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 got a letter from Benjamin Cleveland, signed by two other landowners over the mountain in Tennessee County, as well. They’re pestering Jamie to commit his militia and come join them in ‘rooting out the vile root of tyranny’—which I take to mean going round the neighbors and, if they’re Loyalists, hauling them out and beating them, taking their stock, burning their buildings, hanging them, or doing other antisocial things to discourage them.”
Roger’s laughter disappeared.
“Mr. Cleveland’s prose style leaves a bit to be desired,” he said. “‘Rooting out the root,’ I mean—but at least he’s clear about it.”
“So is Jamie,” I said, and resumed pounding the roots in my mortar with somewhat more force than necessary. “Meaning he’s damned if he’ll do it but he can’t just tell them to go directly to hell without passing Go. If he did, the only thing stopping them from adding the Ridge to their visiting list would be distance.”
“How far is it from here to Tennessee County?” Roger asked, uneasy. “Some way, surely?”
I stopped pounding long enough to shrug and wipe the forming sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.
“Roughly three or four days’ ride. With good weather,” I added, with a glance at the window, which showed sunshine streaming over the blooming grass.
“And, um … there’s Captain Cunningham and his Loyalist friends to be considered, too, I suppose?”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Yes, rather the local worm in the apple, isn’t he? On the other hand,” I added judiciously, “he’s probably Jamie’s best excuse for not joining our friend Benjamin on his bloodthirsty rounds—the notion that Jamie has to stay here on the Ridge in order to keep his own Loyalists in line. Which might actually be true, come to think of it.”
“I suppose so. What is that?” he asked, nodding at the mortar, purely for distraction.
“Echinacea,” I said. “It’s a bit early, but I need it. You dig the roots in autumn, because that’s when the plant starts storing its energy in the root; it doesn’t need to keep flowers and leaves going.
“You realize,” I added, pausing for breath, “that distance notwithstanding, the only things keeping Nicodemus Partland’s thugs—I mean, it must be him, mustn’t it?—from going through the Ridge like a dose of salts are you and Jamie?”
Roger looked as though he wasn’t surprised to hear that but was still discomfited.
“Aye,” he said slowly. “Ye can see it in Lodge. Ye know it’s not done to talk politics or religion there? Equality, Fraternity, et cetera?”
“So I’ve heard.” I’d slowed down a little in my pounding, and gave him a wry smile. “I always assumed that was a custom more honored in the breach, though. Um … knowing what people are like, I mean.” Men, I meant, and he noticed, giving me back the wry smile. He tilted a hand to and fro in equivocation.
“The Lodge members mostly keep to the letter of the law there—but what happens in practice is that some men just stop coming, if they’ve got substantial differences.”
I stopped pounding and looked at him. “That’s why Jamie always goes on Tuesdays—he’s staked the Lodge out as his territory?”
“Yes and no. He’s modest about it, but he is the Worshipful Master. And frankly, any place with him in it tends to be his territory.”
That made me laugh, and I picked up a bottle of beer from the counter, took a swig, and offered it to him.
“But?” I said.
He nodded and took the bottle.
“But. He encourages everyone to come, regardless, and he keeps the peace—in Lodge, where he can do it without it being overtly about politics. But as ye say … in the breach. Men do talk, and even if they’re not talking about politics, it’s easy enough to tell who’s who. And after a point—most of the committed Loyalists stopped coming.”
“They’re gathering at the captain’s house?” I guessed, and he nodded. That gave me a qualm.
“How many?”
“Twenty or so. Most of the Ridge folk are on our side, though the larger part of them would really just rather be left alone and no be bothered.”
“I can’t say I blame them,” I said dryly. A high, thin scream came from the window and I turned sharply but relaxed again almost at once.
“Mandy and Orrie Higgins are collecting leeches for me, with Fanny,” I said, waving at the window. “They keep putting them on each other. Speaking of that—” I leaned back a little, looking him over. “Were you looking for Jamie, or do you need medical attention?”
He smiled, recalled to his mission.
“The latter—but it’s no for me. I was just visiting the Chisholms and as I was leaving, I stopped to talk to Auld Mam—she was sitting on a bench outside smoking her pipe, so I sat down and chatted a bit.”
“That must have been fun.”
“Well, up to a point. But then she told me that whenever she goes to the privy, her womb falls out into her hand, and would I ask ye if there’s anything to be done about it.”
He flushed a little and I stifled a laugh.
“Let me think that one over. I’ll go up and talk to her tomorrow. Meanwhile, would you go fish Mandy and Orrie out of the creek, and find out if Cyrus is staying for supper?”
AS HE WALKED down toward the creek, he saw Jem, Germain, Aidan, and a few of the other boys from uphill, carousing through the woods, brandishing sticks at each other, slashing them like swords and pretending to fire them as muskets, shouting “Bang!” at random intervals.
“It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye,” he murmured, hearing Mrs. Graham’s admonition from his youth. No point in rounding up that lot and lecturing them, though. Beyond the fact that they were boys, there was a colder fact, too: said boys were only a few years away from being able to ride with a militia or join the army.
And the bloody war was heading in their direction, fast.
“Seventeen eighty-one, though,” he said, and crossed his fingers. “Yorktown happens in October of 1781. Two bloody years. But only two bloody years.” Surely they could make it that far?
The sight of Mandy and Orrie in the creek, sopping wet, covered with mud and waterweed, and chattering happily as a pair of titmice, eased his mind a bit—and so did the sight of Fanny and Cyrus, who had now moved closer together.
Cyrus, more than a foot taller than Fanny, was doing his best to arch over and look at what she was showing him without accidentally touching her. Roger cleared his throat, not wanting to startle them, and Cyrus snapped rigidly upright.
“It’s all right, a charaid,” Fanny told him, pronouncing “a charaid” very carefully—and very wrongly. Roger smiled, and saw Cyrus do so, too, though he tried to hide it. “It’s only Roger Mac.”
“True,” Roger said amiably, smiling down at them. “Mrs. Claire only wants to know will ye stay to dinner, a bhalaich?”
Cyrus had gone pink in the ears at being discovered so close to Fanny, and had in consequence lost all his English, but replied in Gaelic that he thanked the mistress and would like nothing better, but that his brother Hiram had told him to be back before nightfall, and it was a long walk.
“Aye, then. Oidhche mhath.”
He noticed, as he turned away, that Fanny had brought out her small roll of personal treasures to show Cyrus; his eye caught the gleam of a pendant in the grass, and Fanny had her hand half shielding an unfolded paper with some sort of drawing, as though to keep it from his eyes. Ah, must be the picture of her dead sister; Bree had described it to him. Cyrus must be well in with a chance, then, if Fanny was sharing that with the lad.