The Fiery Cross characters

Also known as Claire Fraser

Appears from the start

The physician of Fraser's Ridge, running a surgery out of a mountain cabin with home-made instruments, home-grown drugs and two centuries of knowledge she cannot explain to anyone. In her mid-fifties, practical and increasingly indispensable to the settlement, she is living toward a dated newspaper notice that says she and her husband will die in a fire on this land.

Also known as James Fraser

Appears from the start

Laird of Fraser's Ridge, landlord to a scatter of Highland tenants and holder of a royal land grant that carries obligations to the Crown. He is a former Jacobite who has already fought one losing war for a king, he knows from his wife how this colony's quarrel with Britain ends, and he is trying to keep his people out of it for as long as he can.

Also known as Bree, Brianna MacKenzie

Appears from the start

Claire and Jamie's daughter, an engineer by training stranded in a century with no engineering, raising a small son and steadily inventing what she can from memory. Tall, red-haired and blunt, she has chosen this life and this husband, and she carries a fear of the man who assaulted her that she has not put down.

Also known as Roger MacKenzie

Appears from the start

A twentieth-century historian and folk singer trying to make himself useful on an eighteenth-century mountain, where his scholarship is worth nothing and he cannot yet shoot, plough or fight. Married to Brianna and raising a child he has claimed without knowing whose he is, he is looking for a place of his own in his father-in-law's settlement.

Also known as Jeremiah MacKenzie, Jemmy

Appears from the start

Brianna's small son, a red-haired toddler, claimed and loved by Roger. Which of two men fathered him is a question nobody in the family can answer and nobody raises aloud.

Appears from the start

Jamie's blind aunt, mistress of the rich River Run plantation, still managing the people around her by charm, money and information. She has arranged her own remarriage to suit herself and keeps her late husband's affairs, and their sources, firmly to herself.

Appears from the start

The one-armed former prisoner who has become Jocasta Cameron's steward and is now to become her husband. Modest, kindly, and quietly overwhelmed by his change in fortune, he is loyal to Jamie above everyone.

Also known as Marsali MacKenzie

Appears from the start

Laoghaire's elder daughter, now Fergus's wife and a mother, settled near the Ridge. Sharp-tongued, hard-working and thoroughly acclimatised to frontier life, she has made her peace with Claire.

Appears from the start

Jamie's adopted son, a one-handed Frenchman raising a family on the edge of the settlement and making a living by his wits. Charming and adaptable, he chafes at how little the mountains reward charm.

Appears from the start

The small Scottish bondservant who came over with Brianna, now part of the Fraser household and devoted to her father, who is also on the Ridge. Nervous, dutiful and prone to fever, she has never entirely lived down the mistake she made about Roger.

First appears in chapter 17

The royal governor of North Carolina, a capable administrator with a rebellion in his backcountry and a career to protect. He granted Jamie his land, commissioned him a colonel of militia, and expects the debt to be paid in men and obedience.

First appears in chapter 18

The Frasers' new housekeeper, a tiny, round, tireless woman who arrives with her husband and takes over the running of the house entirely. Endlessly talkative and formidably competent, she treats everyone on the Ridge as hers to feed and organise.

First appears in chapter 19

The Irish pirate who robbed the Frasers on the river and assaulted Brianna, alive and at large in the colony. Charming in company and entirely indifferent to other people, he has money, a ship, and no reason to think anyone can touch him.

First appears in chapter 26

A young indentured hunter, barely into his teens, whom Claire first treated for a badly infected throat. Silent about his own history and an extraordinarily good shot, he is the sort of asset a mountain settlement badly needs, and he wants a place on the Ridge.

First appears in chapter 30

The woman of an isolated trading farm the militia calls at, heavily pregnant, evasive, and living in a house where something is badly wrong. What she has been doing there is discovered by Claire and Jamie rather than told.

First appears in chapter 38

Jamie's oldest English friend, a soldier turned Virginia planter, connected at court and a reliable correspondent about what London is thinking. His long-standing obligations to the Fraser family are known to Jamie and Claire and to almost nobody else.