Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 1 breakdown
Just the Outlander chapter
We actually start with a prologue. Claire narrates it, telling us how she used to refuse to step in puddles, thinking of them as bottomless. It’s an interesting thought that links back to the first book and the chapter with the waterhorse. This is the point she wonders if there’s a portal at the bottom of the loch.
We then move onto the actual chapter set on April 16, 1746.
Jamie wakes on the battlefield at Culloden. He’s sure he must be dead, but he’s in pain. He starts to wonder if he’s gone to hell. Or maybe he’s in purgatory. All he knows is that he has to be dead.
It’s only when he starts to listen to the sounds around him that he realizes that he isn’t dead. And he starts to pray that Claire got to her own time safely. She may be stuck somewhere in the passage between time periods, and that’s not something he can bear to think about.
As Jamie starts to realize that he isn’t dead, he thinks about how he can’t feel his left leg. Has he lost it? No, it’s because there’s a body on top of him. That body is Black Jack Randall’s, and Jamie starts to get flashbacks of the fight, but he realizes that he doesn’t remember too much of it. He’ll remember more with time, if he gets that time.
He manages to get Randall’s body off him, but that leads to blood flowing from his leg. He’s been seriously injured, and he’s on the verge of being killed by the infection if he isn’t killed sooner.
Later, a man named MacDonald gets him off the battlefield. They get to a shed, where they’re waiting out the British. Of course, there is no escape. The British soldiers are out there looking for anyone who ran from the battlefield. Jamie is sure that Murtagh died, but he hopes that the Lallybroch men had made it far enough away to get back to their families without suspicion from the British.
The British Army turns up at the shed, announcing that everyone will be killed as traitors. However, they won’t be hanged. They’ll be shot as soldiers, giving them some dignity. MacDonald tries to get two kids off the charges due to their ages, but Hal Grey isn’t going to accept that.
It eventually gets to Jamie who is to be shot. When Hal learns of Jamie’s name, he makes sure it’s the same James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser as who saved John Grey’s life. Jamie doesn’t remember the younger Grey at first, but eventually, it all comes back to him. Jamie doesn’t want to live, though.
Hal doesn’t care. He needs to serve the debt to the family, which means arranging for a wagon to be brought to the shed. He can then send Jamie to Lallybroch, sure that Jamie will die on the way, anyway. At least blood won’t be on Hal’s hands.