Outlander Book Club: An Echo in the Bone Chapter 46 breakdown
Just the Outlander chapter
The chapter starts with Brianna at Pitlochry Dam in a room looking out at the chamber. She is thinking about her parents. Due to the letters, she knows that somehow Claire and Jamie will survive Fort Ticonderoga, but she doesn’t know how. Why doesn’t she just read the rest of the letters?
While thinking about her parents, Rob Cameron turns up speaking Gaelic. Brianna understands him, and now Rob notes that it is her who has the Gaelic. He thought so. Now he wants to know who her father was and what his clan name is. Why would he want to know these things?
After this, we move on to Roger, who is making notes about ley lines and time travel. He uses theories from both Claire and Brianna to figure out how time travel is possible. He’s writing everything in a book, making something for his descendants.
Something that I love is how Roger is writing with a fountain pen and ink rather than a ballpoint pen. Why the fountain pen? I’ll get to my thoughts there in the foreshadowing section.
The topic of Geillis’s notebooks come up. Roger makes a remark about a footnote, but will he summarize Geillis’s notebooks or leave them in full? Leaving them in full leads to opening everyone up to Geillis’s madness. It’s clear there are also thoughts of how the madness could have a knock-on effect on the whole family. Is this something everyone in the family will suffer from?
Brianna comments on how he and Geillis have so many generations between them. This isn’t something to be concerned about just yet.
There are other connections to the past. It’s all about the songs, hymns, and incantations. Roger discusses how they could be linked to time travel, but what they could also mean. There’s also this connection to Roger’s voice, and Brianna brings that up. She apologizes for the loss of his voice.
It doesn’t take long for the topic to move back to the songs. Rob Cameron had brought up Roger’s singing, and Rob is interested in the songs Roger sang. It continues to suggest that Rob is up to something, that he knows something more. This is plot development rather than foreshadowing, so I won’t bring it up in the next section. It’s clear that he is a threat to the MacKenzies.