𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐭 | 𝐉𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐫 ✅

2 - The Highlander's Wife

16th April 1746

Eira Fraser's POV

I blamed Dougal MacKenzie entirely for enticing Jamie to the Jacobite cause. I didn't blame Claire, for she had tried to warn us about what the outcome of Culloden would be.

And as I watched from the window in mine and Jamie's bedroom - the Laird's bedroom - at Lallybroch, I found myself hating my dearly deceased uncle-in-law for sending his nephew and my husband, as well as thousands of other Highlanders to their dooms.

Nobody was going to walk off Culloden moor alive. Jamie had known that.

But I couldn't even bring myself to hate him for his decision to fight that day, because it was who he was. Jamie had provided men for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and he was not going to send his own men to the slaughter if he was not beside them.

I blamed Dougal MacKenzie entirely.

I sighed, blinking the tears away before I turned around and looked at Jenny, who had been watching me. She was holding her and Ian's youngest child in her arms, their daughter, Katherine, who was just a year old.

"He'll be home safe." She promised, "ye ken as well as I that he always comes back."

This was true. How many times in my relationship with James Fraser had he left and then come back, as promised? More than I cared to admit. I had always wanted a husband who would stay within ten miles of our home and me - not one who would go to war, to France, to even further North than Broch Tuarach... but that was not my Jamie.

"How are the children?" I asked, referring to Margaret, Jenny's eldest, and then my two; wee Jamie, named for his father, and Lily Ellen, named for her paternal grandmother.

"They're in the fields with Ian." She told me, going to sit in the armchair by the fire so she could nurse Kitty. "It's wet outside, so I've had Mrs Crook put some tea on for their return."

I had a feeling that Ian would be wanting something a little stronger than tea upon his return; one of the children by themselves was fine, but the three of them together tended to drive anybody crazy.

Wee Jamie was the eldest, born 1st February 1743, and then Margaret, Jenny and Ian's first child, had been born a few months later, in November 1743. On 17th September 1744, I had given birth to mine and Jamie's second child, Lillian Ellen. All three of them were so close that they may well have been siblings rather than cousins.

"Do ye think he's okay?" I asked her, "do ye think it's over yet?"

Neither of us knew the answer to my questions, but that didn't stop me from asking them.

"If anyone can make it home, it's him." What she had said was quite similar to her previous words. They did nothing to comfort either of us, but she said them anyway. In that moment, it was what we both needed - no, wanted - to hear.

Because if Jamie didn't come home...

I couldn't even think about it.

"The size of the Highland army against the British... surely they canna win?"

"They dinna have to win... and as horrible as it sounds, I dinna care about all those other men. I dinna even care about the Bonnie Prince, though I reckon half of Scotland would string me up for it - I just care about my brother."

She was right.

She always was.

There were only two types of people that she loved inexplicably; her brother and her children.