Drums of Autumn recap

Shipwrecked into the American colonies, Jamie and Claire refuse a rich inheritance from Jamie's aunt at her slave-worked plantation and take a land grant in the North Carolina mountains instead, founding Fraser's Ridge. In 1969, Roger finds a newspaper notice recording that James and Claire Fraser died in a fire on that Ridge in 1776, and hides it from Brianna. She finds it herself, follows her mother through the standing stones to warn them, and Roger goes after her. In Wilmington the two quarrel and part after handfasting; that same night Brianna is raped by Stephen Bonnet, a pirate the Frasers once helped escape hanging. Arriving pregnant at the Ridge, she cannot say whose the child is. Her young maid misidentifies Roger as the man who attacked her, and Jamie beats him and lets Young Ian sell him to the Mohawk. When the mistake comes to light, Jamie and Claire go north to buy him back, and Ian trades himself for Roger's freedom. Roger returns, claims Brianna's newborn son as his own, and the two are married.

Previously, in the Outlander books: Claire Randall travelled from 1945 to 1743 through the standing stones at Craigh na Dun, married the Highlander Jamie Fraser, and failed with him to prevent the Jacobite rising. On the eve of Culloden he sent her back to her own century pregnant, expecting to die in the battle; Claire returned to her first husband, Frank Randall, who raised their daughter Brianna as his own, and became a surgeon in Boston. Twenty years later, after Frank's death, Claire told Brianna the truth, and the historian Roger Wakefield found proof that Jamie had survived Culloden. Jamie in fact lived through the battle, hid for years as an outlaw, spent more years in Ardsmuir prison, and fathered a son he cannot acknowledge while paroled to an English estate. Claire went back through the stones and found him in Edinburgh, a printer and smuggler, and had to work through a marriage he had made in her absence. Chasing his kidnapped nephew Young Ian to the West Indies, the family confronted Geillis Duncan, another traveller, whom Claire killed; a hurricane then wrecked their ship and cast them ashore on the coast of Georgia, in the American colonies.

In 1767 the Frasers are in Charleston, without money or land, watching an old friend from Jamie's prison years hang for theft. At the gaol they meet another condemned man, an Irishman named Stephen Bonnet, and help him get free of his irons and out of the city, largely because Jamie will not leave a man to hang if he can prevent it. The party, Jamie, Claire, Young Ian, Fergus, Duncan Innes and the dog Rollo, travels inland by river toward Cross Creek and Jamie's aunt. On the water they are boarded at night by river pirates led by Bonnet, who robs them of the gemstones that are all their capital and takes Claire's wedding ring from her first husband. Claire manages to keep Jamie's ring hidden. They arrive at River Run with nothing.

River Run is a large, prosperous plantation on the Cape Fear, run by Jamie's blind aunt Jocasta Cameron with the help of her butler Ulysses and worked by a great many enslaved people. Jocasta is delighted by her nephew and quickly makes plain what she intends: to name Jamie her heir and settle the estate on him. Jamie refuses. He will not own people, and North Carolina law makes freeing them nearly impossible, so accepting the inheritance would trap him. A violent incident on the estate shows exactly how the colony's law treats an enslaved man accused of harming a white overseer, and hardens the decision. Duncan Innes takes a place in Jocasta's household. Looking for another way to settle, Jamie is offered a large land grant in the western mountains by the royal governor, on terms that require him to bring in settlers and, eventually, to answer if the Crown calls.

Guided by the mountain man John Quincy Myers, the Frasers ride west into the back country, well beyond the settled lands and into territory claimed by the Cherokee. Jamie chooses a site on a wooded ridge with good water and a view over the valley, and names it Fraser's Ridge. He negotiates carefully with the Cherokee to make it clear that they are neighbours rather than invaders. Claire begins gathering the mountain plants she will need and finds a practice waiting for her among the scattered settlers and the native villages. It is a beautiful, empty, dangerous place, and everything they will have has to be built from nothing before winter.

The first year on the Ridge is spent felling timber, raising a cabin, laying in food, and learning what the mountain can and cannot provide. Jamie kills a bear at close quarters and earns a name and a reputation among the Cherokee for it. Young Ian takes to the country completely, spending as much time with the native hunters as with his uncle. Claire meets an elderly Tuscarora healer, Nayawenne, who trades plant knowledge with her, treats her as something more than a fellow physician, and gives her a stone to keep. Settlers begin to trickle in. The Frasers are poor, isolated and entirely occupied with surviving, and for the first time in years they have somewhere that is theirs.

