Drums of Autumn characters

Also known as Claire Fraser

Appears from the start

An eighteenth-century surgeon by necessity and a twentieth-century one by training, newly landed in the American colonies with nothing but her instruments and her husband. She is in her early fifties, blunt, and practised at making do, and she knows more than anyone alive about what is coming to this country in the next ten years.

Also known as James Fraser

Appears from the start

A Highland laird with no land, shipwrecked into the colonies and unwilling to go back to Scotland, where he is still a pardoned traitor with nothing to return to. Tall, red-haired, and used to holding other people's lives together, he is looking for somewhere his family can settle without swearing to anything he cannot keep.

Also known as Ian Murray the younger

Appears from the start

Jamie's teenaged nephew, long and loose-limbed, who has already survived kidnap and shipwreck and has no intention of being sent home to his mother in Scotland. Cheerful, curious, and reckless, he goes everywhere with his enormous half-wolf dog.

Appears from the start

The French orphan Jamie raised, now a married man with one hand and a great deal of nerve, making a life for himself and his wife in the colonies. Quick-witted and worldly, he handles negotiations that need charm more than force.

Appears from the start

A one-armed Highlander who served years alongside Jamie at Ardsmuir prison and was transported to the colonies afterward. Quiet, self-effacing, and steady, he attaches himself to the Frasers as a friend with nowhere else to be.

First appears in chapter 2

Young Ian's dog, a huge animal that is largely wolf, devoted to Ian and alarming to everyone else. He hunts, guards, and repeatedly proves the most useful member of any party he travels with.

First appears in chapter 2

An Irish adventurer awaiting execution in Charleston who talks his way into the Frasers' help and escapes the gallows. Handsome, well-spoken, and entirely without conscience, he treats other people as things that can be spent, and he does not forget where his luck came from.

First appears in chapter 5

Jamie's aunt, sister of the MacKenzie lairds he grew up under, a widow who has made herself one of the richest planters on the Cape Fear river. She is blind, formidable, and used to arranging other people's lives, and she has decided what part her Scottish nephew is going to play in hers.

First appears in chapter 5

The butler of River Run, an educated and highly capable enslaved man who runs the household and serves as his mistress's eyes, secretary, and memory. Impeccably composed in public, he holds a position of great responsibility and no freedom.

First appears in chapter 9

A vast, hairy, good-natured mountain man who lives easily among both settlers and the Cherokee and guides the Frasers into the back country. Frank about his own anatomy and everyone else's, he is a walking introduction to the people of the mountains.

First appears in chapter 16

An elderly Tuscarora healer and dreamer who recognises Claire as a fellow practitioner and something more, and who trades knowledge of the mountain plants with her. She speaks of Claire in terms Claire does not understand, and gives her a token to keep.

Also known as Bree

First appears in chapter 19

Claire's daughter, an engineering student in Boston in 1969, tall and red-haired and as stubborn as both her parents. She has let her mother go and is trying to build an ordinary life, complicated by her attachment to a Scottish historian who keeps disappearing back into the archives.

First appears in chapter 19

The Oxford historian who helped Claire find Jamie, now teaching in Scotland and, in his own time, still combing colonial records for traces of the Frasers. Careful and protective by instinct, he is in love with Brianna and unsure what to do about what he keeps finding.

First appears in chapter 32

A tiny, frightened Scottish bondservant girl of about fourteen, taken on as Brianna's maid for the crossing. Fiercely loyal to her mistress and prone to seasickness, fever and misreading situations, she takes it on herself to protect Brianna from what she believes she has understood.

First appears in chapter 42

An English nobleman and old friend of Jamie's from his prison years, now a Virginia planter and a widower raising his stepson. Courteous, worldly, and discreet about the obligations that bind him to the Fraser family, he turns up when the family is in difficulty and is willing to spend his own name to help.