Yes, there’s quite a lot of Book Ten written, but a) as I don’t write in a straight line, a good many of the extant parts aren’t (yet) connected to other pieces that provide necessary structure or content, and b) if they were, I wouldn’t be posting them anyway, as I don’t mean to give away important bits. So yes, this is (clearly) a small chunk from the early part of the book, but I’m pretty sure you haven’t seen it (or most of it) before.
Context/Background:
I’ll be teaching at the Surrey Intl. Writers Conference (again!) this October, 2024 (that’s Surrey, British Columbia, not the one in the U.K.), and the two topics I’ll be dealing with are “Focus” and “Endings”. I think I may use these two consecutive/connected scenes as examples of one or both of those concepts.
[Endings are important—but there are a lot of endings in a book, besides the one on the final page. Paragraphs have endings; scenes have endings, chapters have endings, etc. So I’ll come back tomorrow and do an annotated version, explaining what/why the various endings are and how they work—and maybe a few notes on Focus (how do you make the reader look where/when you want?). But that’s for tomorrow; it’s pretty late tonight and it’s been a couple of exciting days.]
EXCERPTS from BOOK TEN (Untitled), Copyright © 2024 Diana Gabaldon.
[In which Jamie goes to tell Young Ian what’s up, regarding William’s advent and his news about Lord John.]
Jamie made his way slowly uphill through the remnants of yesterday’s—and last night’s—wedding celebrations. Most of those who had slept under bushes and trees had likely managed to get up at dawn and go home to feed their beasts and their bairns, but he passed a big flowering dogwood whose delicate white flowers had fallen on a belated pair of feet and legs, these naked, hairy, and exposing clean but very callused soles.
From the size of the feet, he suspected that their possessor was either Sean MacHugh or John Quincy Meyers, and as he couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which MacHugh’s wife would not have dragged him out by the ears long since for breakfast and chores, he approached and squatted down, meaning to find Meyers’s shoes and breeks for him before he woke tne man.
This kindly intention was interrupted by the sound of snoring from beneath the dogwood. Two sets of snoring.
Moving much more cautiously, he duck-walked slightly closer and bent to peer beneath the foliage. Meyers’s companion was curled up peacefully beside him. She was also naked. And hairy.
“Why, ye wee Jezebel!” he said. Bluebell stirred, lifted her long nose off Meyers’s shirt-clad stomach and yawned luxuriously, long pink tongue curling. She stretched and came to him, slowly wagging. To his great surprise, she had another companion, who had been curled up behind her substantial blue-tick bulk, but who now looked up with a sleepily inquiring “Yeowf?”
“And what, for the love of God, are you doin’ here?” Jamie demanded.
“Sleepin’,” said Meyers, opening one bleary eye. “Or I was until you started talkin’.”
“Not you, a charadh,” Jamie said, and reached to tweak Meyers’s shirt down into respectability. “Him.” He pointed at the big gray puppy. Skènnen was nearly as big as Bluebell, and him not even a year old. Fully awake now, the dog scrambled to his enormous feet and lunged out to have his ears scratched.
“Mmm. I recollect somebody warm layin’ down beside me in the middle of the night. I wasn’t particular about who it was, long as they didn’t want to talk.” Meyers wriggled slowly out from under the dogwood’s branches and sat up. He scrubbed a hand through his nest of gray-streaked hair, then scratched himself in a meditative manner. “You know this fella, do ye?”
“I do.” Jamie pulled the dog closer, examining him for damage. “He belongs to wee Oggy—Young Ian’s lad, aye?”
“Oh. Reckon he came down wi’ the family, then, and got lost on the way back.”
“Aye, I suppose so.” The dog was uninjured and now awake, was licking Jamie’s face with enthusiasm. “Down, a cu—down, I said!” Skènnen was fine, but something else wasn’t. The sun was high. Why weren’t Rachel and Oggy looking for the dog?
“Did ye see—well, no, ye wouldna, I suppose. Madainn mhath, then, a charadh.” He eased himself up onto his feet and patted his thigh to summon the dogs. “Go down to the house for your breakfast, aye? I’ll take this wee fellow home.”
[end section]
He met his sister, half a mile from the Murrays’ cabin and looking worried. Her brow lightened a bit when she saw him, and further when she spotted the dog.
“There ye are, ye wee gomerel!” The puppy barked happily at sight of her and charged uphill. Jenny intercepted him before he could leap on her skirt with his muddy paws, and firmly shoved him down, grabbing his scruff and rubbing his ear while he squirmed with delight and tried to lick her hands. “What are ye doing wi’ him?” she asked the dog, waving a hand in Jamie’s direction. “And what have ye done wi’ your master, eh?”
“His master? Young Ian, ye mean?”
“I do.” She craned her neck to look round him, in obvious hope that Ian was behind him. “He hasna come home yet. Rachel’s heavin’ her guts out wi’ morning sickness and Oggy wanted his wee cu, so I thought the hound must be wi’ Ian and best I come down and dig them out of wherever they’d slept last night.”
Jamie felt a tickle of unease between his shoulders.
“That’s what I was meaning to do, as well. I found the dog sleepin’ wi’ Meyers, but I havena seen hide nor hair of Young Ian.”
Jenny raised one sleek black brow. “When did ye see him last?”
Every woman he knew said this when something was lost. He gave Jenny a look meant to suggest that he didn’t think this any more helpful than the last thousand times he’d heard it. He answered, though.
“Yesterday, after the wedding, dancin’ wi’ Silvia Hardman and Patience—Higgins, I mean. Maybe an hour before…” He stopped abruptly. He’d been about to say, “Before William”, but didn’t want to be side-tracked into a discussion about William right now. Jenny, Rachel and Oggy had left the festivities early; Rachel was feeling peely-wally and his sister needed to milk her goats. Had the news reached them?
No, he thought, keenly aware of his sister’s eyes, fixed with interest on his face. If she kent about him, it’s the first thing she would ha’ said to me.
And she’ll kill me if I dinna tell her about it now, he concluded.
“My son’s come,” he said abruptly. “William.”
Her face went blank for a second, and then went through such a flurry of expressions that he couldn’t follow it all. The end of it was a look of pure joy, though, and his throat went thick at sight of it. She laughed out loud, and he smiled, shy about his own feelings.
“Did he come armed?” she asked then, a slight tinge of doubt in her voice.
“Aye, but not for me,” he assured her. “He.. ehm… wants my help. He says.”
“To do what?” she asked warily. “Help him steal a bride?”
The matter-of-factness of the question made him laugh.
“I wish that was the way of it,” he said. “No, his—I mean, Lord John—has been taken, and William wants my help to get him back safe.”
“Ach, so that’s why ye want Young Ian.” She glanced down at Skènnen, who had got down and was nosing under a big mountain laurel bush. “I doubt yon wee dug’s any sort of a tracker—at least not yet—but ye might take him along. If ye get anywhere close to Young Ian, the dug will go for him.”
They both turned their heads to look at the sun. Half-two, maybe. Plenty of daylight left.
“Can I tell Rachel?” Jenny asked, and he could see her eagerness, the news beginning to fizz inside her. “She cares for him, ken. William.”
“I do, and ye can,” he said, smiling, and clicked his tongue at the dog. “Come along, a cu.”
[end section]
Read more excerpts released so far on my official Book Ten (Untitled) webpage.
Photo is of a White Dogwood (there are red dogwoods, too, but the white is more common where Jamie et al live). Credit: Eric Hunt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The excerpts on this page were released here and on my official Facebook page on July 16, 2024.