Free A Trail of Fire by Diana Gabaldon Page A

yes, that’s good, it’s all right now, hush, hush, there’s a good boy . . .’
    ‘What a look on that bloke’s face. I never saw anything like—’
    ‘Here, take the little chap. I’ll see if the bloke’s got any identification.’
    ‘Come on, big man, yeah, that’s it, that’s it, come with me. Hush now, it’s all right, it’s all right . . . is that your daddy, then?’
    ‘No tags, no service book. Funny, that. He’s RAF, though, isn’t he? AWOL, d’ye think?’
    He could hear Dolly laughing at that, felt her hand stroke his hair. He smiled and turned his head to see her smiling back, the radiant joy spreading round her like rings in shining water . . .
    ‘Rafe! The rest of it’s going! Run! Run! ’

    AUTHOR’S NOTES
    Before y’all get tangled up in your underwear about it being All Hallow’s Eve when Jeremiah leaves, and ‘nearly Samhain (aka All Hallow’s Eve)’ when he returns – bear in mind that Great Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, this resulting in a ‘loss’ of twelve days. And for those of you who’d like to know more about the two men who rescue him, more of their story can be found in An Echo in the Bone .
    ‘Never have so many owed so much to so few.’ This was Winston Churchill’s acknowledgement to the RAF pilots who protected Britain during World War II – and he was about right.
    Adolph Gysbert Malan – known as ‘Sailor’ (probably because ‘Adolph’ was not a popular name at the time) – was a South African flying ace who became the leader of the famous No. 74 Squadron RAF. He was known for sending German bomber pilots home with dead crews, to demoralise the Luftwaffe, and I would have mentioned this gruesomely fascinating detail in the story, had there been any good way of getting it in, but there wasn’t. His ‘Ten Commandments’ for Air Fighting are as given in the text.
    While the mission that Captain Frank Randall recruits Jerry MacKenzie for is fictional, the situation wasn’t. The Nazis did have labour camps in Poland long before anyone in the rest of Europe became aware of them, and the eventual revelation did much to rally anti-Nazi feeling.
    I’d like particularly to acknowledge the assistance of Maria Szybek in the delicate matter of Polish vulgarities (any errors in grammar, spelling, or accent marks are entirely mine), and of Douglas Watkins in the technical descriptons of small-plane manoeuvres (also the valuable suggestion of the malfunction that brought Jerry’s Spitfire down).

 
     
     
     
    The Custom of the Army

 
     
     
     
    Introduction to
    The Custom of the Army
     
     
     
     
    One of the pleasures of writing historical fiction is that the best parts aren’t made up. This particular story came about as the result of my having read Wendy Moore’s excellent biography of Dr John Hunter, The Knife Man – and my having read at the same time a brief facsimile book printed by the National Park Service, detailing regulations of the British Army during the American Revolution.
    I wasn’t looking for anything in particular in either of these books, just reading for background, general information on the period – and the always-alluring chance of stumbling across something fascinating, like electric eel parties in London (these, along with Dr Hunter himself – who appears briefly in this story – are a matter of historical record).
    As for British Army regulations, a little of that stuff goes a long way; as a novelist, you want to resist the temptation to tell people things just because you happen to know them. Still, that book too had its little nuggets, such as the information that the word ‘bomb’ was common in the eighteenth century, and what they meant by that: in addition to merely meaning ‘an explosive device’, it referred also to a wrapped and tarred parcel of shrapnel shot from a cannon (though we must be careful not to use the word ‘shrapnel’, as it’s derived from Lt Henry