Outlander Book Club: Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade Chapter 4 breakdown

It’s clear that there is a scandal around the Grey family, and it has nothing to do with John. We learn what it is in Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade Chapter 4.

The Lord John books give us a chance to know more about the Grey family as well as about Lord John alone. In the later Outlander books, Hal goes by the title Duke of Pardloe, but he doesn’t like it in the novellas. Why is that? Well, it’s time for us to find out.

We also see John and Percy grow closer, and I find this so important to understand everything when Percy turns up in the Outlander books. Sometimes, I do think there’s a flaw in the Outlander books relying on us reading the Lord John books to really get Percy.

Breaking down Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade Chapter 4

The chapter starts with Lord John going to meet Percy. While walking, he thinks about Geneva and Helwater. As he thinks of Jamie’s face, that’s when he realizes that he’s more excited to go to Helwater for him than he is to help the Dunsany family.

When he meets Percy, there is some social chitchat. Percy then asks if John frequents Lavender House regularly. The two decide to leave the coffee shop they are in and take a walk around Hyde Park. This gives Percy a chance to apologize for calling Hal “Duke.”

John realizes that Percy needs to understand the Grey family history. The Grey brothers’ father, Gerald, was the Earl of Melton and then given the title Duke of Pardloe after helping to take down the 1715 Jacobite Rising. It turned out that some of Gerald’s friends were Jacobites in the 1740s and they named Gerald as one of their co-conspirators.

Gerald took his own life before an arrest warrant could be drawn up. The only reason the lands and titles weren’t taken under a Bill of Attainder is because Prime Minister Robert Warpole was Gerald’s godfather.

Hal decided to clear the Grey name by leading Gerald’s former regiment in the 1745 Uprising. Benedicta doesn’t want to destroy Hal’s success in fixing the family name, so she uses the Dowager Countess of Melton as her title. Lord John Grey shares that he still chooses to go by the title Lord despite Hal renouncing the Duke of Pardloe title. Does this hint at the reason for a disconnect between the two brothers?

Could this chapter be used in a TV series adaptation?

It’s hard to say if this chapter will be used or not. In a way, it needs to be. We need to see the Grey family history since it plays such an important part in this story. However, there’s a lot of information dropping at once. It could end up being spread out in the story, told through a different method as information about Gerald comes up.

TV shows don’t work with a lot of information dropped at once for the sake of it. We need it pieced into the story so that it makes a little more sense, especially with so little time to tell a story on TV compared to a book.