Outlander Book Club: Book 2, Chapter 47 breakdown

Just the Outlander chapter

We pick up with Claire finishing her story. Claire has wrapped it up to where she knows about Jamie, wanting to believe that he made it to Culloden and got to die where he wanted.

However, she reveals a few truths that a daughter definitely doesn’t want to hear. Claire hated Bree while pregnant with her. All Claire wanted to do was die with Jamie, and she couldn’t because she was pregnant with Brianna. She had to follow through with the promise to Jamie, to raise their daughter.

It was after Brianna’s birth that Claire was able to connect to her. No wonder Brianna reacted the way she did.

Brianna’s fiery personality came out in this chapter. Refusing to believe that Jamie is her father—Frank raised her, wanted her, and loved her—she throws a poker out of the window and storms off. Roger is left picking up the pieces, but he doesn’t know what to say.

Claire doesn’t either, but she does have a reason for Roger to learn the story too. She knows that Roger is the direct ancestor of Geillis Duncan and Dougal MacKenzie. She points exactly where on the family tree Reverend Wakefield understandably got things wrong. Claire also notes that Roger has Geillis’s eyes.

Now Roger needs to make a choice. Claire wonders whether she should stop Geillis from going through the stones to where she’ll surely meet her death.

Could it mean Roger won’t be born? Nobody can really say. Would he disappear before everyone’s eyes if they manage to change things? Possibly but possibly not. Roger decides he can’t let Geillis go back to the past to die, though.

There is an inconsistency with the first Outlander book, though. Claire says that Dougal told her “One. Nine. Six. Eight.” In the first book, it was a seven not an eight.