Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

In fact, there is such a thing as a tesseract, both as a geometrical and a scientific concept: Putting it crudely, it’s a four-dimensional construct, in which the fourth dimension is time. And it’s used as a fictional device to bring two separate space/time lines together, obviating the linear time between them. Much more convenient than a clunky old time machine.

Now, it’s also a well-known fact that I stink at ages. I have only the vaguest general notion as to how old anyone in these stories is at any given point, I usually don’t know when their birthdays are, and I don’t really care. This drives both my copy editor and the more OCD-prone of my readers to distraction, and they Aren’t Going to Be Happy about this, but really, there’s no choice.

When I wrote The Scottish Prisoner, I randomly assigned ages to Hal’s and Minnie’s young sons, never thinking we’d see them again until they were adults (we have in fact seen all of them at one time or another as adults in An Echo in the Bone and in Written in My Own Heart’s Blood).

Now…I also noted in The Scottish Prisoner that Jamie Fraser had met Minnie prior to her marriage, in Paris, and that they had known each other in the context of the Jacobite plots of that time. That’s something of a plot point, has to do with both their characters and their subsequent actions, and so is important.

And I allowed Minnie to tell Lord John the circumstances of her marriage to his brother Hal. That’s also important, as indicating something of the relationships between Minnie and Hal and just why he calls on her for help in intelligence matters at various points in later stories.

So—those two facts are important. How old the kids are isn’t important.

But going back to tell more of Minnie and Hal’s backstory, naturally I wanted to include Minnie’s acquaintance with Jamie Fraser. Okay, that had to take place sometime in 1744, when the Frasers were in Paris, plotting away.

Minnie’s pregnancy and the impending birth of her first son, Benjamin, had much to do with the marriage between Minnie and Hal and with her feelings about it. Ergo, Benjamin has to have been conceived sometime in 1744.

As the more nitpicking sort of reader will have instantly realized, if Benjamin was conceived in 1744 and born in 1745—as he has to have been—then he can’t have been eight years old in 1760, when The Scottish Prisoner takes place. Only he was.

Obviously, the only way to reconcile Benjamin’s age—as well as those of his brothers, Henry and Adam—is to draw the logical conclusion that a tesseract occurred somewhere between the writing of The Scottish Prisoner and “A Fugitive Green,” and the boys will all be full-grown men next time we see them and it won’t matter. Luckily, I have full confidence in the mental ability of my Very Intelligent Readers to grasp this concept and enjoy the story without further pointless fretting.





Whale Painters


At one point, while contemplating the subtle color of her eau-de-nil dress, Minnie refers mentally to her acquaintance with a Mr. Vernet, who is a whale painter.

Whale painting was actually a thing in the eighteenth century: There was great demand for the production of romantically watery, adventurous paintings, and thus there were specialists in that production. Claude Joseph Vernet was a real historical artist whose profession consisted mostly of painting seascapes, many including whales. As such, he would also be a great expert in the delineation of water and its many colors and thus in a position to tell Minnie about the concept of “a fugitive green”—i.e., green paint at that time was made with a pigment given to fading out eventually, unlike the more robust and permanent blues and grays.

And of course you all understand the metaphorical allusion of the title. (I actually included M. Vernet in order to make it clear to readers who don’t speak French and don’t necessarily stop to Google unknown terms while reading that eau-de-nil is, in fact, a shade of green.)





BESIEGED





Jamaica

Early May 1762

LORD JOHN GREY DIPPED a finger gingerly into the little stone pot, withdrew it, glistening, and sniffed cautiously.

“Jesus!”

“Yes, me lord. That’s what I said.” His valet, Tom Byrd, face carefully averted, put the lid back on the pot. “Was you to rub yourself with that stuff, you’d be drawing flies in their hundreds, same as if you were summat that was dead. Long dead,” he added, and muffled the pot in a napkin for additional protection.

“Well, in justice,” Grey said dubiously, “I suppose the whale is long dead.” He looked at the far wall of his office. There were a number of flies resting along the wainscoting, as usual, fat and black as currants against the white plaster. Sure enough, a couple of them had already risen into the air, circling lazily toward the pot of whale oil. “Where did you get that stuff?”

“The owner of the Moor’s Head keeps a keg of it; he burns it in his lamps—cheaper nor even tallow candles, he says, let alone proper wax ones.”

“Ah. I daresay.” Given the usual smell of the Moor’s Head on a busy night, nobody would notice the stink of whale oil above the symphony of other reeks.

“Easier to come by on Jamaica than bear grease, I reckon,” Tom remarked, picking up the pot. “D’you want me to try it with the mint, me lord? It might help,” he added, with a dubious wrinkle of the nose.

Tom had automatically picked up the oily rag that lived on the corner of Grey’s desk and, with a dexterous flick, snapped a fat fly out of the air and into oblivion.

“Dead whale garnished with mint? That should cause my blood to be especially attractive to the more discriminating biting insects in Charles Town—to say nothing of Canada.” Jamaican flies were a nuisance but seldom carnivorous, and the sea breeze and muslin window screening kept most mosquitoes at bay. The swamps of coastal America, though…and the deep Canadian woods, his ultimate destination…

“No,” Grey said reluctantly, scratching his neck at the mere thought of Canadian deer flies. “I can’t attend Mr. Mullryne’s celebration of his new plantation house basted in whale oil. Perhaps we can get bear grease in South Carolina. Meanwhile…sweet oil, perhaps?”

Tom shook his head decidedly.

“No, me lord. Azeel says sweet oil draws spiders. They come and lick it off your skin whilst you’re asleep.”

Lord John and his valet shuddered simultaneously, recollecting last week’s experience with a banana spider—a creature with a leg span the size of a child’s hand—that had burst unexpectedly out of a ripe banana, followed by what appeared at the time to be several hundred small offspring, at a garden party given by Grey to mark his departure from the island and to welcome the Honorable Mr. Houghton Braythwaite, his successor as governor.

“I thought he’d have an apoplexy on the spot,” Grey said, lips twitching.

“Likely wishes he had.”

Grey looked at Tom, Tom at Grey, and they burst into suffocated snorts of laughter at the memory of the Honorable Mr. Braythwaite’s face on this occasion.

“Come, come,” Lord John said, getting himself under control. “This will never do. Have you—”