catatonic state and then her refusing to be in the same room with him for him to work out what he needed. In the margins of the rolls there were notes. Most of them reflected travel to this colony or that but one or two, every so often were to another place. Often to a prison Frank had the rolls for and he could verify the corresponding receipt of a prisoner. There were a few of these instances that Frank could not check for transfer or receipt and each one bore the note Ardsmuir.

Frank vanished suddenly and a more sullen Brianna had few adults to distract her from her ailing mother. Not having Frank watching her, helped Claire feel less trapped by her sorrow and more able to move about the house and grounds. She found herself up to visiting long time patients whom she usually cared for when she was in the village. She continued to read to Bree and would sometimes hand the book over to Roger to read while Claire tried with all her might to soak up enough of the contentment of her loved ones to put the disappointment behind her.

It was not a task she felt the equal of. It took her some days to realize that the struggle, the thought she could not get over, was that each of these bits of knowledge—the dun bonnet and Frank’s brush with a ghost, the museum-in-waiting and her wedding gift from Hugh, even Frank’s long rolls of name—had all come to her by happenstance and each had been less conclusive than the last. While she felt certain that the amber had been hers, she had never held it and so might not ever know if there had indeed been a dragonfly incased in it just as she would not ever know if the legends of Bonaid Odhair and the lady of Balnain were predictions of her past future.

She continued on this way, teetering on the edge of the anguish of being half a soul unaware of any progress towards an answer to her hearts quest as Frank toiled in it’s pursuit.

She moved, almost as much a ghost as the dun bonnet in the square, only when necessary, like the afternoon the phone began ringing. The problem was it didn’t stop. Claire would only just decide she might answer it when it would pause the incessant trill. A few moments later it would ring again and she would feel disgruntled enough at the reoccurring caller that she would staunchly refuse to answer. The cycle played through a few times before she pulled the receiver from its cradle. “Yes?”

“Oh, Claire, thanks heavens. Will you come?”

“What? Frank? What are you talking about?”

“The PRO? London? Hasn’t Wakefield told you? Claire, I’m on to something. You should be here.”

“Frank,” she said looking wildly around without a clue what he was talking about. “What? What are you on about, truly?”

“Ardsmuir. I went through the rolls again Claire and there was another location the Jacobite prisoners were kept. There aren’t many records that survived which is why it wasn’t among a lot of the documents we’d been using. I’m on the trail now, but the archivists have only just located what extant documents they have any records of. It’s the only other location, Claire. If Fraser survived the blood letting, if he was the Bonaid Odhair, if he was captured by the authorities, found a Jacobite, this is the only place left he would have been. The records are an unmitigated mess, Claire. If we’re to find him in any reasonable amount of time—,” he broke off. Claire thought for a moment the call had been dropped. “Claire, you’re answer is here. Will you come? To London?”

Jamie .

Her answer was waiting in London and when Mrs. Graham walked through the door with Roger, Brianna, and the marketing Claire had her suitcase packed.

She’d held her daughter—“Mummy will be back as soon as possible, my darling. I promise”—begged one more favor of Graham—“Don’t ask, and don’t ask me not to. I have to know. It’s all been the not knowing”—and told Roger to watch after them all—“You know your father, he’d forget tea, so don’t you let him forget good-nights or tucking-in and—above all—reading a bedtime story”—before tugging his ear, kissing Bree once again, and heading for the train.

The train took her over night and she was tempted to stop in Edinburgh to get a few hours of rest before heading on, but Claire decided that the likelihood she could get any sleep—in either a train car or a bed—for all her mind whirled was far too small. Even stepping out onto the platform at King’s Cross she could not calm the sense of urgency within her as it seemed the closer she got to the Public Records Office, the more her heart pounded. She moved straight through to St. Pancras and found the wait for the tram to take her south to Chancery interminable. With nary a thought towards finding a resting place, a cup of tea, or even Frank, she set off—too agitated to wait with those heading to work.

The walk down city streets showed her how far London had come since the end of the Blitz—blocks of buildings far too new to be anything other than filling gaps left by German bombs or one large, tall building being erected where once there were a dozen—and how far the city had yet to go—still scorched façades, the occasional vacant lot with weedy grass pushing up in the bits of brick and mortar left after the lion’s share of the rubble had been cleared. Claire only half saw it and by the time she reached Holborn she had to pull herself back from dropping her baggage and running. Claire didn’t even register the stonework, oriel windows, the towers and soaring lines of the PRO building that called to mind a paler Westminster in the casual onlooker. She merely ran through the gates only to be stopped at reception. To be told at that point that she had to wait for an available archivist—which could take days—or wait for Frank who already had an archivist working with him threw Claire into a state of fidgeting anxiety she offhandedly noted she had not suffered since adolescence.

She installed herself at a table near a place she was sure Frank would have to pass to move into the hall itself to meet with whomever he was working. She made short journeys to find information that might be vaguely relevant to her only to keep from losing control entirely and descending into madness on the spot. When at last the connection was made—Frank had been on his way to find a sandwich—Claire made him take her to the records they’d been able to locate. She brooked no argument and refused to leave with him for a bite to eat once she’d reached her goal.

Being Frank, he brought her a sandwich back and made her move away from the tables to eat it—a feat she accomplished in remarkably few bites—an they continued on scraping through the documents, which seemed to have seen both hell and high water, in order to find definitive answers.

The problem was that dates were hard to decipherer. They were able to place some documents on the timeline by comparing them to the records of other prisons. A few transfers helped them place the hell and high water as fairly late in period they were looking and helped them set aside a large number of documents as being too late and mostly to do with a problematic garrison that had taken over the fortress. This was the period in which all the previous records were damaged and had taken place after all the Jacobite prisoners were transported in order to make room for the garrison.

Claire began to have nightmares about water washing Jamie away as it had so much of the ink that would have made reading the records they had easier. Sometimes a name in one of the rolls (date unknown) would have possibilities—could it be Murtagh or Matthew or Michael—and they’d debate for hours what had been written down. Some pages were marked with bits of paper so that they could lay them out again when the light through the window changed and re-judge what the little remaining ink could signify.

In the end all the nattering and fretting—“It’s clearly an R-N.” “It could just as easily be an M!”—wouldn’t be necessary, for some giving, pitying celestial mood had carved in careful lettering washed only lightly with the waters that so bedeviled the reading of other pages the string of names that could only amount to James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

Chapter Text

The continuing issue of when Jamie had been at Ardsmuir took longer to solve. Claire having an answer to the most pressing question could not drive herself as she had been in going through all the Public Records Office had from Ardsmuir. Frank pressed her to go home and rest, spend time with Brianna, perhaps even undertake the less arduous task of studying for the surgeon’s exam that would soon put her in the ranks of very few brilliant women in Britain and indeed around the English speaking world. He’d still had time on his sabbatical and he’d been able to count it among his research as so many of the Ardsmuir prisoners had been transported to colonies. He’d pulled in a couple of students for labor and did all he could to show Claire the work was going forward with all due haste to help her discover what could be known, that her presence was unnecessary to that work.

He wasn’t the only one gathering resources to—now that sufficient evidence had been gathered—solve the problem of Claire’s quest. Mrs. Graham had pooled all her druidic knowledge and connections. She wrote Claire of her progress in unearthing folklore and old wives’ tales that might have barring as well as looking into the research of any magicks that she could think of. Reg, for his part, had two roles: 1) to gather things that might be useful should Claire attempt the stones again and 2) to do his best to help Claire recover from the strain of London while keeping her calm and focused.

Claire had her hands full most days not clasping Brianna to her and bursting into tears as words that amounted to “I’m sorry” and “He’s alive” poured out of her. She managed it, just, it felt like everyday. Reg, keeping up his chosen responsibilities, seemed to know just when she was likely to break and whisked her away from Brianna.

