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Voyager, by Diana Gabaldon
Chapter 13 - Midgame

We are back in Inverness, June 2, 1968.

Roger finds Claire in the morning asleep on the study sofa surrounded by scattered papers. He notices the light from the window flickering among the strands of her hair and is reminded that she has a glass face in more ways than one. As he takes inventory of her ivory face to her exposed shoulder, he notices a crumpled sheet of paper against her body.

He extracts the paper and knows that she has found it “James MacKenzie Fraser”. “I don’t know who you were, mate, but you must have been something, to deserve her.”

He darkens the room and starts straightening out the papers when he sees the file marked “Ardsmuir”. He now has a place to focus his search.

As he shuts the door, Brianna comes down the stairs. “Got Him” he whispers and she smiles ‘as bright as the rising sun outside.”


A short chapter but one loaded with discovery. These three characters have had a major breakthrough in their research and their reactions tell a lot about each one.

Claire falls into an exhausted sleep
Roger cleans up the mess
Brianna lights up like the sun outside

Why midgame for a title? I’m still trying to figure that one out a little. Any thoughts on that because all of the titles mean something. Surely not just because it is the middle of the story/research?

I assumed it was midgame because it was a turning point in the middle of their research and now they need to figure out how to find out what happened to Jamie after Ardsmuir. I suppose there could be more to it than that, but I took it pretty much at face value. I just googled "Midgame" and it seems to be a chess term. I looked at this link: http://www.finitechess.com/midgame.htm. Since chess has come up (Jamie and John play) and Torremolinos Gambit was the title a couple of chapters earlier, I assume DG is kind of imagining the whole search as a sort of chess match and this is the middle (midgame) section. Or something like that.

I thought it was interesting that Claire chose to keep the information about finding Jamie to herself for a while rather than waking Brianna and Roger. She needed her private moment with Jamie, as it were. Roger seems to be very much in a caretaking role when he cleans up the mess like earlier in Dragonfly when she collapsed after seeing Jamie's grave stone. It's sweet that Brianna was so happy and excited that they got a step closer to finding him too.

I've always wondered about Bree's feelings about Jamie at this point. I imagine her reaction on hearing who her real Da was was very normal under the circumstances (or not! I am the offspring of a man who died over a hundred years before I was born!!!??? ) yup! Anyhoo it would be interesting to know how she finally breached that chasm! At this point she is pretty happy about the result of their search.

I think Bree and Roger were also quite wrapped up in the search and were undoubtedly excited to have made that breakthrough in finding him. Which is to say that part of their reaction was because they made progress on their puzzle. I don't mean that in a bad way, but neither of them had ever met Jamie and I suspect that it was still a little difficult to wrap their heads around the situation, so it (or really he) wasn't as real to them as to Claire. [Did that make sense?]

Kinda... sorta! I was thinking in a more personal sense though. I think I remember in the beginning when Claire told her about her real father she was most upset about it, stating that Frank was her father and that her mother just did not know what she was saying etc. I guess I can understand that not knowing Jamie nor having met him, it was somewhat 'not real' (??) but still, having 'found' him to have existed sans the whole 17thC bit, I would imagine she was more than a little bit curious about him... about herself.

For me, Brianna's reaction is sort of like when you find personal diaries or letters or something from a close relative that died (like a parent or grandparent). You don't see them as "real" but it's exciting to see their names and what they were doing. This has to be a thrill like no other. Jamie is starting to materialize before her eyes. He's no longer this phantom figment of Claire's imagination. The proof is building that yes he existed and now she knows as much about him as Claire since they are both tracing him post-Culloden together. The researcher in Roger must be screaming. To experience this together (Brianna and Roger) has to be drawing them into one another and connecting them.

Ah! A wonderful image of my lovely Claire asleep from exhaustion and the satisfaction of achieving a goal.

Midgame indeed. Previously, we had reason to believe that Jamie survived Culloden, and we had the story of the Dunbonnet and the Leap O' the Cask. Now, we have an historical document that positively identifies him. This is a major achievement that deserves its own - brief - chapter.

Can you blame Claire for enjoying her find alone as she succumbs to the reward of sleep? After all, she can share her find in the morning.

I love the discussion about Roger as caretaker. We previously discussed how people fill roles as needed in life. Roger is very much caretaker to these women who are becoming very important in his life.

As for Bree, I think that she is getting comfortable with the relatively recent news that she is Jamie's daughter (even though we read a lot of pages to get to this point in their story line).