In 1969 and 1970, Brianna is studying in Boston and Roger is teaching in Scotland, seeing each other when they can and quarrelling about how much Roger wants to settle things. Roger has never stopped searching colonial records for the Frasers, and he finds a newspaper notice reporting that James Fraser and his wife died in a fire that destroyed their house on Fraser's Ridge. He hides it, unwilling to hand Brianna her mother's death. Brianna finds it anyway. Furious with him for concealing it, and certain that she can reach her parents in time to warn them, she resolves to follow her mother back.

Brianna goes to Scotland, prepares as her mother did, and passes through the standing stones at Craigh na Dun. Roger learns what she has done and follows, working his passage to the colonies as a crewman aboard a ship whose captain turns out to be Stephen Bonnet; he sees Bonnet drown surplus passengers for profit and understands exactly what kind of man is loose in the country. Brianna lands and makes her way toward Wilmington, accompanied by Lizzie, a small Scottish bondservant girl whose indenture she has taken over. Roger tracks her down there. Their reunion turns into a quarrel when she learns he had hidden the death notice from her, but they make it up, agree to a handfast marriage, and spend the night together. Roger then leaves to settle his affairs and secure a way home for them both, intending to return within weeks; Brianna, who does not know when to expect him, is left in Wilmington alone.

Stephen Bonnet is in Wilmington, and he still has the ring he took from Claire on the river. Brianna, trying to get her mother's ring back from him, is caught alone by Bonnet and raped. She tells no one what has happened, gathers Lizzie, and continues upriver to River Run and then into the mountains to find her parents, carrying the warning she crossed two centuries to deliver.

Brianna reaches Fraser's Ridge and meets her father for the first time. The reunion is overwhelming for all three of them, and it is quickly overtaken by two facts: the newspaper notice that says her parents will die in a fire, and Brianna's pregnancy. She tells Claire she was raped and cannot know whether the child is Roger's or Bonnet's. Lizzie, who saw only that her mistress was ruined by a man and then saw Roger arrive asking for Brianna, tells Jamie that this is the man. Jamie and Young Ian beat Roger nearly to death without letting him speak, and Ian, thinking he is sparing his uncle a hanging, sells him to a band of Mohawk traders passing through, who take him north.

The mistake comes out when Brianna hears Roger's name and description, and the family has to face what they have done. Jamie sets off north with Claire and Young Ian to find the Mohawk village and buy Roger back, carrying what little the family can raise in trade goods. Brianna, too far along to travel, waits at River Run under Jocasta's roof, where Lord John Grey, an old friend of her father's, comes to keep an eye on her and eventually offers to marry her so that the child will have a name and protection. She bears a son. Stephen Bonnet is still at large, and the question of the baby's father is one nobody can answer.

The search ends at a Mohawk village far to the north, where Roger has been kept as a captive and has survived a brutal ordeal at the hands of the village. Jamie's offers are refused, and the standoff is broken only when Young Ian offers himself in Roger's place. The Mohawk accept, adopt Ian into the village, and let Roger go; his family leaves him there, with no expectation of seeing him again. Roger, who has spent months deciding whether he can accept a wife and a child who may be Bonnet's, chooses to come back. He arrives at Fraser's Ridge, meets Brianna's newborn son, and claims the boy as his own without asking whose he is. Brianna names the child Jeremiah, called Jemmy, and she and Roger are married. Bonnet remains alive and free, and Claire and Jamie go on building a settlement they have been told in print will one day burn with them in it.

Jamie, Claire and Young Ian follow Roger north into Iroquois country and find him held in a Mohawk village. Jamie's attempts to buy him back fail, and in the end Young Ian offers himself in Roger's place, is adopted into the village, and stays behind; the parting is permanent as far as any of them know. Roger, who has had months to decide whether he wants a wife carrying a child that may be another man's, chooses to come back. He returns to Fraser's Ridge, where Brianna has borne a son she names Jeremiah, called Jemmy, and accepts the boy as his own without needing to know whose he is. Brianna and Roger are married. Nobody can say whether the child's father is Roger or Stephen Bonnet, and Bonnet himself is still alive and free somewhere in the colonies, with Claire's stolen ring and a grudge. Claire and Jamie remain on the Ridge, holding a newspaper notice from a future decade that reports their own deaths in a house fire, and beginning to build something that they know history says will burn.