One such moment he sent her out to Cormac in Edinburgh—there preparing for the term that would start shortly—for a few days. Cormac, still not really aware of what had befallen her since the long summer holiday had taken her both from the classroom and the hospital, brought her to an art exhibit that floored her. There were four artist—The Glasgow Four—in the showing but only two of them seemed to Claire to have an other worldly vision into her. Their paintings of women, highly stylized in the Art Nouveau fashion she’d remembered from her youth, captured the mystery and beauty of the dance she’d seen at the stones that first time; captured the mysticism, half romance and half disbelief, she felt looking back into the past she’d lived two hundred years ago; captured the tension she so often felt between the enticement, the pull of the modern world versus the serenity and lush spirit of the past; and captured the very scenes she’d imagined when Jamie whispered the story of the woman of Balnain against her ear long before she could admit to herself she wanted so much more from him. She half-wondered if perhaps one or both of the sisters had traveled through the stones like Geillis, like herself.

On the way back to Cormac’s she couldn’t help but ask, “What would you do if I didn’t take the ward?”

“Is that what’s happened? Someone else has wooed you away and you couldn’t face me?”

“Brianna isn’t Frank Randall’s child,” she said baldly, jumping one topic for the heart of matter.

He merely drove on through the unsurprisingly wet Edinburgh night. “I had thought perhaps not. Wakefield then?”

She laughed—save for that first miss impression, Cormac had come to understand her relationship with Reg well. “Certainly not.” She sobered, “I believed, for a long time that Brianna’s father was dead, that he’d died the day I last saw him. I discovered recently that I was wrong; he’s alive or… was. I don’t know if it will be possible to find him, reach him now….”

“But you want to. I see. Well, Claire, I canna say I won’t be disappointed to not be working with you, to not see you become the surgeon I know you to be. But you won’t give up medicine for this man, will you?” He seemed genuinely perturbed.

“Are you joking? For a time he was one of my most troublesome patients.”

Cormac smiled, “Wise to use one passion as a bridge to another.”

“He supported my work, even when others told him he should press me to… be more traditional.”

“Then my disappointment will be only for my loss, and the hospital’s. You are a doctor, Claire. Where so ever you go, you will be and your patients—this lucky man included—will be all the better for it.”

Claire felt a weight lift. She had wanted to accept Cormac’s offer, be apart of his plan, for the purpose it gave her in the life she was trying to build without Jamie and in the twentieth century. With the possibility that she would not truly have to, she could not choose it over even the chance to reunite with Jamie and she returned to Inverness and her patchwork family there lighter.

News awaited her as did Frank. Only back for a couple of days before returning to his research assistants in London, he, Reg, and Graham had begun compiling what they knew and needed her to flesh out the details.

“So the days remained even?” Frank asked for possibly the eightieth time.

“To the best of my knowledge. There wasn’t a calendar just sitting the other side of the stones with each day accurately marked off. It took a week for me to even find out what year I was in. Given what day I left you and what day I returned, it seems as near to a one-to-one match as I can tell.”

Frank had a nervous victory cresting on his face. It made Claire both hesitant and reminded her of the many happy instances of it before she’d gone through the stones and changed everything between them. “That’s excellent, truly excellent.”

“But why? What is the point of all these silly questions you keep asking?”

“He’s a date, Claire,” Reg said looking at me with uncertainty.

“What? A date? Ardsmuir?” Claire couldn’t help but stand and move to where Frank was arrange things on a board of children’s.

“If time continued at the same rate you experienced it, if it is still going more or less a day for every day here, I can say for certain Fraser will be alive at Ardsmuir for another two months,” Frank said trying to contain the merriment a problem solved usually gave him.

“He’s alive? You’re certain?”

“There’s a hole in the records about two years after his intake at Ardsmuir during which it seems several lives were lost I cannot say for certain his was not among them. At least for the next two months.”

Claire might have been in shock. Certainly if you’d asked her how she’d react to finding Jamie had survived Culloden, the immediate aftermath, and could still be waiting for her on the other side of the stones, her answer would have contained whoops of joy, tears, grateful hugs of all and sundry. When faced with the reality, however, she turned from Frank, gazed out the window and noticed, as if in passing, that her mind was almost blank.

“The research of Craigh na Dun has also been fruitful. Ye said the stones in ye watch were damaged in the travel the first time and the second the stone in a ring, aye?” Claire nodded as the woman continued, “So it would seem the stones are a type a’ sacrifice, a payment. Easy enough to find something suitable for that. Now ye, first went through on Beltane but we can no’ wait for it to come around again as ye Jamie might not be waiting. Samhain would work for sure but it is also some time past when Mr. Randall says he canna guarantee yer lad will be there. Which means we have to try for Lughnasasdh which doesna give us much time for you to decided if you want to go through again.”

“Of course I want to go.”

“And Brianna?” Frank asked.

“Will come with me,” she responded succinctly.

“We’ve no idea if it will work for her. No knowledge of a child going through.”

“She’s been through once. There’s no reason to think she can’t again.”

“Aye, Claire there is. She was one with ye when she came through the stone,” Graham said. “She was protected by yer ability to travel. There’s no saying for sure she can again. “

Claire took a moment, two. She didn’t like the logic of it mostly because she could not find a whole to poke, save the one she already had. Brianna had gone through once, but they were right. Who was to say it would be true again? “Alright, I’ll be cautious but I must try.”

And try they would.

Frank went back to London after Claire rung a promise from him that he would not return to see her off. This would be their goodbye filled with gratitude for the gifts Frank had given her and Brianna and Jamie and a gift she would give him. An official divorce. She’d been working on it for a while. She’d meant to convince him of it during his visit. While there may not have been enough time to square it away, she wanted to attempt, make the intention clear, should Frank ever wish to marry again.

Reg pulled out the many things he’d found he thought Claire would need to return through the stones including a few weapons—she’d had some harrowing tales—enough coin to see her and Brianna around town safely for many months should her reunion not go as planned—some easily traded bobbles, and a book on Scottish history—“This would have been helpful last time.” He had other ideas, such as giving her maps and lessons on things he knew, but Claire hadn’t wanted to stand out when she arrived. That had been the whole problem the first time. Simply knowing when she would be arriving was a huge help, which brought her back to Graham.

Graham, aside from nudging Claire to keep an even keel, set to work helping Claire stitch the clothes she and Brianna would need to blend in. Together they adjusted the items she’d worn back through the stones to hold the many precious items Claire would be taking back as well as to be more comfortable. They made a couple shifts and dresses for Brianna who liked them for their princess qualities until they prevented her from playing with Roger as readily as she’d prefer. She made capes for both of them out of raincoats and lined them with a generic plaid so as not to draw the ire of the British who’d outlawed the tartans of the clans.

Nevertheless, Claire could not bring herself the abandon the Fraser tartan Graham had given her years before. She’d planned to use it, as she had when Bree was a baby, to strap the girl to her as they went through the stones. On the other side she would attach it as a layer under her skirts or turn it into a knapsack that she hoped might go unnoticed.

When the day itself came Brianna slept easily in the sling of the fabric wrapped around Claire’s shoulders and waist as they climbed from Reg’s care to the hill as the sun rose. Graham had been adamant she come and as the closest thing to an authority they had on the stones and the best friend Claire had no one had the will to deny her. Reg came as well and at the last moment Roger slipped into the car. He’d been sleepy and somber and had leaned over to hold Bree’s hand as they drove. They’d left him sleeping in the a seat while the rest hiked to the stones.

Mrs. Graham lit candles placed rhythmically among the pillars of rock while she chanted and sang. Soon the sun began to rise and Claire could feel the stones waking, the buzz of a swarm was over whelming and she forgot to wish them one last farewell as the stones pulled her and the child close.

Bree woke, mumbled, “Mama? What’s that sound?” As the confirmation that her daughter too could hear their song, Claire let the stones tow them through.

Chapter Text

Somewhere on her way through the stones, as tightly as she was clasping Brianna, she heard the child’s scream as if from very for off, yet when she came back to herself they were still as tightly bound together as they had been and the child was wide eyed and awake against her.

“Bree, darling?”

“Mum,” the girl said and clutched at Claire’s clothes the way she had as a babe.

“Yes, darling, I’m here. I’ve got you and I’ll not leave you. Mummy promises.” In response the child only patted her sides and burrowed into Claire’s chest. It was a struggle to get to her feet with the child still strapped to her by the shawl but she hadn’t the heart to release the girl for either of their sakes. Still trussed so, she began the hike towards Inverness grateful that, at least for the next leg, it was mostly downhill and hoped that by the time they were on the way up again Claire could bear to release her little one and Brianna could bear to merely hold her mother’s hand.

