Outlander Book Club: The Fiery Cross chapter 73 breakdown
Just the Outlander chapter
After Claire gives us the run-down about how she’s in Hillsborough and where she’s staying, we get a chance to hear about Tryon’s actions. Jamie is still angry, and if it wasn’t for Tryon being who he was, Jamie would have killed him for the mistake. Tryon defends himself by saying the Regulators are traitors and not soldiers of war, so he didn’t need to hear Roger’s story.
However, it’s later clear that Tryon knows the mistake he made is inexcusable. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have sent the 5,000-acre land grant as an apology for almost killing Jamie’s son-in-law.
Jamie and Claire need to figure out how the mistake was made, though. They know that someone claimed Roger was James McQuiston. This is a name Jamie knows as a minor leader of the Regulators, but it turns out that nobody knows this man by face. It could be an assumed name to protect the man’s real identity.
It was no wonder that Roger was so easily assumed to be him. If nobody knew what McQuiston looked like, why would anyone question his real identity?
Jamie and Claire ask Roger for details about the mistake because Jamie is sure that it wasn’t the Browns who did this. Roger knows the name of one of the men who lied, and through charades, he gets the answer out to the Frasers. It takes some time, but Claire and Jamie learn that Buck was one of the men responsible.
Jamie isn’t sure what to do with that information. While Buck was the son of Geillis, he was also the son of Dougal. That means he’s family to Jamie, and Jamie can’t kill his family; not after what happened to Dougal. Jamie has no choice but to think on the matter.
Later in the chapter, we see Brianna painting. She’s doing a portrait of a dead soldier at Alamance, and she thinks about how treating the soldiers on the battlefield didn’t affect her that much. Maybe it’s that she didn’t get to know the people.
When she visits Roger, she makes sure she stores up stories to tell throughout the day. It’s difficult talking to him when he can’t talk back. One of the things she tells him is that he has a land grant as an apology. What will they do with it? That’s still to come.