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 would eat, lie down before the hearth for one hour, then get up, dash cold water in his face, pull on the least filthy of his two work shirts, and go out to meet the militia in the big clearing below the house. He would set Bobby to drilling whoever had shown up, while he talked with the newcomers, persuading them to join, sealing their engagement with a silver shilling (he had sixteen left, hidden in the heel of one of his dress boots) and the promise of a mount and a decent gun. Then he would take over the drilling, as the light gradually seeped out of the land, drawn up into the last brilliance of the sky, and when the sun finally disappeared he would stagger up to bed and—with luck—get his boots off before collapsing facedown beside me.
Other men needed to tend to their harvest and butchering as well, though, so the attendance was spotty—and would be, he’d told me, until mid-October.
“By which time, I might possibly have a few horses and rifles in hand to give them.”
“I hope Mr. Cleveland’s friends all have harvests to look after, too,” I said, crossing the fingers of both hands.
He laughed and poured a ewer of water over his head, then set it down and stood for a moment, hands braced on the washstand, head down, dripping into the basin—and all over the floor.
“Aye,” he said, into the dark cavern of his long, wet hair. “Aye, they do.” He didn’t straighten up immediately, and I could see the depth of each slow breath as it swelled his back. Finally, he stood up straight and, shaking his head like a wet dog, took the linen towel I offered him and wiped his face.
“Cleveland’s rich,” he said. “He’s got servants to mind his fields and his stock and let him play hangman. I dinna have that luxury, thank God.”
53
First Foot
ON SEPTEMBER 16, OUR front door closed for the first time. It was a thing of beauty, solid oak, planed and sanded smooth as glass. Jamie and Bobby Higgins had put in the hinges and hung the door before lunch, and had finished installing the knob, lock, and mortise plate (the lock purchased at hideous expense from a locksmith in Cross Creek) just before sunset. Jamie swung the door closed with an impressive thud and threw the bolt with a ceremonious flourish, to the applause of the assembled family—which at the moment included Bobby and his three sons, invited to share supper with us and provide a little company for Fanny, as she missed Germain, Jem, and Mandy cruelly.
We’d laid wagers over supper as to who might be the first person to knock at our new front door, with guesses ranging from Aodh MacLennan (who spent more time with us than with his own family—“Why would he bother to knock, Sassenach?”) to Pastor Gottfried—an outsider at twenty to one, as he lived in Salem. At dawn the next morning, Jamie had drawn the bolt and gone out to tend the stock, but now we were finishing our noon meal, and no strange step had ventured yet upon our virgin threshold.
I was peering into the depths of my cauldron to see how much soup was left, repressing an urge to declaim the witches’ speech from Macbeth—largely because I couldn’t remember any more of it than “Double, Double, toil and trouble,” with scanty additional recollections of eyes of newt and toes of frog—when suddenly a measured bam-bam-bam echoed through the house.
“Eee!” Orrie leapt up—spilling his soup—but Aidan, Rob, and Fanny were all faster, and hit the hall at a dead heat, squabbling over who should answer the door.
“The manners of you, ye wee gomerels,” Jamie said mildly, coming up behind them. He grabbed both boys by the shoulders and pushed them aside. “And you, too, Frances, what are ye thinking, scrabbling wi’ the lads?” Fanny blushed and gave way, allowing him the honor of answering his own front door.
I’d come out into the hall, curious to see who our caller was. Jamie was so tall that I couldn’t see past him, but I heard him greet whoever it was in Gaelic, with a formal honorific. He sounded surprised.
I was surprised, too, when he stepped back and gestured Hiram Crombie into the hall.
Hiram lived toward the west end of the cove, well down the slope, and usually ventured away from his own neck of the woods only to come to church of a Sunday. I didn’t think he’d ever come to the house before.
A spare, dour-looking man, he was the de facto headman of the village of fisher-folk who had emigrated, en masse, from the far north near Thurso, to settle at the Ridge. I looked automatically over my shoulder for Roger; the fisher-folk were all rock-ribbed Presbyterians, who tended to keep to themselves; Roger was probably the only person in the household who could be thought of as being on truly cordial terms with Hiram—though Mr. Crombie would at least speak to me, after the events surrounding his mother-in-law’s funeral.
Roger was gone, though. And it appeared that, in fact, Hiram had things other than religion on his mind.
He’d doffed his hat—his good hat, I saw—when he came in, and gave me a small nod of acknowledgment, then cast a glance at the knot of children, blinked without changing expression, and turned to Jamie.
“A word with ye, a mhaighister?”
“Oh. Aye, of course, Mr. Crombie.” He stepped back and gestured toward the door of his study—known to all and sundry as the speak-a-word room. He met my eyes as he followed Hiram into the study, and gave me a wide-eyed shrug in response to my questioning look. Hell if I know, it said.
I SHOOED THE children off to the creek to look for crawdads, leeches, cress, and anything else that seemed useful, and retired into my surgery, seizing the rare moment of leisure to ramble through the pages of my precious new Merck Manual, keeping one ear out in case Jamie wanted anything for Hiram.
One of the unusual accoutrements of my new surgery was a cane-bottomed rocking chair. Jamie had made it for me—in the evenings, over a period of months—from ashwood, with rockers of rock maple, and got Graham Harris, the local expert, to cane the bottom, assuring me that the chair would outlast me and any number of subsequent generations, rock maple being called that because it was hard as stone. The chair was remarkably helpful for soothing babies or small, wiggly children that I wanted to examine—and just as helpful for calming my own mind when I had to retreat from the stresses of daily life, in order to avoid throttling people.
At the moment, though, I was content in mind and body, and absorbed in finding out what the modern treatment for interstitial cystitis might be.
Lifestyle adjustment
Up to 90% of patients improve with treatment, but cure is rare. Treatment should involve encouraging awareness and avoidance of potential triggers, such as tobacco, alcohol, foods with high potassium content, and spicy foods.
Drug therapies …
Granted, there was nothing I could actually do with much of the information—no one on the Ridge ate spicy food to start with, but my chances of talking any of them out of using tobacco, alcohol, or raisins were low. As for drugs, the only applicable substance I had was my reliable willow-bark tea. Beyond curiosity, though, there was somehow a great comfort in the sense of authority in the book; the feeling that there was someone—many someones—who had blazed a trail for me; I wasn’t completely alone in the daily struggle between life and death.