Claire had several sweets in pockets of her skirt with which to keep Brianna moving quickly and her spirits up. Claire was all too aware of what could happen to the two of them alone on the road together. No matter how tired she got she refused to stop moving closer to Inverness and hopefully a coach that would take them close enough to Lallybroch to make due with a horse. The cost of such things would greatly deplete Claire’s cache of coins but the safety to be had was paramount to arriving with Bree unscathed into the family’s care. Once there she had no doubt they would be safe enough. And things went sufficiently close to plan that Claire did wonder if she was using up all her good luck on the front end of the journey—not that Bree’s safety wasn’t worthy of such—and hope what might befall her later would be as equally pleasant a scenario.

It wasn’t really until she and Brianna were coming up the very rise she and Jamie had traveled that first trip to Lallybroch—the child happily in front of her on the old mare they’d purchased at Broch Morda from an ancient woman Claire thought might have recognized her but said nothing. What would Claire’s greeting be? What would the state of the Murray’s left behind be with the vengeance of the clearances? Had the twentieth century ruins of Lallybroch had their root in the eighteenth? She breathed a wee bit easier once she saw that the home she had hoped to show her child from the very beginning still had its roof, whatever might befall it later.

She had hoped that upon riding in through gate to the courtyard she’d feel more at easy but there was no one about and the steadiness of her voice while she sang “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” faltered. Claire slipped down out of the saddle and was helping Bree to her feet when a man came round the side of the house. On second look he wasn’t actually a fully-grown man but broad and tall and definitely a Murray.

He stopped when he saw her and she smiled at him, “Wee Jamie, isn’t it?” she asked as his face looked stunned and went white. “You’ve forgotten your Auntie Claire?” He stumbled away and went screeching for his “mam.” “Well, little love,” Claire said, pulling Bree close, “That could have gone better.” She sighed.

“Let’s get old Nanny here a drink, shall we?”

“Aye, Mum,” chirped the child who so far loved only the horses in this new world Claire had thrust upon her. They led the horse over toward the stable and Bree pet her leg while the beast drank and Claire began untying the bundles that they’d acquired during their journey so she might relieve the animal of her saddle.

She almost dropped the thing when she heard, “I swear James Murray if ye’re hauling your pregnant mother around by the elbow for less than a bluidy dismemberment I will tan your hide till… Oh…”

“Aye,” the nearly-man said as Claire turned to see Jenny much as she first had, round with child and caught between confusing emotions.

Claire waited, not wanting to assume that she’d be welcome, not knowing what the English had done in her absence. She started to speak, took half a step forwards, and watched Jenny clutch the no longer wee Jamie. “Are ye no’ a spirit brought by the faeries to vex us?”

Claire shook her head, found herself laughing and crying, “No more than I ever was.”

“Och, Claire,” Jenny gasped, grabbed her belly and waddled, dragging Jamie along behind her. When she reached Claire she released him and threw both arms around her long lost kinswoman. “Where the bloody devil have ye been?”

“Jamie sent me away. We knew we’d lose at Culloden and he couldn’t bear for the child and I to—”

“Child?”

“Bree, darling. Come meet your Aunt Janet.”

Bree’s curls preceded her around the legs of the nag and Jenny nearly collapsed on the ground in tears. “Oh aye lass. Yer aunt indeed.” She wept and clung to the girl.

“Introduce yourself, darling,” Claire nudged when Jenny had pulled back a bit.

“Brianna Ellen Fraser, pleased to meet you,” she said with a curtsy that was entirely Graham’s doing before hiding behind her mother’s skirts.

Jenny laughed and reached out for Wee Jamie to haul her up. “Oh, Claire Fraser,” she wiped her nose on her arm, “I might never believe my bruither again. He was so sure ye’d died. Would only ever say ye’d gone. No’ where or why or how.”

“We knew the English would extort a terrible price for the uprising and with the child coming, the battle, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he would die that day he made me promise we’d leave, never return, never give the redcoats a chance at Red Jamie’s bride and offspring.”

“But ye’re here?”

“I thought him dead. I got word he wasn’t. Tell me what you know Jenny,” Claire demanded, grabbing Jenny’s arm. “Tell me how to find my husband.”

Claire hadn’t intended to put Jenny on the spot so quickly or artlessly—though looking back she would not be surprised that her drive to find Jamie, to see him living with her own eyes had overpowered her sense—and was rescued from making a greater mess of things when a herd of people flooded into the yard from the road. When Claire looked to them they were just what must have been the rest of the Murray brood save the eldest who had a toddler on his shoulders and was signing a raucous song in even French. Claire’s gullet dropped and she found herself shouting, “Fergus,” as she pelted across to wrap the no longer small boy in her arms.

Shock had him scrambling to let down the little one on his shoulders and return her embrace with a chant of, “Milady, oh milady.” The tears once more ran down her face, the happiest tears she had cried since Bree learned to walk. She pulled away from him and began taking stock of how he had grown and the soundness of his limbs when she found his wooden hand, kissed it as she had the other and his face again.

The day and night went on that way, reunion and introduction, Brianna charming each new member of her family when she could be coaxed out of Claire’s shoulder to do so. It was after the children, Fergus included, had trundled off to bed, save Bree who was dead to the world at Claire’s hip—the whole ordeal of coming to through the stones to be surrounded by strangers and strange places had resulted in wakeful nights where the child would rise and not know where she was save with her mother, so Claire liked to keep her near when she slept to keep the terror and tears to a minimum—that she, Jenny, and Ian finally got down to business.

“I just don’t see how, Claire,” Jenny continued, “ye can think of dragging that wee thing out to Ardsmuir and back even after the long journey here.”

“Jamie—”

“Will be cross enough at ye for coming back with the English still traipsing about like bluidy fiends. I don’t even think ye should go. It’ll be hard enough to hide ye’ve come back ‘round here where the clan’ll keep it quiet. Who’ll keep you safe on the road? Ian can’t go; we’ve got the crop to tend. Fergus?”

“Jenny, there was a time you left child bed to help me find Jamie.”

“Aye. Find. Well, we ken right where he is and he’ll be no’ going elsewhere till it please his royal majesty and,” Jenny said clearly having worked up a good lather over it, “if ye had half the sense God gave a goat ye’d bury your nose and Brianna’s until this storm has passed and pray that when they’d done punishing us Jamie can come home just like this whole family has been doing for years.”

“Janet,” Ian said softly while Claire looked away and blinked back her tears.

Some silent conversation had flowed between them and when Claire turned back Jenny looked chastened and approachable again. “I ken ye need to see him. I ken he needs to see you—oh, more ‘n ye, I expect—but he’ll no’ forgive us if we let ye do something rash and cost him ye all over again. Aye, and say ye go and he sees ye. Ye think that bruither of mine will not break every bar in the place to return to ye?”

Jenny did have a point there, Claire had to concede. “So help me Jenny? You’re brother was always the one for strategy in our marriage, and I know well where he gets it.”

Jenny huffed and looked away. Crossing her arms she said, “If ye can get there—and I’ve still no idea how—ye’d have to get him a message that escape is being planned and he has to sit tight—which he’ll still no’ likely do.” She twiddled her fingers. “If’n he does he won’t sit tight long. We’d have to actually have a plan working or he’d come up with some hair brained scheme of his own, like us turning him in for the money—ruddy fool!”

Claire smiled, she was much less cross with him for it. He’d done it to protect his people, his family, Fergus’ other hand, and if he hadn’t she never would have known he had survived Culloden.

“So,” Claire said, “first I have to see him and then I have to convince him not to break out without us being ready on this side. The second I can do, if I can speak with him long enough to get through that Fraser granite skull.”

Ian laughed, “Aye, ‘tis hard stuff,” and made to knock on Jenny’s head.

“But that means I have to get there. No letter will be enough to tell him I’m here and keep him from becoming a fugitive again. No deliverer will be enough, not Fergus, not you. The only one with a chance to keep him under lock and key is me.”

