Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone characters

Also known as Claire Beauchamp Randall

Appears from the start

A twentieth-century surgeon living in the eighteenth by choice, back on Fraser's Ridge after two years of war and a burned house. She is setting up a new surgery in a half-built home, growing what she needs, keeping bees, and treating a mountain full of people with almost nothing to work with. Now in her sixties, she has her whole family within reach for the first time in years and no illusions about how long the war will leave them alone.

Also known as Jamie

Appears from the start

A Highland Scot in his late fifties, rebuilding the house and the settlement he left when it burned. He has resigned one commission and knows he will be asked for another as the war moves into the southern colonies. He holds land he is obliged to fill with settlers, whether or not they share his politics, and he is trying to be a grandfather and a landlord and a soldier at the same time.

Appears from the start

Jamie and Claire's daughter, an engineer, newly arrived on the Ridge with her husband and children after a crossing through the stones and an Atlantic voyage. She turns her training on the new house: water, drains, a bathtub, anything that will make eighteenth-century living less brutal, and she is trying to raise two children who know things no child of this century should say aloud.

Appears from the start

Historian, folk singer and ordained minister, now the preacher of a backcountry settlement that includes Catholics, Presbyterians, Moravians and people with no use for any of it. His damaged voice is slowly coming back. He is also still chasing what the written record says about his own family and about Jamie and Claire, and he has not stopped wondering how much of it is already fixed.

Also known as Jem

Appears from the start

Roger and Brianna's son, old enough now to be useful and old enough to be dangerous with what he knows, since he has lived in two centuries and can be careless about which. He has a good ear, a Gaelic tongue and a secret or two his grandfather trusted him with.

Also known as Mandy

Appears from the start

Roger and Brianna's small daughter, whose heart was mended by surgery in the twentieth century and who has a talent nobody can explain: she can feel where her brother is, and she can feel the stones.

Appears from the start

Jamie's nephew, who lived for years as a Mohawk, married a Quaker and now farms and hunts near the Ridge. He is expecting his first child with Rachel, and he is still working out how a man who has killed belongs in a household built on the testimony of peace.

Appears from the start

Young Ian's wife, a Quaker disowned by her Meeting, plain-spoken and unafraid of anyone on the mountain. She keeps her convictions in a household and a settlement organised around a war she will not take part in.

Appears from the start

Jamie's sister, widowed and transplanted from Lallybroch to a North Carolina mountain, where she has taken over as much of the household as Claire will let her have. Sharp, funny, and pleased to be near her son again after twenty years.

Also known as Fanny

Appears from the start

A girl of about twelve whom William placed in Jamie and Claire's keeping after her elder sister's death. She has come out of a Philadelphia brothel into a mountain household, speaks little, watches everything, and is being brought up as a daughter of the house.

First appears in chapter 3

A former soldier who has lived on the Ridge for years, branded on the cheek for his part in the Boston killings, now married with children of his own and one of the settlement's steadiest hands.

First appears in chapter 11

A retired Royal Navy captain who takes up land on Fraser's Ridge and brings his elderly mother with him. Formal, capable and used to command, he preaches to those who will listen and makes no secret of where his loyalty lies in the present quarrel.

Also known as William Ransom

First appears in chapter 31

Jamie's natural son, out of the British army and out of patience with everyone who shaped his life. He refuses the name he was raised under and has no cause he will fight for, but the Grey family still has claims on him, and one of them is a missing cousin.

Also known as John Grey

First appears in chapter 31

The English lord who raised William, still moving between armies, families and confidences, and now bound up in his brother's search for a lost son in a British-held southern city.

Also known as Duke of Pardloe

First appears in chapter 31

Lord John's elder brother, a duke and a regimental colonel, who has been told his eldest son died in an American prison camp and has never accepted it. Autocratic, asthmatic and entirely undeterred by the fact that there is a war in the way.

First appears in chapter 62

A young woman with an infant son, who presents herself as the widow of Hal Grey's eldest son and therefore the mother of a duke's heir. Poised, guarded and rather harder to read than a grieving young widow ought to be.

First appears in chapter 77

Jamie's foster son, a one-handed Frenchman with a printing press and a long practice at surviving other people's wars, still setting type where the news is.

First appears in chapter 77

Fergus's wife and Jamie's stepdaughter, keeping the press and the children going wherever the war has put them this year.

First appears in chapter 104

Hal Grey's eldest son, reported dead in an American prison camp and mourned by his family for years.