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.
Roger was shaking his head. “Not much, no. Not in words. But—he put his hand on my throat.” His own hand rose, touching the ragged scar left by the hangman’s rope. “And … something happened,” he said softly.
4
The Women Will Ha’ a Fit
“WOULD YE COME ASIDE to the cabin, cousin?” Ian said, looking uncharacteristically shy. “In case Rachel might be back. I’d … like ye to meet her.”
“I’d love to meet her,” Bree said, smiling at him, and meant it. She lifted an eyebrow at her father, but he nodded.
“It will be good to put this lot down for a bit,” he said, wiping a sleeve across his perspiring face. “And if ye milked the goats as your mother asked ye to this morning, Ian, I wouldna say no to a cup of it, either.” He and Ian were carrying the usable remains of the deer, bound into an unwieldy package inside the mostly intact skin and hanging from a stout pole that they bore across their shoulders. It was a hot day.
Someone was home at the cabin in the aspen grove. The door stood open, and there was a small spinning wheel standing on the front stoop amid the darting leaf shadows and a chair beside it with a flat basket piled with brown and gray puffs of what Brianna assumed must be combed clean wool. There was no sign of the spinner, but women were singing inside the house, in Gaelic—breaking off every few bars in laughter, with one clear voice then singing the line over again, and the second after it, stumbling over an occasional word, then laughing again.
Jamie smiled, hearing it.
“Jenny’s teachin’ wee Rachel the Gàidhlig,” he said, unnecessarily. “Set it down here, Ian.” He nodded at the pool of shade under a fallen log. “The women will ha’ a fit if we bring flies into the house.”
Someone in the house had heard them, for the singing stopped and a head poked out of the open door.
“Ian!” A tallish, very pretty dark-haired girl popped out and hopped off the porch, grabbing Ian round the middle in exuberant embrace, this instantly returned. “Thy cousins have come! Does thee know?”
“Aye, I do,” he said, kissing her mouth. “Come say hello to my cousin Brianna, mo ghràidh. Oh—and Uncle Jamie, too,” he added, turning round.
Bree was already smiling, moved by the obvious love between the young Murrays, and glancing at her father she saw the same smile on his face. Saw it broaden as he looked beyond them to the open door, where a small woman had come out, a baby wearing nothing but a clout in her arms.
“Who—” she began, and then her eyes fell on Brianna, and her mouth dropped open.
“Blessed Bride protect us,” she said mildly, but her eyes were warm, blue, and slanted like Jamie’s, smiling up at Brianna. “The giants have come. And your husband, too, they say, and him even taller than yourself, lass. And ye’ve bairns, too, they say—all of them springin’ up like weeds, I reckon?”
“Toadstools,” Bree said, laughing, and bent down to hug her diminutive aunt. Jenny smelled of goats, fresh wool, porridge, and toasted yeast bread, and a faint scent in her hair and clothes that Bree had long forgotten but recognized instantly as the soap Jenny had made at Lallybroch, with honey and lavender and a Highland herb that had no name in English.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said, and felt tears well in her eyes, for the soap brought back Lallybroch as she’d first seen it—and with that ghost, another, stronger one behind it: the ghost of her own Lallybroch.
She blinked back the tears and straightened up, a tremulous smile pasted on her face. This vanished at once, though, as she remembered.
“Oh, Auntie! I’m so sorry. About Uncle Ian, I mean.” A new wave of loss washed through her. Even though Ian Murray the elder had been dead all of her life, save for a few brief years, and she had met him only once, the loss seemed fresh and shocking now.
Jenny looked down, patting the baby’s tender back. He had a downy head of brown-blond fuzz, like a guinea hen’s chick.
“Ach,” she said softly. “My Ian’s wi’ me still. I can see him in this wee’un’s face, clear as day.”
She turned the baby deftly so he rested on her hip, looking up at Brianna with big round eyes—eyes the same warm light brown of her cousin Ian—and his father.
“Oh,” Brianna said, charmed and comforted at once. She reached out a tentative hand and offered the baby a finger. “And your name is … Oggy?”
Jenny and Rachel both laughed, one with honest amusement and the other ruefully.
“I’m afraid we haven’t managed to find the proper name for him as yet,” Rachel said, touching him gently on the shoulder. Oggy turned toward his mother’s voice and kept on turning, leaning slowly out of Jenny’s arms like a sloth drawn ineluctably toward sweet fruit.
Rachel gathered him up, gently touching his cheek. He turned his head—again slowly—and started sucking on her knuckle.
“Ian says that Mohawk children find their proper names when they’re older, and have just cradle-names until then.”
Jenny’s shapely black eyebrows rose at this.
“Ye mean to tell me that the bairn’s going to be Oggy until … when?”
“Oh, no,” Rachel assured her. “I’m sure I’ll think of something before ‘when.’” She smiled at her mother-in-law, who rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Brianna.
“I’m glad ye didna have such trouble wi’ your own bairns, a nighean. Jamie said in his letters that they’re called Jeremiah and Amanda, is that right?”
Brianna coughed, avoiding Rachel’s eye.
“Um … Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie,” she said. “And Amanda Claire Hope MacKenzie.”
Jenny nodded approvingly, whether at the quality or the quantity of the names.
“Jenny!” Bree’s father appeared on the porch, sweaty and disheveled, bloodstained shirt much in evidence. “Ian canna find the beer.”
“We drank it,” Jenny called back, not turning a hair.
“Oh.” He disappeared back into the house, presumably in search of something else potable, leaving damp, slightly bloody footprints on the porch.
“What’s happened to him?” Jenny demanded, shooting a sharp glance from the footprints to Brianna, who shrugged.
“A bear.”
“Oh.” She seemed to digest this for a moment, then shook her head. “I suppose I’ll have to let him have beer, then.” She disappeared after the menfolk, leaving Brianna and Rachel outside.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a Quaker before,” Brianna said after a slightly awkward pause. “Is ‘Quaker’ the right word, by the way? I don’t mean to—”
“We say Friend,” Rachel said, smiling again. “Quaker is not offensive, though. But I think thee must have met at least one. Thee might not know, if the Friend chose not to use Plain Speech in talking with thee. Most of us don’t have stripes, spots, or any other physical mark by which thee might discern us.”
“Most of you?”
“Well, naturally I cannot see my own back, but I’m sure Ian would have told me, was there anything remarkable …”
Brianna laughed, feeling slightly giddy from hunger, relief, and the simple, recurrent joy at being with her family again. A charmingly expanded family, too, it seemed.
“I’m really glad to meet you,” she said to Rachel. “I couldn’t imagine what sort of girl would marry Ian—I’m sorry, that sounds wrong …”
“No, thee is quite right,” Rachel assured her. “I couldn’t have imagined marrying a man like him, either, but there he is in my bed each morning, nonetheless. They do say the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Come into the house,” she added, shifting Oggy into a new position. “I know where the wine is.”