“Aye,” Jenny said, most displeased about it. Claire heaved a mighty sigh and rolled her eyes to the ceiling—she noted happily that it was in much better shape than the last time she been to Lallybroch in 1953—before turning expectant eyes back on Jenny. “Well, there is cousin Michael… Father Murray.”

Chapter Text

Homer’s Odyssey played a bigger role than she’d expected.

Father Murray was not the most dour man Claire had the pleasure of spending time with, but she had also been in medicine for over a decade and in multiple wars. Suffice it to say, there was stiff competition.

It was none too soon when Claire and the father arrived at the gates of Ardsmuir. There was some fast talking when Father Murray insisted that the men be given the right of confession even if they weren’t allowed the sacrament of Holy Catholic communion—as it flouted the Church of England’s sensibilities. Claire did her level best to keep her mouth firmly shut and look demure, never her strongest suit, even when the guards insinuated none too discretely that she was the priest whore rather than, as he’d said many times a kinswoman, trying to discover if her husband was alive or dead among the captured Jacobites—Father Murray had steadfastly refused to drive a wedge between himself and God with a lie which left Claire a bit exposed if it became clear that Jamie was the spouse she’d been after; not that Father Murray seemed particularly put out at that.

Colonel Quarry had Claire Fraser Murray and Father Murray to tea where he bestowed Father Murray with a place to hear confession with a full guard to listen in—not rolling her eyes was a trial indeed—and denied Claire the opportunity to do the same. Claire knew that none of the men would truly confess where the British would hear their hearts’ wounds and so there would be no chance to get word to Jamie—not that Father Murray would agree to carry a message of any kind—and if she herself could not approach the men, there would be no way to quell any of Jamie’s more instinctual reactions.

Claire spent the majority of the meal trying to find a way to ingratiate herself to the Colonel in some fashion that would not give her too much away. She saw a rather painful boil on the back of the Colonel’s neck, tucked behind his ear when he went to collect a message from a young captain at the door. Claire whispered to the father that he might offer her services to lance it for him as her Christian duty. Father Murray must have been so pleased to see one of Jenny Murray’s kin at least appearing biddable that it wasn’t long before Claire was all but silently treating numerous members of the regiment.

After a couple days of treating men in the courtyard with only few words uttered in the most terrible Scottish accent Claire had ever heard, the Colonel seemed to trust her enough to walk along the bars about the outside of the prisoner’s courtyard guarded by two men to keep her from doing anything he deemed untoward. Claire could not make out the figures of anyone she knew, nor could she seem to catch the eyes of the men inside. Thankfully she could hear them speak; nothing so clear as to understand but the coughing and wheezing of a few might give her an opening.

It would turn out not to be the opening she had hoped but the very thing that Frank had warned her made it difficult to tell if Jamie would live much past summer. The bacterial infection was the end of three men before Claire was allowed to treat any one. Her patients were placed under such tight watch that she could not dose them with the little penicillin she dared to bring with her. As men died and her phony Scottish burr fell to the wayside, Claire worried that the Colonel would clap her in irons—half-hoping he would toss her in the prison at last so she could find Jamie amongst the men—but it never came to pass. He seemed to respect her enough to let her try to contain the outbreak unaccosted if entirely unassisted.

Father Murray too seemed to see Claire differently as he said last rights in the wake of her exhaustive efforts. It wasn’t really gratifying given the circumstances. At least this last did finally lead to him nodding in the direction of the fence between the courtyard Claire had been given for her work and that the prisoners had access to for a few short hours in rotation. At first she had thought he had spotted another ill inmate, but then the half-wasted figure of a still-broad shouldered man, lank and dirty red and wavy hair came into focus where he leaned against the rails of the outdoor cell.

Jamie.

Claire cast about to take stock of the men who were meant to be guarding her; their attention was elsewhere, as it had been for most of their shift. As for many of the guards at this point, she was merely a moving part of the stonework, a functioning piece of the prison itself. She dipped a rag in the freshly boiled water and used it to clean off her hands and forearms—the scald was almost unnoticeable—and walked casually towards the bars.

Getting as close as she dared she called quietly, “Jamie.” His eyes traveled slowly from the ground to her face and away. She hadn’t long. “Jamie, please, say something,” but his only response was a string of gàidhlig from which she could only gather some of the endearments he’d used for her years before. My brown haired lass, he’d said of that she was sure, his tone so mournful and beaten that she could not imagine he had any real understanding that she was indeed before him.

Behind her there was a sudden scrabbling and a sharply barked, “Mistress,” that forced her to turn away. She had to tell herself all the way back to the soldiers that she must be smart or she would ruin any chance she had of freeing Jamie at all.

“That man is sick. He must be gotten out of there or he’ll make the others ill as well,” she lied. “I’ve only just contained it. Fetch him, and for heaven’s sake don’t let him bleed on anything,” she threw in to ensure that they’d keep any retributive force to a minimum.

Claire cleared a bench and beckoned the father. She demanded he translate a few lines into gàidhlig for her as she dug through her meager provisions to mix a tonic as quickly as possible.

“Set him there,” she instructed with her back to the two men who looked like even the tips of their bayonet’s might be contaminated from nudging Jamie through to her. They jumped back fast when she handed one of them the cup she’d mixed. “Have him drink this,” she barked and counted to ten before ordering them to leave and turning to Jamie herself.

She moved her face as close to his as she dared, tipped the cup up quickly to pour it all down his throat, looked into his eyes, and said, “Is tu cnaimh de mo chnaimh.” Bone of my bone.

She watched his eyes widen, felt his hand go lax under hers where it wrapped around the cup, still draining into his mouth. As she took it away his eyes rolled back and he uttered her name. Claire’s heart pounded in her chest and her skin tingled in the cool breeze and for the first time in longer than she cared to consider she truly felt like dancing.

Chapter Text

It had been hard to release Jamie once she’d laid him out on the bench, but she’d forced herself to treat him with the brusque moves she did all her other patients. She had set fine line for them. She had to keep Jamie close, seeming ill enough to be left to tend him as she wished, but far enough from the others—some of whom she still didn’t think would make it—and sedated enough to keep them all from being caught. Doing a little quick math, she realized it would be most judicious of her small remaining supplies to wait until evening to dose the guards with valerian root so that she might be able to speak with Jamie without keeping him sedated. The faster his mind could process what was real around him, the faster they could escape the most dangerous part of her Hail Mary play.

The most immediate concern was that the other prisoners seemed less accepting of Jamie’s removal from their numbers than they had been of the truly fallen ill. Claire was worried they would point out that Jamie hadn’t shown any symptoms and demand to know why he’d been removed. Instead it seemed that a handful would keep a constant eye on Jamie and her care of him. She caught herself shaking her head—it would just figure that he had garnered such loyalty among the imprisoned Jacobites that they would keep vigil over him.

As night fell and the courtyard cleared, Claire shared some late dinner with her guards. As soon as they began to snor,e she roused Jamie as delicately as she could—a pitcher of water to the face might be more expedient but she was afraid his crying out might rouse further suspicion. He’d come to calling for her and though she shushed him murmuring that she was there, he seemed again not to hear her.

“Darling, hush please. It isn’t safe here. You must be quiet,” she pleaded in the face of yet more dazed gàidhlig. “I’m here,” she said with fresh tears in her eyes, placing his hands on her face. “I’m here, I swear. I’m right here.” She put her hands on him and throwing all remaining caution to the wind kissed him.

“Sassenach,” he whispered against her cheek, her lips, her eyelids. “Mo nighean donn. Mo ghràidh.”

“Yes, damn it, Jamie. It’s me. Now snap out of it,” she said, punching him in the nearest spot to her fist, which happened to be at the crux of his arms and ribs.

As Jamie coughed and sputtered he eked out, “Aye, I believe ye now.” After a moment he chuckled and his eyes on her face had lost their dreamy haze only to gain a tearful one. “How, sassenach? How can ye be before me and no’ a shade or a dream?”

His hand on her face was so soft; she’d forgotten how careful and tender he could be, almost always was but for when she needed to feel the hardened strength of him—something he might not be able to provide given how captivity had shrunk him. “You lived, Jamie. At Culloden. The history books might not have written of it but the Bonaid Odhair still shows up in bedtime stories.”

