Oh, God, she prayed passionately, oh, God—that they might be safe! Please, please, let them be safe. It didn’t matter how ridiculous it might be to pray for the safety of people who had been—who had to be—dead for more than two hundred years. It was the only thing she could do, and did it several times each day, whenever she thought of them. Much more often, now that they had come to Lallybroch.

She blinked back tears, and saw Roger’s Mini Cooper come down the winding drive. The backseat was piled high with boxes; he was finally clearing out the last bits of rubbish from the Reverend’s garage, salvaging those items that might have value to someone—a dismayingly high proportion of the contents.

“Just in time,” she said, a little shaky, as he came up the walk smiling, a large box under his arm. She still found him startling with short hair. “Ten minutes more, and I’d kill somebody, for sure. Probably Fiona, for starters.”

“Oh, aye?” He bent and kissed her with particular enthusiasm, indicating that he probably hadn’t heard what she’d said. “I’ve got something.”

“So I see. What—”

“Damned if I know.”

The box he laid on the ancient dining table was wood, as well; a sizable casket made of maple, darkened by years, soot, and handling, but with the workmanship still apparent to her practiced eye. It was beautifully made, the joints perfectly dovetailed, with a sliding top—but the top didn’t slide, having been at some point sealed with a thick bead of what looked like melted beeswax, gone black with age.

The most striking thing about it, though, was the top. Burned into the wood was a name: Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie.

She felt a clenching in her lower belly at the sight of it, and glanced up at Roger, who was tense with some suppressed feeling; she could feel it vibrating through him.

“What?” she whispered. “Who is that?”

Roger shook his head, and pulled a filthy envelope from his pocket.

“This was with it, taped to the side. It’s the Reverend’s handwriting, one of the little notes he’d sometimes put with something to explain its significance, just in case. But I can’t say this is an explanation, exactly.”

The note was brief, stating merely that the box had come from a defunct banking house in Edinburgh. Instructions had been stored with the box, stating that it was not to be opened, save by the person whose name was inscribed thereon. The original instructions had perished, but were passed on verbally by the person from whom he obtained the box.

“And who was that?” she asked.

“No idea. Do you have a knife?”

“Do I have a knife,” she muttered, digging in the pocket of her jeans. “Do I ever not have a knife?”

“That was a rhetorical question,” he said, kissing her hand and taking the bright red Swiss Army knife she offered him.

The beeswax cracked and split away easily; the lid of the box, though, was unwilling to yield after so many years. It took both of them—one clutching the box, the other pushing and pulling on the lid—but finally, it came free with a small squealing noise.

The ghost of a scent floated out; something indistinguishable, but plantlike in origin.

“Mama,” she said involuntarily. Roger glanced at her, startled, but she gestured at him urgently to go on. He reached carefully into the box and removed its contents: a stack of letters, folded and sealed with wax, two books—and a small snake made of cherrywood, heavily polished by long handling.

She made a small, inarticulate sound and seized the top letter, pressing it so hard against her chest that the paper crackled and the wax seal split and fell away. The thick, soft paper, whose fibers showed the faint stains of what had once been flowers.

Tears were falling down her face, and Roger was saying something, but she didn’t attend the words, and the children were making an uproar upstairs, the builders were still arguing outside, and the only thing in the world she could see were the faded words on the page, written in a sprawling, difficult hand.

December 31, 1776

My dear daughter,As you will see if ever you receive this, we are alive… .



EPILOGUE II

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

WHAT’S THIS, THEN?” Amos Crupp squinted at the page laid out in the bed of the press, reading it backward with the ease of long experience.

“It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire … Where’d that come from?”

“Note from a subscriber,” said Sampson, his new printer’s devil, shrugging as he inked the plate. “Good for a bit of filler, there, I thought; General Washington’s address to the troops run short of the page.”

“Hmph. I s’pose. Very old news, though,” Crupp said, glancing at the date. “January?”

“Well, no,” the devil admitted, heaving down on the lever that lowered the page onto the plate of inked type. The press sprang up again, the letters wet and black on the paper, and he picked the sheet off with nimble fingertips, hanging it up to dry. “’Twas December, by the notice. But I’d set the page in Baskerville twelve-point, and the slugs for November and December are missing in that font. Not room to do it in separate letters, and not worth the labor to reset the whole page.”

“To be sure,” said Amos, losing interest in the matter, as he perused the last paragraphs of Washington’s speech. “Scarcely signifies, anyway. After all, they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

Also by Diana Gabaldon

(in order of publication)



OUTLANDER

DRAGONFLY IN AMBER

VOYAGER

DRUMS OF AUTUMN

THE OUTLANDISH COMPANION

(non-fiction)

THE FIERY CROSS

and

LORD JOHN AND THE PRIVATE MATTER



SPRING THAW

Fraser’s Ridge, colony of North Carolina

March 1777

ONE THING ABOUT a devastating fire, I reflected. It did make packing easier. At present, I owned one gown, one shift, three petticoats—one woolen, two muslin—two pairs of stockings (I’d been wearing one pair when the house burned; the other had been carelessly left drying on a bush a few weeks before the fire and was discovered later, weathered but still wearable), a shawl, and a pair of shoes. Jamie had procured a horrible cloak for me somewhere—I didn’t know where, and didn’t want to ask. Made of thick wool the color of leprosy, it smelled as though someone had died in it and lain undiscovered for a couple of days. I’d boiled it with lye soap, but the ghost of its previous occupant lingered.

Still, I wouldn’t freeze.

My medical kit was nearly as simple to pack. With a regretful sigh for the ashes of my beautiful apothecary’s chest, with its elegant tools and numerous bottles, I turned over the pile of salvaged remnants from my surgery. The dented barrel of my microscope. Three singed ceramic jars, one missing its lid, one cracked. A large tin of goose grease mixed with camphor—now nearly empty after a winter of catarrhs and coughs. A handful of singed pages, ripped from the casebook started by Daniel Rawlings and continued by myself—though my spirits were lifted a bit by the discovery that the salvaged pages included one bearing Dr. Rawlings’s special receipt for Bowel-Bind.

It was the only one of his receipts I’d found effective, and while I’d long since committed the actual formula to memory, having it to hand kept my sense of him alive. I’d never met Daniel Rawlings in life, but he’d been my friend since the day Jamie gave me his chest and casebook. I folded the paper carefully and tucked it into my pocket.