A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Bobby arrives, and Claire examines him. She thinks him a very sweet boy and begrudgingly likes Lord John, although she doesn’t trust his generosity toward Bobby. Lord John is gay, and Claire suspects he wants to have a sexual relationship with Bobby. She believes this explains why he sent Bobby to Claire for hemorrhoid treatment. Although she doesn’t like the idea of fixing Bobby up so that she can send him home to be taken advantage of, Claire treats him anyway. Jamie defends Lord John, calling him an honorable man. Claire observes that Lord John is still in love with Jamie. Jamie admits that he offered his body to Lord John once, long ago, in an effort to know him and know his honor. Lord John then had a relationship with Jamie’s son, although what truly happened remains unclear.

Richard and Lionel Brown of Brownsville arrive, seeking Jamie. Bobby is bitten by one of their mules and faints. When he revives, he tells Claire the fainting has happened many times before, which is why Lord John sent Bobby to see her. Lord John doesn’t even know about Bobby’s hemorrhoids. When Jamie appears with the Brown brothers, they call Bobby a murderer and say it’s dangerous to keep such company. Jamie says he keeps the company of whom he wishes and kicks them off his property. Jamie tells Claire, Bobby, and Lizzie’s father, Joseph Wemyss, that the Brown brothers have declared themselves heads of the Committee of Safety. They tried to recruit Jamie to no avail. It was one such committee that harassed and beat Bobby.

Claire suddenly remembers that she sent Lizzie for brandy, but Lizzie never returned. They find her passed out on the floor of the kitchen; she’d contracted malaria years before and sometimes has attacks, such as this one. Claire realizes she’s out of the bark she’s used to treat it in the past, but she finds a note in her casebook and decides to use gallberries. The Beardsley twins arrive, concerned about Lizzie. They tell Claire they can get gallberries from the Cherokee who live over the mountain. Jamie agrees to go with them. He decides he should be the Indian agent to keep the Browns from doing the job.

Jamie tells Bobby and Claire that the Browns had heard of Bobby and had come to take him and make a show out of their new authority position in the community. Jamie gives Bobby a gun and asks him to watch over his family while he’s away with the Cherokee. With their knowledge of the future, the Frasers know that Jamie’s decision to be the Indian agent means they have crossed the threshold of war.

Jamie sends Bobby to fetch his son-in-law, Roger, so he can learn from his knowledge of Indians and revolution. He remembers having his palm read by an old witch woman in Paris. She told him he would die nine times before he would finally find rest in his grave. Jamie has a vision of his godfather, Murtagh, telling him not to be afraid, as death doesn’t hurt. He’s had a few visions like this but hasn’t told Claire yet.

Claire shows Bobby Lizzie’s malarial blood cells under a microscope and teaches him about parasitic diseases. She asks if Bobby had a foot rash a few months ago, which he affirms. He most likely has hook worms, she explains, which would explain his fainting spells.

Roger comes home to find Brianna with a gift from Lord John: a jar of extremely flammable white phosphorous. Intending to make matches out of it, she stores it in her mother’s surgery room. Jamie arrives and asks Roger to fetch the new Scottish tenants from Cross Creek. He is to take Arch Bug and Tom Christie with him. The new members of their community are Protestant, as is Christie. To aid Brianna’s understanding, Roger compares the strife between Scottish Catholics and Protestants to the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Christie and Roger will make the newcomers feel safer in joining the largely Catholic community. The expedition will take six weeks. Roger decides to take Jem along, too, to give Brianna a break and to ease his loneliness on the trip.

Jamie returns home from speaking to Roger about natives and Protestants to find Claire asleep at the kitchen table, exhausted from trying to treat Lizzie. She hasn't been able to keep the strong gallberry tincture down, so Claire has rubbed a salve into her skin in attempt to cull the malaria.

Jamie cryptically asks Claire how many times he’s almost died. They count five instances together.

Jamie and Ian meet with Bird-Who-Sings-in-the-Morning (or Bird), a Cherokee village's war chief, and his brother, Still Water. Bird wants guns in trade from Jamie’s king. Jamie tells him it will be hard to get guns. Jamie brings up the burning of homesteader settlements and Bird stands up for his people’s right to defend themselves when the colonists encroach on their territory.

In the previous village that Jamie and Ian visited, Bird’s nephew happened to be there. Two young Cherokee women came to Jamie during that visit, an attempt to honor him by seducing him. Ian told the women that Jamie had a vision that he couldn’t lie with a woman until he brought guns to all of the Tsalagi (the native word for Cherokee).

After three weeks of helping the new families prepare for their move from River Run to Fraser’s Ridge, Roger feels anxious to come home. Duncan Innes, Jamie’s uncle (husband of Jocasta), tells him the story of his grandfather, a Covenanter (a Scottish defender of Presbyterianism) whose sister was “stakit to droon,” or executed by drowning at 18 years old. Duncan has a mustache, unusual for the time period, that hides a scar on his upper lip. Duncan tells Roger he had a debilitating cleft palate as a child. He would have died if it weren’t for a traveling healer who performed the necessary surgery on him. Roger wonders if this healer was another time traveler.

Roger finds Jem downstairs. Phaedre, another of Jocasta’s enslaved servants, comes to take Jem to bed. She tells Roger that a strange man was hiding in the barn and looking at Jem ominously, asking the boy who his father was before Phaedre took Jem away. The man was Stephen Bonnet, an Irishman and pirate who once raped Brianna and has a violent history with Roger. Roger suppresses his urge to go find Bonnet. He still has the responsibility to take the new Scots home to Fraser’s Ridge.