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.
I’d felt such reassurance for the first time when I, a fledgling nurse, was given a copy of the U.S. Army’s Handbook for the Sanitary Troops by a Yank medic I’d met during my first posting during the War. My War, as I always thought of it.
That’s what the Yanks called us—the enlisted medical support—the sanitary troops. After the first week in a field hospital, I wanted to laugh (when I wasn’t crying with my head under a pillow) at the name, but it wasn’t wrong. We were fighting with everything we had, and cleanliness was not the least of our tools.
Nor was it now the least of mine.
The amount of water needed by the average man daily for drinking purposes varies according to the amount of exercise he takes and the temperature of the atmosphere; a fair average is three or four pints in addition to that which he takes in food. On the march the amount is limited by the capacity of the canteen to about one quart, and this quantity should be very carefully husbanded.
A water is said to be potable when it is fit to drink. A potable water is an uncontaminated water; no matter how clear, bright, and sparkling a water may be, it is not potable if it is so situated that it can be fouled by fecal matter, urine, or the drainage from manured lands. There is a very common error that all spring water is pure; many springs, especially those which are not constantly flowing, draw their water from surface sources.
I should copy that out in my own casebook, I thought, glancing toward the big black book on the shelf above the leech jars. It was a comforting thought, that someday that casebook, too, might give a sense of authority to another physician, arming them with the gift of my own experience, my own knowledge.
I flipped Merck’s pages slowly, and paused, my eye caught by the heading Malaria. Was there anything new in the treatment of malaria? I’d seen Lizzie Beardsley two weeks ago, and she’d assured me that she’d taken the Jesuit bark that Mrs. Cunningham had given me … but she was pale and her hands trembled when she changed the diaper on little Hubertus, and when I pressed her, she’d admitted to feeling “a bit dizzy, now and then.”
“Small wonder,” I muttered to myself. The eldest of her four children was not quite five, and while one of the Beardsley boys—well, one of her husbands, why not be blunt about it?—was usually at home to be doing the outside chores while the other hunted or fished or ran traplines, Lizzie did virtually all of the heavy household work, alone, while nursing a new infant and feeding and minding the others.
“Enough to make anyone dizzy,” I said out loud. Being in the Beardsley cabin for more than a few minutes made me dizzy.
I could hear noises, voices in the hallway. Mr. Crombie had done his business with Jamie, then. They sounded cordial enough …
Who would read my writings? I wondered. Not only the casebook, but the small book of domestic medicine that I’d had published in Edinburgh two years before? That one had a number of helpful remarks on the importance of handwashing and cooking one’s food thoroughly—but the casebook had more valuable things: my notes on the production of penicillin (crude as my efforts were), drawings of bacteria and pathogenic microorganisms with a brief exegesis on Germ Theory, the administration of ether as an anesthetic (rather than an internally applied remedy for seasickness, its principal use at the moment), and …
“Oh, there ye are, Sassenach.” Jamie’s head poked into the surgery, wearing an expression that made me shut Merck abruptly and sit up.
“What on earth’s happened?” I said. “Is something wrong with one of the Crombies?” I was making a quick mental inventory of my first-aid kit as I got to my feet, but Jamie shook his head. He came all the way in and shut the door carefully behind him.
“The Crombies are thriving,” he assured me. “And so are all the Wilsons and the Baikies. And the Greigs, too.”
“Oh, good.” I sank back into my rocking chair. “What did Hiram want, then?”
“Well,” he said, with a resumption of the odd expression, “Frances.”
“SHE’S TWELVE, FOR God’s sake!” I said. “What do you mean, he wants permission for his brother to court her? What brother, for that matter? I didn’t think he had one.”
“Oh, aye. Half brother, I should ha’ said. Cyrus. The tall one that looks like a stem of barley gone to seed. They call him a’ Chraobh Ard. D’ye not have anything drinkable in here, Sassenach?”
“That one,” I said, pointing at a black bottle with a menacing skull-and-crossbones marked in white chalk. “It’s rhubarb gin. A’ Chraobh Ard?” I smiled, despite the situation. The young man in question—and he was a very young man; I didn’t think he could be more than fifteen himself—was indeed very tall; he topped Jamie by an inch or two—but spindly as a willow shoot.
“What can Hiram be thinking?” I asked. “His brother surely isn’t old enough to marry anybody, even if Fanny was, which she isn’t.”
“Aye.” He picked up a cup from the counter, looked suspiciously into it, and smelled it before putting it down and pouring a measure of gin into it. “He admits as much. He says that Cyrus saw the lassie at kirk and would like to come a-visiting—in an official way, ken?—but Hiram doesna want his attention to be misunderstood or taken for disrespect.”
“Oh, yes?” I got up and poured a small splash of gin for myself. It had a lovely fragrance to match its flavor—sweet but with a noticeably tart edge. “What does he really have in mind?”
Jamie smiled at me and clicked the rim of his wooden cup with mine.
“The militia. Other things, too, but it’s mostly that.”
That was a surprise. While Hiram was, like every other fisherman I had known, tough as nails, I’d never known him or any other of the Thurso men to take up arms, beyond occasionally shooting game. As for riding horses …
“See, Captain Cunningham has been preaching about the war again, and he’s makin’ Hiram uneasy in his mind.”
“Has he, indeed?” What with one thing and another, I hadn’t gone to the captain’s Sunday services of late. But I knew he was a Loyalist—and there was that man, Partland, who had tried to bring him rifles. “Do you think he’s planning to raise his own militia? Here?” That would be more than awkward.
“I don’t think so,” Jamie said slowly, frowning into his gin. “The captain has his limits, but I think he’s wise enough to ken that he does have them. But yon friends of his … Granger and Partland. If they had it in mind to raise a unit of Loyalist militia—and they do—he’d likely support them. Tell his congregation about it, I mean, and urge the suitable men to turn out.”
It was odd, I thought, that while whisky warmed the body, gin seemed to cool it. Or perhaps it was the talk of militias that was giving me a chilly feeling on the back of the neck.
“But surely Hiram’s not going to listen to Captain Cunningham, is he? I mean, the captain isn’t strictly speaking a Papist, but from Hiram’s point of view, Methodists likely aren’t that much better.”
“True.” Jamie licked the corner of his mouth. “And I doubt he’s gone to many of Cunningham’s sermons himself. But a few of the Thurso folk do, of course.”
“For entertainment?” I smiled. While both Roger and the captain had small but devoted congregations, there were not a few of the Ridge inhabitants who would come to listen to anyone willing to get up and talk, and who sat through all of the Sunday services, including Rachel’s meetings, later comparing critical opinions of each preacher’s remarks.