He smiled, still running a thumb across her cheek. “I’m glad of it, if it brought ye to me.”

“It was Ardsmuir. Oh, Jamie,” she threw her arms around him properly, “if you hadn’t turned yourself in I never could have known, never found you. Jenny can be as cross as she likes, but I’m so grateful, you loyal fool, that I could kiss the stones of this wretched place.”

“I’d much rather ye kiss me, sassenach.” Claire tried but found herself quietly sobbing, shaking too badly. “Ye’ll no’ be alone again, mo nighean donn. I am so sorry I wasna there for ye again. I didna want ye to be alone this time,” Jamie said, starting to cry himself. “I meant to save ye both. I’m so sorry it wasna enough.”

It took some time for Claire’s exhaustion and relief to spend enough that she could fully grasp what Jamie was saying. She pulled back and looked at him, wiping the tears from his face, older but no less dear. “No, darling,” she smiled. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. You saved us. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but…,” she shrugged. “She’s amazing. So like you. Brave and clever, sweet and giving.”

“A lass?” he said as though he once again could not believe the world around him was real.

“Aye, you stubborn Scot. A lass as braw and bonnie as ever you did ken,” she said with a tilt to her lips and spark in her eyes.

“And she’s well? Truly?” he asked taking in both but needing to know, to be sure in the space between his heart and the place in the ether his child inhabited.

“She’s perfect, except for having inherited the thick Fraser skull,” she stroked one in question, “absolutely perfect and safely installed at Lallybroch.”

She felt his shoulders sag and his chest expand, felt him fill back into his own body. “Then we make for home,” he murmured into her curls. “There’s a weak spot in the defenses of the western—”

“Jamie.”

“—ramparts and the stones are—”

“Jamie,” she shook her head and pulled back from him.

“—loose out on the turret—”

“Jamie.”

“Aye, wife?”

“It’ll take more than that.”

“Ye’re here,” he said as though that was the only piece of the puzzle he’d needed to slot into place before the rest would simply fall into line.

“Jenny and I’ve been talking about it. There’s no place for us safe in Scotland if you break out of Ardsmuir. I’d gladly go on the run with you forever darling,” she stroked his face again—the glory of just that action after all the time apart transcended the darkness she’d become too well acquianted with—“but there’s Brianna now.”

“Brianna?” he gasped.

“Brianna Ellen Fraser,” she said, letting it sit a moment, letting them both enjoy knowing the name of their child. “But a life on the run? Is that what you sent us away for? Is that what you wanted for her? For now she ‘s safe. Loved. Darling she’s here. But we can’t ask that of her. I can’t leave her.”

“I’ll no’ get out of here Claire. No’ after the uprising. Red Jamie will never be freed,” he said with conviction and say eyes boring into hers.

“You will,” she countered, knowing that if Jamie survived he’d be cleared out with the rest of the men for the garrison. “You will. Years from now,” years she never intended to wait, “but you will. All of the men will if they can survive that long. Can you, Jamie,” she pleaded, down on her knees before him in the dirt of the courtyard, “can you survive a handful more years until then?”

“Sassenach,” he said with sadness and pain in his voice but light in his eyes. “With ye waiting for me, I could survive the very fires of hell.”

As they clung she prayed that it wouldn’t be necessary: no fires of hell, no transportation to the colonies, no years of waiting with bars and pretenses between them as there would have to be while she remained at the prison.

Parting from him again after finally seeing his breathing body, kissing his warm lips, feeling the heat of his hands on her skin was harder than she’d expected. After all she knew this time that he was alive, that he had survived the death toll Frank could not verify that he would. Still, as she rode away—with plans already in place with Quarry and Father Murray to return before the winter set in—she felt herself watching the walls get smaller, feeling her heart beat grow fainter. All the time they were apart she worried, plotted with Jenny and Ian, prepared Brianna—being so young it was less strange to be suddenly hearing about a very much alive father than it had been to realize the house she was sleeping in was the ruin she’d visited regularly with her mother, to realize she’d recently tended the very same herb garden in 1953—but she needn’t have.

It was on her third visit to Ardsmuir that her plans went awry. Colonel Quarry had come to accept that Claire would make her rounds to the prison, care for his men—both convict and conscript—and leave every few months when the weather was good. To allay some suspicion, Claire and the venerable Father Murray would tour a few other Jacobite prisons though they were never as well received and often turned away the day they arrived. It may have added time and trial to their journey, but it hide Claire’s success and it fulfilled Father Murray’s Christian altruism—he quoted the book of Matthew so often Claire felt she was in catechism. To discover that a new governor had come and Claire would have to start from scratch, was a very troubling spring surprise.

“Mistress Murray, is it?” the man in question asked.

“Aye,” she said trying her best Jenny impression on for size—fully aware that it was indeed terrible.

“Colonel Quarry spoke very highly of you and your skills with medicines,” he paused, clearly waiting for her to speak.

“Thank ye.”

“I was wondering if you would have something for an arm that was broken once, many years ago that still pains from time to time,” he studied her face and she tried not to blush. “Particularly,” he added, “when playing charades.”

Claire looked at him strangely, she was aware and yet could not stop it. “Aye,” she trilled and pulled out a few packets of herbs she would mix and tell him to make for a poultice when it pained him.

He abruptly rose and called out some orders to his men. He turned to his desk and ignored her and Father Murray while he worked. She looked awkwardly to the priest and back to the man at Quarry’s desk. Suddenly Jamie was brought into the room and sat in a chair by the chess set at the window. “Ah, Mr. Fraser. There’s a woman with some healing skill I’d like to tend your arm.” Claire’s eyes immediately raked Jamie’s arms looking for some injury he might have sustained over the winter when she was unable to come. “Well, mistress, can’t you see? His left arm is terribly painful. It requires skillful care.”

“Aye,” she said, checking the water that was already on the fire and finding it near a boil. She laid out the herbs and inspected the hale and hearty arm—in fact much improved in strength since her first visit nearly a year before. She tried to avoid Jamie’s gaze and keep her face straight. While she felt she might be failing, Jamie seemed to be as well. Even as she wrapped his arm in the hot cloth and ground herbs, she felt his strange misgivings.

“This is terribly disappointing,” Major Grey muttered. “You are both generally much better at acting. None of this holds a candle to your past performances.”

Claire could think of nothing to say as she straightened away from Jamie’s but a question laden, “Aye?”

The officer began to chuckle—which would soon grow to a full-throated laugh—and Jamie, himself, raised his “painful” arm to rub his eyes as he scoffed, “Och, Claire.” This last seemed to have Father Murray giving a nervous titter.

For her own part Claire’d had enough. She tossed the carefully wrapped poultice to the floor and chirped, “Well, now that I’ve so clearly amused all of you thoroughly,” in her own voice.

Grey laughed even louder and tilted his head back. “Oh Mrs. Fraser, you will never know how much. It was gratifying to be able to get one over on you after all this time. Petty?” he shrugged. “Perhaps, though deliciously so.”

Claire huffed as she sat in the nearest chair.

“You don’t remember me. I understand; neither did your husband.” Speaking of her husband, Claire still did not understand why he wasn’t more alarmed at the prospect of this man knowing Claire’s true identity. “We have met before.”

“I had gathered.”

“I am glad to see that my gentlemanly sacrifice for the virtue of an English rose was at least honored in the uprising.”

It took her a moment to process, yet when she did, she could see the shape of the face and the haughtiness of high birth had worn from the surety of youth to the grace of one who had experienced the world as it really was. “I supposed your arm healed well?”

“Very well, though it does not pain me when playing charades or during general diversions.”

“I am glad to hear it,” she said perfunctorily.

“Are you?”

“I am a healer, Major Grey. I believe as Hippocrates did that in doing no harm to my patients.”

“I am glad to hear it and, given Quarry’s notes on your work with the men of this outpost, I’ve no doubt of it, mistress.”

In his pause Claire looked again to Jamie trying to suss out her husband’s plan for this encounter. Surely he must know something about what the Major was after in regards to the peculiar meeting.

