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.
“No!” Fanny was screaming. “No! No! No!” She had blundered into the stream, too, and was trying vainly to reach Cyrus and the paper, but the water was deeper here and was pulling at her skirts and she was staggering, shoes slipping in the mud and slime of the streambed.
Roger kicked off his own shoes, waded out, and grabbed Fanny around the waist.
“It’s all right,” he was saying urgently, dragging the girl through the current toward shore. “It will be all right!” But Fanny, who knew perfectly well that it wouldn’t be, went on shrieking, struggling mindlessly to reach the last remnant of her sister.
Dear Lord, show me what to do … What was there to do? he wondered. He set Fanny down, and the girl sank to her knees, curled up like a dying leaf, and went dead silent, bar great shuddering gasps for air.
“Daddy, Daddy!” Mandy, who was strictly forbidden to cross the creek alone, had just skipped over the stones like a cricket and now grabbed Roger’s leg, whimpering in panic.
Voices from uphill. The boys had heard the screaming and were running through the—oh, bloody hell—
“Get out of the garden!” Roger bellowed. The crunching noises of feet through turnips ceased instantly, and he dismissed the potential damage from his mind, needing all his attention to detach Mandy from his soggy leg while trying to say comforting things to Fanny.
Fanny was breathing like a winded horse. Worried that she might hyperventilate and pass out, Roger squatted down next to her and laid a hand on her narrow, heaving back.
“Fanny,” he said gently, “you’re soakin’ wet. Come inside. We’ll get ye some dry clothes and something hot to drink.” He put an urging hand under Fanny’s elbow, trying to get her to rise, but Fanny pressed her crossed arms tighter against her curled body and shook her head. The deep gasping had lessened, though, beginning to give way to sobs.
Squelching noises announced the hesitant approach of Cyrus, and Roger looked up at him, tall, gangly, and dripping, his face dead white.
“Mistress …” he said, and swallowed, having no idea how to go on.
“It’s no your fault, a bhalaich,” Roger began, but Cyrus shook off the halting words and collapsed to his knees in front of Fanny.
“Mistress …” he said again, tentative. Fanny ignored him completely, but he reached out his closed hand and opened it slowly under her nose.
The paper was little more than a soggy, crumpled ball in his palm. Roger heard him swallow again.
Fanny made a sound as though he’d driven a spike into her belly, snatched the remnant of paper from him, and cradled it against her chest, sobbing as though her heart would break.
I suppose it already is broken, poor little thing …
“Mo chridhe bristeadh,” Cyrus whispered, his face crumpled with misery. “B’fhearr gu robh mi air bathadh mus do thachair an cron tha seo ort.” Shattering is my heart. I would that I had drowned before I allowed such evil to come upon you.
Fanny made no answer and wouldn’t move. Roger exchanged a helpless look with Cyrus, but before he could try again to move Fanny, the boys had arrived, full of shocked questions. Germain had the flannel cloth with the rest of Fanny’s treasures, picked up from the creek bank and bundled in his hand.
“Cousin …?” he said tentatively, his hand with the bundle hovering between Fanny and Roger. Fanny didn’t move to take it, so Roger nodded at him.
“Thanks, Germain. Take it to the house, will ye?” He rose, his knees stiff, cold wet stockings puddling round his ankles. “Jem? Take Mandy and the boys and go along to the house with Germain. We’ll … be up directly.”
The boys all nodded, round-eyed with concern, and left with Mandy, glancing over their shoulders and beginning to murmur to one another.
Cyrus was beginning to shiver, the cold wind passing through the wet thin cloth of his shirt and breeks. Roger put a hand on his bent head—even kneeling, his head reached well above Roger’s waist.
“It will be all right,” he said in Gaelic. “You did no wrong. Go home now.”
Cyrus looked up at Roger, then helplessly at Fanny’s bowed head. After a moment, he nodded jerkily, got up, and bowed to her before turning and walking slowly away, glancing back, his face full of trouble.
Roger sighed, and after a moment’s hesitation, he sat down on the ground and gathered Fanny into his arms. He rocked the girl slowly, patting her back as though she were a small child. He felt like a bystander in a place where a bomb has just exploded, and neither ambulance nor police have yet arrived.
Ambulance and police … aye, that would be Claire and Jamie, he thought with a tinge of wry amusement. Calling for one or the other of the Frasers had in fact been his first impulse, once he got Fanny out of the creek. But Jamie had gone to Salem, and Claire had said she was going to look at a case of what might be chicken pox at the MacNeills’. And if you came right down to it … neither of them could really help in this situation. Whereas, maybe … just maybe …
He took a deep breath, hugged Fanny tight, then set her down and stood up. Fanny was shivering by this time, hard enough that the sobs had stopped, though tears were still flowing and her eyes were swollen.
“Come with me,” Roger said firmly, reaching for her hand. “Brianna can maybe fix this.”
ROGER’S ONLY THOUGHT when he’d said “fix this” was a fuzzy notion of Sellotape, this succeeded by a dubious notion of drying the paper and stitching the drawing together like a sampler. Brianna, luckily, had a better idea.
“It’s a nice, heavy rag paper,” she observed, laying the still-damp pieces of the drawing on the kitchen table and smoothing them. “Must have been, to last so long. How long do you think Fanny’s had it?”
“Two years, maybe?” Roger hazarded a guess. “Her sister was seventeen or so when she died, and Fanny says this was done when she was ten, so Jane would have been maybe fifteen. Can you copy it, do ye think?”
“Yes, and I will. But Fanny will want the original, too. For emotional reasons.”
Roger nodded. “Aye. What can you do about it, then?”
“Oh, just mend the tear.”
“Ye really are going to sew it together? I thought of that, but—”
“Well, that’s actually not a bad idea,” she said, looking as though she wanted to laugh but refraining from doing it out of politeness. “But I’m pretty sure Fanny wouldn’t want her poor sister to look like Frankenstein’s monster, even if she doesn’t know what that is.”
“What is that?” Fanny hovered in the doorway, looking uneasy. She’d been stripped, dried, and dressed in a fresh shift and stockings and, with her flushed cheeks and wavy, drying dark hair, looked like a small, disheveled angel recently rescued from badgers.
“It’s just a novel,” Bree said, and smiled. “I’ll tell you the story later, if you want. Here, come and look.”
Fanny came to the table, her head turned half away, not really wanting to see the ruined drawing. Then she saw the paper screen that Bree had fetched from the pantry—a rectangular wooden frame, with a very fine screen made of muslin from which threads had been pulled to create a grid, this tacked to the sides of the frame—and curiosity overcame her reluctance.
“It’s a clean tear—that’s lucky.” Brianna touched the torn edge of one half with a gentle finger. “See how it’s frayed along the edge? Paper is made of fibers, and if you were to soak a sheet of paper in water for a long time, do you know what you’d get?”