Dragonfly in Amber characters

Also known as Claire Fraser, Claire Beauchamp

Appears from the start

A former combat nurse, now a physician in her late forties, who returns to Inverness in 1968 with her grown daughter, two years after her husband Frank's death. Twenty years earlier she vanished for three years and came back with a story nobody would believe. Blunt, capable, and long practised at keeping her own counsel, she has come north to learn the fate of the Highland men she left behind in 1746, and to finally tell her daughter the truth about where she was.

Also known as Bree

Appears from the start

Claire's twenty-year-old daughter, raised in Boston and now a student, tall and strikingly red-haired. Practical and stubborn like her mother, she is grieving the father who brought her up and is bewildered by her mother's sudden determination to dig through Scottish records for a group of men dead two centuries.

Appears from the start

A young Oxford historian, adopted son of the late Reverend Reginald Wakefield of Inverness, who is clearing out the manse after his guardian's funeral when Claire and her daughter arrive. Dark-haired, even-tempered, and a fine singer, he has a scholar's appetite for old papers and agrees to trace what became of a company of Highlanders after the rising of 1745.

Appears from the start

Claire's husband, a Cambridge historian who died two years before her 1968 return to Scotland. His lifelong research into his own eighteenth-century ancestry shadowed their marriage, and he and Claire built a careful life in Boston around a subject they did not discuss.

Also known as James Fraser

First appears in chapter 6

A young Highland laird living in exile in France in 1744, tall and red-haired, still carrying the scars of what was done to him in Scotland. Married to Claire and outlawed at home, he works in his cousin's wine business in Paris while the two of them try to head off the Jacobite rising they know will end in disaster. Shrewd, stubborn, and better educated than his rough life suggests, he is uneasy at scheming against a cause many of his own kin hold sacred.

First appears in chapter 6

Jamie's godfather, a small, weathered, and famously taciturn Highlander who has followed him into exile. Loyal past all argument and dangerous when roused, he serves as bodyguard, messenger, and blunt conscience to the household in France.

First appears in chapter 6

Jamie's older cousin, a Scottish wine merchant long established in Paris, prosperous, shrewd, and quietly sympathetic to the exiled Stuarts. He hands his house and much of his business over to Jamie while he travels, which gives the couple both money and a foothold in the city's political circles.

First appears in chapter 7

A wealthy French nobleman and wine importer whose ship Claire condemns as carrying smallpox, costing him an entire cargo. Elegant, vain, and vengeful, he is rumoured to keep company with people who dabble in the occult, and he treats the loss as a personal insult to be repaid.

Also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, Prince Charles Edward Stuart

First appears in chapter 10

The exiled Stuart heir, a personable, devout, and impulsive young man convinced that God and his own birthright will restore his father to the British throne. He is chronically short of money and long on confidence, and he seeks out Jamie as a Highlander who might help him raise both funds and men.

First appears in chapter 11

A small French street orphan and gifted pickpocket, taken out of a brothel by Jamie and set to lifting and copying private correspondence. Cheerful, quick, and fiercely attached to the man who took him in, he becomes a fixture of the household.

First appears in chapter 11

A squat, odd-looking Paris apothecary whose crowded shop sells herbs, charms, and curiosities to duchesses and cutpurses alike. He knows a great deal more about medicine, poisons, and Claire herself than he readily explains, and he becomes her supplier, her teacher, and something close to a friend.

First appears in chapter 12

The formidable nun who runs L'Hopital des Anges, a Paris charity hospital, with absolute authority and no patience for squeamishness. A trained musician of some reputation before she took orders, she is accompanied everywhere by a large dog and quickly recognises that the English lady volunteering on her wards has real skill.

First appears in chapter 15

A timid, sheltered English girl of fifteen brought to Paris by her uncle and betrothed against her wishes to a much older French nobleman. Claire recognises her name from a family tree she once studied and takes an interest in her that she cannot explain to anyone.

First appears in chapter 16

A gentle, scholarly young Englishman in poor health, employed as secretary to an English duke visiting France. He is the younger brother of Jonathan Randall, and as unlike him as a man can be; his presence is the first proof Claire and Jamie have that the captain they believed dead is alive.

Also known as Black Jack Randall

First appears in chapter 17

The English dragoon captain who tortured Jamie at Wentworth Prison and hunted Claire in the Highlands, alive after all and serving in France on his patron's business. Cold, controlled, and predatory, he is the one man Jamie has sworn to kill, and the one man Claire has reason to need kept alive.

First appears in chapter 15

A rich, genial English nobleman with estates on both sides of the border, a taste for young men, and a habit of promising support to whichever cause looks likeliest to win. Jamie has dealt with him before and trusts nothing he says.

First appears in chapter 36

War chief of clan MacKenzie and one of the most committed Jacobites in the Highlands, forceful, charming, and openly hungry for the fight he has spent years preparing. He greets the rising as the moment he has waited his whole life for, and he does not care to hear that it might fail.