Likely noticing her unease and observation of his prisoner’s movements, Major Grey continued. “I have no intention of arresting you, mistress Fraser as there is at present no evidence that you mean to do more than apply medicinals to His Majesty’s subjects, loyal or not. And until such time as I do. I see no reason to hold your identity over your head as Quarry did.”

At the last Claire’s attention snapped to Grey’s face.

“He thought it was the only way he could secure your care for all at Ardsmuir and not just the prisoners. He meant as well as you to do the best for those under his care. As do I. So, during this visit, while it must not be apparent to the men I am aware of your identity, here, you may be your husband’s wife.”

Claire sat for several moments, letting herself feel regret that she would once again be taking advantage of this man’s better nature as the alternative—to leave Jamie to whither in prison and be paroled out to who knew what colonial servitude—was much more unpalatable.

Claire cleared her throat, swallowed and demurely queried, “Have we your leave then sir?”

The new governor nodded, took up a stack of official correspondence and blocked his view of them in his perusal. Rising to her feet, Claire straightened her skirts, lifted her chin, tucked a few hairs back in their pins before turning to see Jamie, smirk growing like spring across his, likewise coming to stand. Claire took a step towards him, awkward with the audience and the year since she’d been able to truly embrace him last—having reasoned it wasn’t a good idea for Jamie to fall sick and guards unconscious whenever she came to the prison. “Jamie,” she gasped as the tears began and felt their arms clasp tightly about each other in the same moment.

“Mo ghràidh.,” he said, pressing his rough, careworn cheek to her wet one.

“Oh, my love. My darling,” she said between setting kisses wherever they might lie. It would be sometime before she remembered the priest, before they did more than hold each other there in the governor’s keep.

It would be longer still before Jamie could tell her of what had come to pass during the long winter of Lord John Grey’s administration over Ardsmuir prison and what had led him to allow such comfort to the very same Red Jamie who had once broken his arm.

Chapter Text

Being away from Jamie, not knowing what would befall him at Ardsmuir while they were separated was the lion’s share of the trouble though she suffered the same when she would at last reach Jamie, know he’d come through whatever had come to pass in her absence when the worry over what might be occurring at Lallybroch and to Brianna fell to the forefront. While the plans were still not finalized which would solve this problem permanently, Claire undertook to solve it temporarily. She had been planning to take Brianna with her each time she left for Ardsmuir and each time something had prevented her. At first Jenny would not hear of it and made heartrending pleas for the girl’s safety that her mother could not deny. When Claire had arranged for a larger envoy (Fergus and wee Jamie might be spared for the month it would take to reach Ardsmuir and return) another problem would arise—trouble with the redcoats, the crop, and most recently Brianna herself had fallen ill. It had delayed their departure considerably and Claire’s worry for the health of her child sat side by side with her worry over the girl’s father.

When at last the stars seemed to align, Claire once again had to hold herself to the plan, take the care to follow the pattern, and visit the Jacobite prisons on her way to Arsdmuir. Having the extra men and a child along for the journey was change enough. She could not risk going straight to Jamie and what that might signal to those watching. Instead of pockets full of treats to keep Brianna in good spirits, Claire found herself retelling the child’s hundred favorite stories about her father—many now tales Claire hadn’t known or had forgotten that Jenny, Ian, and the rest of the clan had filled in since they’d come to the eighteenth century where Jamie was as alive for his family as he had been for Claire—as they plodded through the highlands. It kept her mind from dwelling too much on the state of the escape plans, on the many variables that could go wrong, on how desperately she needed her family safe and well. The laughter of a child was a remarkable restorative.

“And then milord fell backwards over the downed trunk to land flat on his back in the stream below. He was displeased to find himself both muddy and wet,” Fergus said to the giggling Bree riding with him on his mare. “I would not repeat his words in the presence of such a noble lady as you, mon ange.”

Claire could hear the smirk in his voice and was glad that he had taken so to Bree. Looking over at them she wished she had some way of capturing the moment. She’d never been one for photographs or photography as the chemicals required, the artistry and timing even in developing them seemed to her cumbersome. The thought that some years from now when Fergus had grown enough to pursue his own dreams—perhaps to return to France, as much as it would pain her—and Brianna had come into the fullness of her father’s height and her parents’ joint independence to have this sweet moment to reflect on. The togetherness of the pair smiling at each other as their bodies moved with the horse would warm a weary soul with an empty nest. She had wished this before in moments after Culloden when she had worried his face was beginning to fade from her heart, when she could only conjure the terrible expression on his face as he turned her towards the stones.

Their winding path brought them eventually to the gates at Ardsmuir where they and their little cart were met with confusion though not outright suspicion—a good sign. Only Claire and Father Murray were allowed in at first and Claire watched over her shoulder as wee Jamie drew up closer to Fergus’s horse, a hand near the dirk hidden in his coat, and Fergus’ arm tightened around Bree as he started to sing “Moggy Lauther” his deep baritone and the sweet high soprano of Brianna’s ringing through the windows of the fortress sounding more gàidhlig then they ever had but letting her know they were safe.

Inside she was taken to Major Grey where the guard explained the concern in the change of things, so of course Lord John turned to Claire with an exasperated look and went out to the cart to see the offending troupe. They heard Fergus, wee Jamie, and Brianna singing about Bessie Bell and Mary Gray before they came back through into the light. “Well, Mistress Murray, what is all this about?”

Fergus, still wonderfully skilled in misadventures and intrigue tickled Bree at just the time she might have corrected the prison governor’s name for her mother.

“If I am to continue treating the men I need more supplies. And, rather than journey with them I thought I might create a garden to supply me while I’m here and perhaps a company surgeon should you be able to procure one. These three will help make short work of it,” Claire explained hoping her face would not give away that there was more to her story to the guards though she was sure Grey had already surmised as much.

“You’re children, are they?”

“Not all, no,” she responded honestly. The cover story at home, should things work would need a good deal more luck if it was to take the way she and the rest of those involved needed. Still she had to tread carefully to keep from tripping Father Murray’s lying clause.

“I see well. Where do you propose place this garden, should I grant your request?” he said with added emphasis on request letting her, and the guards know that this was far from a given.

“I had thought outside the walls would be best to keep from pulling on your water supply,” Claire said turning towards a hill off to the south of the gated wall. “To get enough sunlight and drain in the rain it would need to be away from the walls a bit but not so exposed to the winds up from the sea as to be flattened before they take root,” She continued to explain as she led the way to the spot she’d been planning on. Fergus and young Jamie behind her let down Brianna and moved to follow. The child of course shook off her brother’s hand and dashed to catch up with her mother. “We’ll put up a temporary fence to protect the plants to start from the wind and animals but anything planted here should be hearty enough to not need tending after the first few months.” Claire accepted her daughter’s hand without looking away from Grey’s light eyes. She angled her hips and arm as such to try to shield as much of her daughter as possible. “It might take a fortnight, more if I have to go farther afield to gather items to transplant,” she said as a bid to get the Major’s eyes back on her as he seemed to be trying to get the girl to smile.

“I suppose it is a good investment in time. I do worry that it will need more than just the lot of you to construct in such a time if you are also to gather plants from the nearby specimens. With additional men it may go faster.”

“I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you and your men, sir.”

“Nor would you. A couple of convicts could make easy work of turning the soil and constructing a fence at your direction,” he said at which Claire closed her eyes, trying to not visibly pray. “With a small guard of course.”

“Of course, your lordship.”

John Grey did not disappoint in his choice of convicts and on the second day, Claire—exiting her tent in the morning, moving to stoke the fire and begin making parritch for the day—found Jamie, Murtagh, and a man she’d never seen before at the end of rifles on the edge of the camp they had claimed. In order to get the guns elsewhere she forwent breakfast, Fergus would be sure Brianna ate, and immediately set about putting them to work. She paced the garden, told them set any heather they found to one side, stones and rocks to another, but to otherwise turn the whole piece up to three feet down. It was a fair bit of labor, even for three grown men. Once they’d begun to work in earnest, the guards were at their ease, leaning against their arms and smoking pipes.

