Seven years ago, Claire had disembarked from the airplane and had first stepped onto American soil at the tarmac in Boston. Claire had said Je suis prest to sturdy herself as Claire always did for any coming ordeal. At that moment, something crossed over in her mind. Claire had put a period, turned a page, finished a chapter, closed a book—whatever metaphor was necessary to go on and to just…endure.
In the intervening years, Claire had often wondered what it had all meant. Why was I chosen? What was I meant to accomplish? Why did I go back to that moment in time? Geillis had gone back further in time than Claire. Geillis had left in 1968 and arrived in Scotland a few years before her; she must have gone back 225 years or more. So why did Claire go back 202 years and then come forward 202 years? Claire couldn't reason out the underlying logic of it.
Was I supposed to change things? If so, was I now enduring the penalty for my failure? We couldn't succeed. Despite our best efforts, nothing had changed. Nothing discernible changed because she had gone back. From 1743 to 1746, she had killed people who would have lived and saved people who would have died and yet none of that legacy seemed to have carried forth unto today. And she felt sometimes she would go mad trying to make sense about alternate timelines and parallel universes and the like.
Was I supposed to know and yet fail like the Greek myth of Cassandra? Was she cursed to know all these future events and also the knowledge that all the warnings and advice were for nought?
Was I simply a messenger? Was I supposed to know the Highland way of life before it passed into history forever so that I could tell people how they lived and that through my stories, they would be able to live on? If so, Claire was failing miserably, because except for Mrs. Graham and Frank, Claire had told nobody. Not even her bonny red-haired lass knew anything about the Fraser clan, her land, or her heritage. When Claire eventually did tell Brianna, would she hate her? Claire had been able to preserve her daughter's life and her own by coming forward in time, but by doing so, Claire had denied her daughter Scotland, her birthright, and her true father.
During these last years as Claire watched her daughter getting older, she could feel the memories of those lost years, that lost life receding into shadow and the vibrant palette of the Scottish countryside and her Jamie were fading to gray.
Her life was busy most of the time—with Brianna and with study and those tasks often were sufficient to drive away her thoughts. However, at night Claire was lying alone in her bed or she would look up at the stars in the 1955 sky and remember sitting beneath those same constellations with Jamie, leaning back into his strong broad chest, by a roaring campfire. Those were the times that drove her to reflection, to melancholy, to mourning her great love.
Claire was now flying among the clouds and in an hour, they would land and Claire would step back onto British soil. Frank sat on the aisle and Brianna between them, a typical arrangement that worked best for the couple. Over the last years, they were far better as parents than as spouses and Claire had never found the ability nor the inclination to bridge the chasm that existed between them.
The Spring semester had ended a few days ago at Harvard and both Frank and Claire were on summer break from teaching and attending medical school. Claire had silently rebelled against the idea of returning to Britain and being a few hundred miles from the locations that had meant so much to her. The memories and the ghosts had been far easier to resist with thousands of miles of oceans between that bit of earth and her. However, Frank had insisted on going. He would not allow himself to remain in an imposed exile from his home country and he would not be separated from his daughter. He did nothing wrong in his mind and he would not be penalized or punished. And besides, he had wanted to take her little girl to the grand palaces and medieval castles of her fairy tales. So their travels would include day trips to Hampton Palace and the great castles in Leeds and Warwick. Brianna was coming to Britain with him for the summer he had decreed and therefore, by necessity and her adopted Fraser stubbornness, so was Claire.
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Frank had become accustomed to Claire's apathy for all things unrelated to Brianna and medicine and had set the trip itinerary himself. After they landed and Claire once again sturdied herself with the Fraser mantra, Frank informed her that they would spend several weeks in Oxford and Cambridge and then travel up to Edinburgh where he would work with a colleague. While there, he would take a one-week trip, by himself he had stressed, up to Inverness for some additional research there.
Claire battled internally at this pronouncement. Inverness would be difficult to see once more and it would perhaps send her mind on soul-searing trajectories—a happenstance that Claire definitely did not want Brianna to witness. Claire knew she possessed immense fortitude and mental strength, but humans were not meant to travel through time and she worried that at some point, the strain would break her. However, Claire recoiled at the announcement that she and Brianna would stay behind in Edinburgh. Claire was not one to be dictated to in any century and certainly not for the sake of Frank's likely motivations of insecurity.
So they had a row and Claire prevailed that Brianna and she would indeed accompany Frank to Inverness. In the aftermath of that row, she felt more like Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp than she had in years. She could feel the layers of 'Claire Randall' that she had morphed into while dwelling in America were falling away and that she was returning to her true self once more.
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Frank had extracted one promise from her before they had ventured north to Inverness—Claire was to stay far, far way from the stones at Craigh na Dun. Claire accepted. It was a fair concession on his part and it would have brought about unnecessary torture for her. Everyday that Claire lived in this noisy century without Jamie and that Brianna lived without knowing her true father was another day of shallow knife cuts. No need to inflict deep stab wounds on herself.
In the years since reappearing through the stones, pregnant and broken-hearted, Frank had remained the same as Claire had always described him. Frank was solid and kind; he was good to Brianna and her. The wounds Claire had inadvertently inflicted on him had never healed, Claire knew. Nevertheless he soldiered on as head of their family as one would expect of any Englishman and particularly an English veteran of World War II. And yet, Claire knew that this life they had now was one that they had reluctantly inherited—it wasn't one of their choosing.
Claire cared for him and she profoundly wished for a way to stop hurting him. However, the inertia that prevented them from fully discussing those lost years also prevented them from ever fully reestablishing themselves as a couple. And Claire, as much as Frank, soldiered on.
And yet, as the train rolled north into the Highlands, Claire began to worry that this journey to Inverness was a disastrous mistake as a low buzzing sound that only she could hear began to build.