Virgins is available in the collection of Outlander novellas entitled Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (2012). The synopsis is basically for those of you who aren't reading every word written by Gabaldon and just want to know what happens.
Review (No Spoilers)
Virgins takes place three years before the first Outlander novel, which is also the start of the television series. It begins after Murtagh drops Jamie off in France in the care of Ian Murray, after rescuing him from Fort William.
The story is mostly from Ian's point of view as he tries to help Jamie cope with the physical pain and infected wounds of his terrible flogging, the guilt and grief he is experiencing about the death of his father Brian, and his worry about what Randall did to his sister Jenny. As the band of mercenaries carry out two jobs, Jamie and Ian essentially discuss the experience of becoming adults. Virgins is very much a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) with a focus on morality. Neither Jamie nor Ian have ever killed a man or bedded a woman, and both topics occupy their thoughts.
It's very like Diana Gabaldon to include something I know nothing about – the lives of persecuted Jews in eighteenth century France. Another major thread is Jamie and Ian encountering prostitutes for the first time and eventually realizing how miserable their lives are.
All of the extra novels, novellas and short stories that Gabaldon wrote extending the Outlander universe and exploring the lives of secondary characters are a gift to her fans, and enjoyable to read for just what they are. Virgins is an interesting story, but it honestly didn't do much for me. But it works as a reminder that at the beginning of the Outlander story, our hero Jamie Fraser is still so very young and yet, he has had a number of life-changing experiences. Virgins gives us some of those experiences.
Beneath the spoiler kitten is a complete synopsis of Virgins, with spoilers.
Injured and exhausted, Jamie joins Ian Murray as a hired mercenary in France, outside Bordeaux. Jamie is nineteen, and Ian twenty; Ian has not yet lost his leg. The mercenaries, commanded by a man named D'Eglise, are delivering a wagon-load of money and exotic rugs to a Jewish moneylender. The mercenaries are attacked by thieves. D'Eglise tortures and kills one of the attackers, a Jew named Ephraim Bar-Sefer, to learn, unsuccessfully, who sent the thieves.
After the delivery, Jamie and Ian and the other mercs visit a tavern. Jamie flirts with a brown-eyed barmaid and tries to impress her by speaking (Biblical) Hebrew, but she thinks he is a Jew and rejects him.
Because Jamie speaks Hebrew, D'Eglise takes him (and Ian) along as a translator to negotiate the band's next job with Dr. Hasdi, a Jewish physician, although as it turns out, Jamie's Biblical Hebrew isn't needed. Dr. Hasdi notices that Jamie is bleeding and in pain, and insists on treating the infected whip marks on his back.
Dr. Hasdi has hired D'Eglise to deliver his granddaughter, Rebekah bat-Leah Hauberger, to her fiance, the son of the chief rabbi at the synagogue in Paris. Along with Rebekah, the mercs must deliver her dowry: a sum of money as well as an old, priceless Torah scroll from Spain. Jamie and Ian are both attracted to the beautiful, intelligent Rebekah, much more so than the prostitutes they encountered earlier.
At another tavern called Le Poulet Gai (the Happy Chicken), Jamie and Ian witness one of the mercs, Mathieu, called Pig-Face, rape a prostitute in the street because she refused him. Jamie and Ian are too surprised and too inexperienced sexually to realize what is happening and too shocked to stop it. The two realize that prostitutes lead a miserable life, and Jamie worries that his sister Jenny will have to live that life.
Off to Paris. Jamie and Ian guard Rebekah and her maid in their coach, along with a man named Peretz who is in charge of the scroll. They are again attacked by thieves and Peretz is killed when the coach crashes. They take refuge in an inn overnight, where Rebekah gives Jamie drugs for his pain. While Jamie hallucinates in bed, Ian and Rebekah take a romantic step or two that they shouldn't, although they don't go as far as actual intercourse.
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| Sam Heughan and Steven Cree as later day Jamie and Ian in Outlander. |
When our two friends wake up, Ian contemplates circumcision and offering to marry Rebekah, and whether or not he should go to confession. As it turns out, Rebekah and her maid have already escaped with the scroll. Jamie and Ian track the women to the estate of Vicomte Beaumont, who has been betrothed to Rebekah secretly for four years. Since the Vicomte will lose everything when he converts, he and Rebekah had conspired to steal the money and the scroll, making them the inadvertent cause of the two deaths that occurred.
After the wedding, Jamie insists on taking the scroll back to Dr. Hasdi and telling him the truth about Rebekah's actions, and he and Ian do just that. Back in Bordeaux, while again at the first tavern they visited, Mathieu Pig-Face is about to rape the barmaid who had flirted with Jamie earlier, and Jamie and Ian bring him down together. The barmaid is killed in the struggle, and an enraged Jamie kills Mathieu with his bare hands.
Ian drags Jamie to confession at St. Andre's cathedral. The two of them then take off to enlist with the King of Prussia as mercenaries. They are both still technically virgins, but Ian did have a sexual experience and Jamie did kill a man.
Throughout the story, Jamie and Ian talk about what their fathers told them about how to be a man, especially when it comes to women, and about making their own moral and ethical choices. They had never encountered a Jew before, and essentially realize that even people who seem to be very different are really just people.
And that's it. If you've gotten this far, could I ask – I don't tend to do synopses. Is this one too complete? If I do more of them, should I go shorter?
Billie
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.
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