Once the breakfast had been made, portioned, and eaten the father went in through the gate as was his wont, wee Jamie and Fergus pulled the rocks from the dirt the men were turning over and Claire, loathe as she was to do it, took Brianna with her in search of the few herbs she was sure to find nearby. Claire didn’t dare let Bree run back and forth across the earth while Jamie turned it over. The likelihood of a guard noticing the resemblance was too high. It would also be cruel. To have his child so close, within reach of his fingers, yet for him to have to pretend complete ignorance and indifference to her was a torture she could not set before him. Claire also didn’t dare to tell Brianna who the men truly were, at least not the two who were her kin. When she returned it was to find the guards eating some ways off, sharing what looked like a bottle between them. She hoped ardently that it was Grey’s doing despite also wishing she had gotten a light dose of valerian root in it to make them lazy and amenable.

“You there,” she called to Jamie, “bring that shovel here.” She hauled the sack of plants she’d found and Brianna to a well-cleared patch of soil. “Bree, darling hold this open for Mummy,” she said helping the girl to get a firm grip so the fabric would stay taut and open straight to the contents. She took a plant, “Perfect, love,” got to her knees, and—“About a foot deep here”—shoving dirt back over the roots found Jamie’s filthy, cold hands pressing the plant to its new home with her.

“Claire,” he said with his voice and hands shaking.

“Brianna,” Claire said, reluctantly pulling her hands from beneath Jamie’s, “a leannan, bring the bag here and help us.” The girl did as she was bid and Claire had to look away from the tears gathering on Jamie’s face, both to keep from crying and to watch that the guards.

“What else have you got in yer wee bag there, lass?” Jamie asked, his voice still unsteady but the soft tone he’d used to speak to Faith as she grew inside Claire.

“There’s this one,” Bree said with a rustle.

“Ah, braoileag. A treat with some milk and honey for ye.”

Not recognizing the gàidhlig word for the plant, Claire turned and saw vaccinium myrtillus in his hand. “That will go here,” she said moving to the place she chosen for it, knowing she’d plant certain things in need of its shade and other to protect the dark berries from the animals, though she could do nothing about the birds who would also be after them.

She kept watch as father and daughter continued to plant the items she’d managed to find. Jamie spoke to Brianna in a mixture of English and gàidhlig, much as Jenny and Ian had taken to, and the child seemed entranced by his knowledge and kindness—just as Claire had been those first weeks nearly a decade earlier. When the sack was empty, she had Fergus bring the plants she’d brought from her garden at Lallybroch, knowing she wouldn’t be able to find them wild. She had Jamie and Brianna plant them slowly to her specifications while the others worked to clear the land, till the soil, and sift for rocks.

At the end of the day the men were escorted back by a changed guard that also invited the whole of the Murray camp to dine with the governor. Father Murray accepted and Claire did not know what to hope for, that Jamie would be present or that he would not.

When they arrived after cleaning as well they could with a pot of tepid water, Grey greeted them warmly and dismissed the guards. “And now,” he said turning towards Brianna while Claire clutched the girl’s hand tighter, “I would like very much to make your acquaintance. I,” he began in courtly tones, “am Lord John William Bertram Armstrong Grey, major in His Majesty’s royal army and governor of Ardsmuir.” He turned his leg and bowed only to look up at Brianna.

The child, with grace far beyond her years and usual precociousness, curtsied and said, “Brianna Ellen Fraser,” before straightening to cover her mouth with both hands as she giggled at her own seriousness.

“Mistress Fraser,” Lord Grey smiled warmly at Claire and held out a hand. She placed her own in it, despite her misgivings, to bow as he bent over it. “Father Murray,” he greeted the older man, “gentlemen,” he said turning to Jamie and Fergus.

This was a deciding moment. Did she continue to treat him as an enemy and conceal the names of the men who were not supposed to be at Arsdmuir but rather back at Lallybroch—where two Murray cousins were filling in for them—or leave the lying to those who were far more suited to it and trust him with at least their identities. “Fergus, our son,” she felt him shift behind her, “and James, Murray a cousin,” she ultimately chose remembering that Brianna, while more of a snake charmer, was not yet of an age to grasp duplicity and its necessity.

“Fergus,” he said reaching for the lad’s hand and not shirking from the hook, “your father speaks of you often. James,” he took the hand of Jamie’s namesake. “Please sit all of you.”

The group moved to the table, it was not as finely laid as Lord John Grey’s position might dictate, certainly not up to the caliber of some of her previous meals with British officers. Claire was relying on her husband’s impression of the man as to their level of danger. Jamie had treated the governor as an equal, almost a friend on her last visit, they had shared laughter and not traded barbs the way he had with Captain Randall from the first.

They sat through dinner without Jamie ever appearing. Claire knew it was best not to confuse Brianna with Jamie’s identity, but she couldn’t help feeling disappointed that they had not had the few moments of privacy the Major had given them last time, such as it was. As wee Jamie carried his sleeping cousin back to the camp Claire wondered just how much she could trust Grey, how much Grey could be asked for, pushed to give.

Still wondering, she rushed from her tent in the morning having formulated another plan. Her eagerness meant she was ready before the men from the prison had arrived and went directly to work on the parritch. Her timing worked beautifully and she was able to send Brianna with a trencher of the stuff to give to each man, her father included. Jamie wrapped his hands around hers on the dish, smiled into her face so brightly it stung Claire’s eyes. She could not bring herself to look away, so she pretended it was the smoke.

That day’s task would divide the guards in two. One would stay and watch Murtagh and the other convict—Claire had learned his name was Duncan the day before—continue to clear and till the garden space with wee Jamie. The other would depart with Claire, Brianna, Jamie, Fergus, and the cart to collect debris for the fence meant to protect the transplants from the wind and animals while their roots took hold. Claire had carefully taken those less likely to look intimidating so that no alarms would be raised about their separation. Jamie’s hulk was returning, especially with the increased labor, but how likely would a guard away from the tower be to be over powered by an invalid, woman, and child? The guards did not object to the arrangement and each relaxed their posture to keep vigil.

Not ten paces outside camp Brianna slid her hand into Jamie’s as she skipped beside him. Claire hoped that her position behind the pair curtailed the guard’s view of the movement or that he had no interest in the actions of the young. The day went on, Jamie and Bree getting acquainted when he and Fergus weren’t prying up stumps or gathering branches. She’d caught herself singing an old song from her youth which must have had deeper roots than she realized, for the guard joined in and soon the lot of them were singing and stacking wood and rocks in the cart as a troupe rather than in the shadow of the gun at their backs.

Finally deeming the cart full enough for the day, they turned back towards camp. Jamie put Bree on his shoulders, Fergus led the horse, and the guard trundled along beside Claire, talking her ear off about the little sister with two thin braids he’d left at home when he enlisted. How he longed to write to her but knew she’d not been taught to read, knew that until she wed there wouldn’t be anyone to write her letter back to him.

The Murray camp again fed the lot and Claire watched Bree snuggle between the Jamies while she was ladling out the stew.

Things continued that way for the fortnight Claire outlined, for the only change was that the governor—once he heard Claire had been feeding both prisoners and guards from her own provisions—sent a bushel of supplies to make up the difference. Towards the end, when little was left to be done in the dirt, Claire went into the prison to see the ailing. There were far fewer with each visit. This was in part due to the frequent access to a healer and to the improved care they received under Grey. She left Brianna in the care of her kin by the garden placing stones to divide various sections and to stand on out of the mud when it rained. On her way out the day before she had said they would be ready to depart, the Major called her to see him.

“Please, have a seat,” he said as the door closed behind his guard. “Mistress Fraser, I have been pleased with the reports coming from your camp, though I must say it is getting difficult to remain stone-faced about the way your daughter has taken to those who have labored on the garden.” He smiled but then it fell off to a sigh, “I fear you will not be able to keep your secret much longer. Anyone who has seen them together cannot deny the similarities between Jamie and Miss Brianna. Surely you are aware.”

“Yes,” she said worried about what his next words would be. “Their hair certainly does make it hard to avoid.”

“It’s Scotland, red hair alone would not be an issue but with all the rest…you see the reason for concern.”

“More so than you, I imagine, as it is my family on the chopping block,” she snapped back. Damn this man. Him and his superior knowledge of what is best for those she loves, she thought uncharitably.

