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.
He became aware that he was staring at Percy with his mouth open, and closed it. Percy smiled, a little tremulously. The façade of the arrogant, elegant Frenchman had dropped away, and it truly was Percy. His dark curls were hidden under the smooth, powdered wig, but the eyes were as they’d always been—dark, soft, and holding promise. Of various kinds.
“Don’t tell me,” John said, surprised that his own voice sounded normal. “Monsieur Citròn?”
“Yes.”
Percy’s voice was husky, though John couldn’t have said with what emotion. Humor, fear, excitement, lust …? The last thought made him shake off Percy’s grasp and take a step back.
“How bloody long did you know?” he demanded. “Monsieur Citròn” had been his opposite number, in France’s equivalent to the Black Chamber. All countries had one, though the names varied. The underground hive where worker bees gathered the pollen of intelligence, grain by grain, and painstakingly turned it into honey—or poison.
Percy shrugged.
“I’d been working for the Secret du Roi for about two years, before they gave you to me. It took me another six months to discover who you really were.”
Not for the first time, John wished he had Jamie Fraser’s ability to make glottal noises that made clear his state of mind without the nuisance of finding words. But he was an Englishman, and therefore found some.
“Are you working for Hirondelle now?” he demanded. The Secret du Roi—Louis XV’s private spy ring—had not quite perished with the death of the King, but in the manner of such things had quietly been absorbed into a more officially recognized body. He had himself escaped the clutches of Hubert Bowles, head of London’s Black Chamber, some years ago, and had left the world of official secrets behind with the relieved sense of one being fished out of a noisome bog on the end of a rope.
Percy raised one shoulder briefly, smiling.
“If I were still true to La Belle France—and her masters—you couldn’t tell whether I was telling you the truth about that or not, could you?”
John’s heart was beginning to slow down, but that “if” sped it up like a kicked horse. He didn’t reply at once, though. He took time to look Percy up and down, deliberately.
“It’s not quite like leprosy, you know,” Percy said, bearing this scrutiny with visible amusement. “Treason doesn’t show that easily.”
“The devil it doesn’t,” John said, but more for something to say than because it was true. “Are you actually telling me that you have—or are about to,” he added, with a hard look to Percy’s very expensive Parisian finery, “part company with your ‘special interests’ in France?” Including whoever you were working for in the Black Chamber? I wonder.
“Yes. I haven’t done it quite yet, because—” He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder, and John gave a short laugh.
“Wise of you,” he said. “So you’re wanting to prepare a soft landing on this side before you jump. And you thought you’d start with me?” There was enough spin on that question as to take the skin off Percy’s hand if he tried to catch it.
He didn’t catch it and he didn’t duck, either. Just stood and let it pass, regarding Grey with his soft, dark eyes.
“You saved my life, John,” he said quietly, looking at him. “Thank you for that; I hadn’t the chance to say so at the time.”
John flipped a hand dismissively, though his chest had tightened at Percy’s words. He’d suppressed everything at the time and he didn’t want it back now, twenty years later. Any of it.
“Yes. Well …” He turned slightly; Percy was standing between him and the terrace with the French doors.
“So I thought that you might possibly be willing to do me a much less dangerous favor.”
“Think again,” John advised him briefly, and, stepping round his erstwhile lover, walked rapidly away.
He heard nothing behind him; no protest, no offers, no calling of his name. At the open French doors, he glanced involuntarily behind him.
Percy was standing by the hydrangea bush. Smiling at him.
46
By the Dawn’s Early Light
THE SUN WAS WELL above the horizon when William came ambling slowly down Oglethorpe Street toward his father’s house. He’d had a long, fascinating—and very enlightening—conversation with Christopher Preston, about the Crown’s treatment of prisoners, prisoner-help societies, prison hulks … and Ardsmuir Prison. In the fullness of time, he might need to have a talk with Lord John. But not just … this … minute.
He wasn’t drunk, but wasn’t yet quite sober, either. One of his pockets sagged heavily and jingled when he touched it. He had a vague memory of playing cards with Preston and some friends of his—at least this experience seemed to have ended better than the last time he’d got blind drunk, ended up penniless, and … met Jane again.
Jane.
He hadn’t meant to call her to mind, but there she was, vivid, drawn on the surface of his mind with a sharp-pointed quill. The first time he’d met her—and the second. The shine of her hair and the smell of her body, close in the dark.
He stopped and leaned heavily on the iron fence surrounding a neighbor’s front garden. The scent of flowers and new-turned soil was fresh as the morning air on his face, the breath of the distant river and its marshes soothing, with its sense of flowing water, soft black silt, and lurking alligators.
The unexpected thought of alligators made him laugh, and he rubbed a hand over his rasping whiskers, shook his head, and turned in to Papa’s gate. He sniffed the air expectantly, but he was early; he could smell smoke from the kitchen fire, but no bacon. Voices, though … He wandered round the side of the house, intending to see whether he might charm Moira the cook into giving him a bit of toasted bread or some cheese to ease the pangs of starvation ’til something more substantial was ready.
He found Moira in the kitchen garden, pulling onions. She was talking to Amaranthus, who had evidently been gathering as well; she carried a trug that held a large mound of grapes and a couple of pears from the small tree that grew near the cookhouse. With an eye for the fruit, he strode up and bade the women good morning. Amaranthus gave him an up-and-down glance, inhaled as though trying to judge his state of intoxication from his aroma, and with a faint shake of the head handed him a pear.
“Coffee?” he said hopefully to Moira.
“Well, I’ll not be saying there isn’t,” she said dubiously. “It’s left from yesterday, though, and strong enough to take the shine off your teeth.”
“Perfect,” he assured her, and bit into the pear, closing his eyes as the luscious juice flooded his mouth. He opened them to find Amaranthus, back turned to him, stooping to look at something on the ground among the radishes. She was wearing a thin wrapper over her shift, and the fabric stretched neatly over her very round bottom.
She stood up suddenly, turning round, and he at once bent toward the ground she’d been looking at, saying, “What is that?” though he personally saw nothing but dirt and a lot of radish tops.
“It’s a dung beetle,” she said, looking at him closely. “Very good for the soil. They roll up small balls of ordure and trundle them away.”
“What do they do with them? The, um, balls of ordure, I mean.”
“Eat them,” she said, with a slight shrug. “They bury the balls for safekeeping, and then eat them as need requires—or sometimes they breed inside the larger ones.”