Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 33 breakdown
Just the Outlander chapter
We start the chapter with Jamie and Claire now in their room together at Lallybroch. It takes place no long after the beating, and Jamie’s butt cheeks are red. It makes Claire comment that he looks like a baboon, something that Jamie hasn’t heard of.
It’s easy to overlook what would have been known or not back then. I’m so glad Diana Gabaldon puts some of these bits and pieces into the story, and it’s used by the writers on the show some of the time if it works for the overall story.
After clarifying what a baboon looks like, Claire then questions whether it will make a difference to Young Ian. Is he just going to run off again?
Jamie doesn’t think so. Young Ian didn’t like giving the beating. He’ll take one every time and do it again, but he didn’t like what Jamie had him do. That helped to make it clear he can’t do this again.
Young Ian has the Fraser stubbornness. However, it is balanced somewhat with the Murray patience, and we see that now and again. When it comes to running away, it’s all stubbornness and Jamie knew how to counter that.
The chapter moves on to Claire asking Jamie about him being hunted. He knows what it’s like because of what happened at Ardsmuir. This is when he tells her about the “Frenchman’s gold,” which Duncan Kerr had rambled about.
Jamie thought Claire was the white witch. He had to escape to see if she was on the island that Duncan had mentioned. He had this last bit of hope to find her, but it wasn’t easy getting there. At one point, he was going to give up and let the current taken him and kill him, but he heard his mom’s voice. She got him to an undercurrent that took him to the island he needed to get to.
Claire wasn’t there, though. There was some gold, though. It wasn’t the bullion that Louis would have sent from France. It was made up of gemstones and old coins—very old coins.
Claire doesn’t think too much of this. She’s too focused on Jamie’s story, but the mention of gemstones should have made her think about someone else: Geillis. I’ll get to that in the foreshadowing.
In the end, Jamie decided to return to main land and turned himself into the English. There was no way he would let the English burn down the houses around Ardsmuir to find him. And they would have headed to Lallybroch, so he wasn’t going to risk there. The English would have assumed he had the French’s gold.
Jamie also notes that the men at Ardsmuir needed him. He’d become their chief in there, and he wasn’t going to leave them.
It was an honorable decision to make. We continue to see that he will sacrifice himself for the sake of others. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if his actions caused the deaths of many others.
After a night of lovemaking, Claire wakes to see three women riding toward Lallybroch. Oh yes, this is important. Claire doesn’t mention it to Jamie and maybe she should have because they’re interrupted by “Daddy?”