“I meant no offense, mistress. I only wanted to be sure that you were aware of the danger. I wish no harm to befall you or your loved ones. I have done all I can within the realm of reason to aide you, have I not?”

“Yes,” she responded trying to feel reasonable.

“Then perhaps you can tell me what the remaining reason is for the ire you so clearly feel.”

“You couldn’t understand,” she snapped. “You couldn’t understand what it is like to have someone you love so near and not be able to touch him, not be able to call him by name, or hear your child—” she cut off abruptly, sensing the tears on her face and sob stuck in her throat.

“I have more of an idea than you could know, Mistress Fraser,” he said with more depth of feeling than she had ever heard from him, “of what it is like to hold so deep a love in your heart that you might die to not give it expression.” When she looked back to his face she saw that it might be true. “I have been in awe of you these many months, they way you have dedicated so much time and work to finding away to be near him, care for him, while protecting what he holds more dear than his own survival—you.” He looked away from her as if it was too painful to continue. “You are stronger than I was, than I am. I do not know that I could ever do all that you have done to return to your husband.”

And she laughed. She couldn’t help it or hold back the bitter, ironic edge to it. If only you knew, she wanted to say but thought better of it.

“I know that you must leave tomorrow and I understand that it might be the last time you daughter sees her father for some years,” the years she felt down to her very soul and rebelled, “perhaps I can offer you some small token, a boon, to hold your family together through that time and distance. I could give you tonight, as I once did before. Give you the shelter of my rooms to be yourselves until such a time as the Jacobites are freed.”

Claire would take it greedily, though his words cut her—“until such a time as the Jacobites are freed”—she would not let his prediction come to pass.

That night in room where they had taken supper previously it was just Lord John Grey, Jamie, Fergus, Brianna, and Claire. The father and Jamie the younger had both said they would stay behind to finish what could be done before morning. The second the door was closed Claire latched on to her husband’s face with her hands and kissed him. She heard Brianna giggle and Fergus shush her. Somewhere in the room Lord Grey shifted.

“Oh sassenach,” Jamie said stroking her face, “I canna believe sometimes yer really here.”

She laughed and continued to stroke his face, “Not just me this time.”

“Aye,” he said as his hand drifted from her cheek over her shoulder and arm. “Will ye no’ make the proper introductions?”

“Gladly,” she said taking his hand and leading him to where their children waited. “Brianna Ellen Fraser,” she took the girl’s hand, “this is James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, your father.”

“Aye,” piped up the little voice and the girl commenced swinging her and her mother’s hands back and forth lightly as she smiled benignly at the two adults.

“Is that all you have to say, Bree.”

“Hello,” she uttered half as a question.

“The lass has a point, sassenach. There’s no’ really a protocol for meeting a father you’d never seen in your life, much less when someone tells you a fair bit later he is indeed your da.”

“Da?” the child in question asked. “Like wee Ian calls Uncle Ian. You’re my father and my da?”

“The verra same lass,” he said and bopped her nose.

Bree took a moment to think about it and came to a sanguine, “I like da better. Makes it easier to keep Father Murray separate.”

The rest chuckled. Bree tugged on Jamie’s hand and rather than crouch he lifted the girl up into his arms and embraced her. “Da,” she whispered to him, “I’m very glad we came through the wardrobe to find you.”

Jamie looked quizzically at Claire who shook her head and smiled, “Tell you later,” as she curled an arm around Fergus.

No, she would not let this be the last time her family could truly be together until it pleased His Royal Majesty to show some clemency.

Chapter Text

Later she would hear many things about the time they had been apart, about Lord John, about the cave, about the battlefield, about all the things Jamie had to say, do, imagine to remain sane in the in-between. She would have her stories to tell him as well, but all of that would come later after she had ridden away from Ardsmuir for the last time.

The plan hinged on the perceptions of others, they all knew that. So she could behave in no new way. She could not reveal herself as the wife of the captive Red Jamie and so finally kiss him goodbye or watch him as she rode away, she could not shirk her routine of stopping by other prisons on her way back to Lallybroch. She could not neglect the many who now relied on her care in favor of spending time with him. As a result, should the plan go awry, should any of them be caught, she might never see Jamie again.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, would that it were, but it was most unwelcome.

Claire trusted that Fergus, wee Jamie, Jenny, and Ian would play their parts well. That left only her. This would be the nearly the worst time to falter in her purpose, in her confidence that it could be done.

The pieces as far as she could see fell into place smoothly. She and Brianna made busy with the crofter’s hut they were supposedly calling home all along. Fergus was seen there abouts by as many strangers as he could find. Suddenly the cabin was darkened, their possessions left, and wee Jamie, Michael, and Jenny appeared to dig graves in the herb garden that Claire had just brought back from the dead and it was put about that a grave illness was taking pieces of the country folk and to watch your own threshold for it. A letter was sent to the governor of Ardsmuir by way of his majesty’s army, delivered by a red-eyed Mrs. Ian Murray to the captain then at Fort William. As things were set to happen, while Claire and Brianna were hidden within a shipment of sheep’s wool being sent to Glasgow with their meager belongings, Fergus was to slink up the opposite coast and with a boat make his way to Eliean Mullagrach, Father Murray to extoll the “loss” of his great companion in God’s work of caring for the lest among His people, and the Murray’s at large were to look bereft. Once in Glasgow, Claire and Brianna were to board Jared Fraser’s ship which would, should everything go at Ardsmuir as they planned, meet up with Fergus and Jamie at Great Bernera before setting out for the long journey out past St. Kilda to be the head of Jared’s company in New Orleans.

The two riskiest parts of the plan were totally out of Claire’s hands:

1) Jamie’s reaction to the news of their deaths (Grey merely told him it, rather than let him read the letter Jenny carefully crafted, all would be lost).
2) Fergus’ successfully getting a boat out past Silkies’ Isle to Ellen’s Crown and then across the Minch (the boy was no sailor and certainly not skilled in the western Scottish coast).

And so from the moment she left in the cart, roasting in the wool with Brianna, she began to worry over what might happen and didn’t stop until, far later then either side had anticipated and after numerous mishaps, Jamie and Fergus Fraser stood at the foot of the Lucette’s gangplank.

Brianna went tearing down it and Claire watched as Jamie’s face battled first disbelief at seeing her and then terror that she would fall in. Both lost out to joy as he swung her into his arms to her laughing exclamations. Claire walked more sedately, relief and bliss pervading her as she watched the family she had fought so hard for finally stand, nearly free, together on the shore. She kissed them all and sent Fergus on with Bree to show him the ship.

“Well, lass, another ship is it to be?” he asked passing his arms around her middle, glancing balefully at the Lucette’s mainsail.

“Aye, ye bluidy Scot,” she said nestling her arms around him as well.

“Och, sassenach,” he scoffed. “How canna it be that your accent is such after all this time?”

“Hmm,” she returned deciding valor had little to do with her response, “where we’re going we’ll both have silly accents.”

She watched him turn green just at the thought of boarding the ship. “I’m well prepared this time darling. I can’t say as you won’t still feel unwell but this trip had a bit more planning in it. I expect it will make some difference. And there’s a great difference between the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Please, Claire,” he muttered. “Dinna talk about it. Each word just make the verra land seem to wobble.

“Well, shall we stand here then? Watch the ship go out on the tide?”

“Nay, lass. I ken there’s naught for it but to board. Will ye no’ be joining me?”

“Every step of the way, my love.”

“Aye, I canna say I am not glad to be leaving some of the things we found here in Scotland, sad as I am to be leaving for good.”

“You’ll miss it Jamie, more than I can tell you.”

“Aye, I ken your right, but the things I’ve missed having the most in life will be right beside me. My wife,” he said holding her face in his hands and kissing her chastely, “my family,” and again, “and hope,” and again. “Ye can build anything out of hope, mo ghràidh.” He rubbed his thumbs once more across her cheeks.

She kissed him, brought her lips to both his palms only to then use them to pull him up the gangway and onto the ship where they would live for the months it would take them to sail to Nova Scotia, down the coast of the British Colonies, round the Spanish peninsula and into the French port town where hope would build them a new home.