Outlander Book Club: An Echo in the Bone Chapter 64 breakdown

Just the Outlander chapter

The chapter starts with a man coming to Claire’s tent. He would like to trade something for cinchona bark, also known as Jesuit bark. Claire wonders if he has malaria, but he shares that it is for someone else. He has a box of all sorts to trade, with much of it being silks, laces, etc. Claire isn’t interested in anything but the laudanum, and she quickly explains that she uses it for pain management.

This does lead to an interesting conversation about doctors who know their limits. Jamie joins in with the conversation, as the man wonders whether by admitting limits that people wouldn’t strive to be greater. I get the sense this is indicating to why he ends up turning his coat.

It’s at the end of the chapter that Claire finds out she was talking to Benedict Arnold. She is shocked to realize that she likes the man, and she shares as much as she can with Jamie. However, she didn’t pay a lot of attention to Bree’s history books, so doesn’t know everything about the man.

Jamie says that he will keep an eye on Arnold. Maybe he can stop the man from turning to the British, but Claire doesn’t want them to stop this. They’re not trying to change history, and they saw some of the damage of trying to change history at Culloden. There are to many things at threat here, so they need to let Benedict Arnold become the turncoat that we know him as.

I love this moment. As much as we’ve seen that these big events can’t be changed, we also see Claire not wanting to even put anything to the test. They need America to become America. Otherwise, what would have happened to the country?