Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
- Автор: Гэблдон Диана
- Серия: Outlander #9
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte Press
- ISBN: 978-1-473-51900-8
- Жанр: Исторические приключения
Электронная книга - «Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone». Краткое содержание книги:
The past may seem the safest place to be . . . but it is the most dangerous time to be alive. . . .
Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same. It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser’s Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt. Tensions in the Colonies are great and local feelings run hot enough to boil Hell’s teakettle. Jamie knows loyalties among his tenants are split and it won’t be long until the war is on his doorstep. Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. Sometimes they question whether risking the perils of the 1700s—among them disease, starvation, and an impending war—was indeed the safer choice for their family. Not so far away, young William Ransom is still coming to terms with the discovery of his true father’s identity—and thus his own—and Lord John Grey has reconciliations to make, and dangers to meet . . . on his son’s behalf, and his own. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War creeps ever closer to Fraser’s Ridge. And with the family finally together, Jamie and Claire have more at stake than ever before.
I’d meant to find him alone and have it out with him the next day, but what with the roof, Geordie McHugh’s smashed thumb, and the worrying news of Brianna’s disturbed heartbeat, there hadn’t been an opportunity.
Supper was outwardly peaceful; there was no company, no culinary disasters, and no emergencies like one of the children catching fire—which had actually happened to Mandy a few days before, though she had been saved by Jamie noticing her dress sparking, whereupon he dived across the table, tackled her, rolled her on the hearth rug, and then picked her up and stuffed her into the water-filled cauldron, which was half-full of sliced potatoes and carrots, but fortunately not yet boiling. She and Esmeralda had emerged from the ordeal dripping, hysterical, and slightly singed around the edges, but basically sound.
I was feeling slightly singed around the edges myself, and was determined to extinguish the smoldering embers we were presently walking on.
So when we rose from supper, I left the dishes on the table and invited Jamie to come for a stroll with me—ostensibly in search of a night-blooming begonia I’d found. Fanny, who had some idea of what a begonia was, glanced sharply at me, then Jamie, then down at her empty plate with her face studiously blank.
“Are begonias the stuff ye plant around the privy?” he asked, breaking the silence in which we’d come from the house. We were passing the main house privy at the moment, and the bitter scent of tomatoes had begun to overwhelm the heady smell of jasmine. “Is that what I smell?”
“No, that’s jasmine; the flowers don’t bloom past August, though, so I have tomato plants coming up under the vines. Tomato plants have a strong scent and it comes from the leaves, so you have that almost up until the truly cold weather—when nothing smells anyway, because it’s all frozen.”
“So is anyone who spends more than thirty seconds in a privy in January,” Jamie said. “Ye wouldna linger to smell flowers when ye think your shit might turn to ice before ye’ve got it all the way out.”
I laughed, and felt the tension between us ease, feeble as the joke was. He wanted to resolve it, too, then.
“One of the unappreciated aspects of female clothes,” I said. “Insulation. When the temperature goes down, you just add another petticoat. Or two. Of course,” I added, looking back at the house to be sure we hadn’t picked up any outriders, “not having private parts that can be exposed to the elements is rather a help, too.”
A sliver of moon gleamed briefly on the top rail of the paddock, the wood polished by long use. Beyond, the house was huge against the half-dark sky, only a few of the lower windows lit. Solid and handsome, like the man who’d made it.
I stopped by the paddock fence and turned to face him.
“I could have lied, you know.”
“No, ye couldn’t. Ye canna lie to anybody, Sassenach, let alone me. And given that his lordship had already told me the truth—”
“You wouldn’t have been sure it was the truth,” I said. “Given what both parties told me about that fight. I could have told you John was talking out his backside because he wanted to annoy you, and you would have believed me.”
“Ye could choose your words wi’ a bit more care, Sassenach,” he said, a hint of grimness in his voice. “I dinna want to hear anything about his lordship’s backside. Why d’ye think I would have believed ye, though? I never believe anything ye tell me that I havena seen with my own eyes.”
“Now who’s being annoying?” I said, rather coldly. “And you would have believed me because you would have wanted to—and don’t tell me otherwise, because I won’t believe that.”
He made a huh sort of sound under his breath. We were leaning back against the paddock rails, and the smells of jasmine, tomatoes, and human excrement had been replaced with the sweeter odor of manure and the slow, heavy exhalations of the forest beyond: the spiciness of dying leaves overlaid by the sharp, clean resins of the firs and pines.
“Why didn’t ye lie, then?” he asked, after a long silence. “If ye thought I’d believe it.”
I paused, choosing my words. The air was still and warm and filled with cricket songs. Find me, come to me, love me … stridulations of the heart? Or merely grasshopper lust?
“Because I promised you honesty a long time ago,” I said. “And if honesty turns out to be a double-edged sword, I think the wounds are usually worth it.”
“Did Frank think that?”
I inhaled, very slowly, and held the breath until I saw spots at the corners of my eyes.
“You’d have to ask him that,” I said, very precisely. “This is about you and me.”
“And his lordship.”
I lost the temper I’d been holding.
“What the bloody hell do you want me to say? That I wish I hadn’t slept with John?”
“Do ye?”
“Actually,” I said, through my teeth, “given the situation, or what I thought the situation was …”
He was no more than a tall black shape against the night, but I saw him turn sharply toward me.
“If ye say no, Sassenach, I may do something I’ll regret, so dinna say it, aye?”
“What’s wrong with you? You forgave me, you said so—”
“No, I didn’t. I said I’d love ye forever, and I will, but—”
“You can’t love somebody if you won’t bloody forgive them!”
“I forgive you,” he said.
“How fucking dare you?” I shouted, turning on him with clenched fists.
“What’s wrong wi’ you?” He made a grab for my arm, but I jerked away from him. “First ye’re angry because I didna say I forgave ye and now ye’re outraged because I did?”
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong to start with, you fatheaded arsehole, and you know it! How dare you try to forgive me for something I didn’t do?”
“Ye did do it!”
“I didn’t! You think I was unfaithful to you, and I. Bloody. Wasn’t!”
I was shrieking loudly enough to drown out the crickets, and shaking with rage.
There was a long moment of silence, in which the crickets cautiously tuned up again. Jamie turned to the fence and gripped the top rail and shook it violently, making the wood creak. He might be speaking Gaelic, but whatever he was saying sounded like an enraged wolf.
I stood still, panting. The night was warm and humid, and sweat was beginning to bloom on my body. I ripped off my shawl and threw it over the fence. I could hear Jamie breathing, too, fast and deep, but he was standing still now, gripping the fence rail with his shoulders stiff, head bent.
“Ye want to ken what’s wrong wi’ me?” he asked at last. His voice was pitched low, but it wasn’t calm. He straightened up, looming in the moonlight.
“I swear to myself I will put … this … thing … out o’ my head, and mostly I manage. But then that sodomite sends me a letter, out o’ the blue—just as though it never happened! And it’s all back again.” His voice shook and he stopped for a second, shaking his head violently, as though to clear it.
“And when I think of it, and then I see you … I want to have ye, then and there. Ye rouse me, whether ye’re slicing cucumbers or bathing naked in the creek wi’ your hair loose. I want ye bad, Sassenach. But he’s there in my head, and if—if—” Lost for words, he smashed a fist down on the fence rail and I felt the wood tremble by my shoulder.