Outlander Book Club: An Echo in the Bone Chapter 58 breakdown
Just the Outlander chapter
The chapter starts with John with his nephew and Mercy Woodcock. He learns that Henry is considered a good prisoner, and it’s clear that Henry is a prisoner of war. Mercy is a rebel, and that makes her an unworthy partner for Henry. There’s also the problem of the fact that she’s married, and John isn’t too impressed with her attention on Henry when she is still married.
He really doesn’t like this woman. He’s worried about the scandal that she brings to the family.
He doesn’t have much time to think about this, though. They need a surgeon for Henry, and Dr. Franklin has introduced him to Dr. Benjamin Rush. John realizes that the two doctors are rebels, and due to his connection to Franklin, many seem to assume that he is also a rebel. They are warm to him because of his connection to Franklin.
This is when John runs into Percy Wainwright. It’s time to get some information from Percy, which is when we learn that Percy is looking for Fergus, who he believes is Amelie Beauchamp’s child. He shares that Amelie died 40 years ago in a brothel, and Percy believes that Fergus was the boy and is now a printer and the adopted son of Jamie Fraser.
We get a little bit of detail about her life, including how her father petitioned the “Comte” to marry her. However, Amelie disappeared with no word to anyone. Percy would eventually find a marriage contract between Amelie and the Comte St. Germain. Percy wasn’t going to approach the Comte when he found the contract, and the Comte died or disappeared 10 years after Amelie did. The Comte had a reputation as a sorcerer.
A lot of this is stuff that we know. We know what happened to the Comte, and we can read one of Diana Gabaldon’s short stories to get the truth about the Comte being a time traveler. This just adds so much more to Fergus’s story, and it leaves us wondering about who Fergus is really connected to. Is he a time traveler, too?
At the end of the chapter, John asks about Denys Randall-Issacs. The question about Denys throws Percy off-guard for a second. It’s long enough for John to figure out that Denys (and likely Richardson) is probably a rebel.