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.
“Aye, mostly. The captain’s no so good as a Punch-and-Judy show—or even as good as Roger Mac—but he’s something to listen to and talk about. And Hiram’s cousins have been talking. He doesna like it.”
“And so … he wants his half brother to court Fanny?” I shook my head. Even with a solid half ounce of rhubarb gin under my belt, I didn’t see the connection.
“Well, it’s no really about Frances, ken.” He picked up the gin bottle and smelled it thoughtfully. “Rhubarb, ye say. If I drink more of this, will it give me the shits?”
“I don’t know. Try it and see,” I advised him, holding out my own cup for more. “What is it about, then, and why is Fanny involved?”
“Well, it’s a tie—no a formal one, of course—but a link betwixt Hiram and me. He sees well enough where things are going, and it will be easier, when the time comes, for him to go with me, and bring some of his men along, if there’s a … friendly feeling between the families, aye?”
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” I took a minute to contemplate that. “You can’t really be considering marrying Fanny off to the Crombies! It may be war, but it isn’t the War of the bloody Roses, with dynastic marriages right and left. I mean, I’d hate to see you end up in a butt of malmsey with a red-hot poker up your arse, like the Duke of Clarence.”
That made him laugh, and the knot forming under the gin in my stomach relaxed a little.
“Not yet, Sassenach. No, and I willna let Cyrus trouble Fanny—or even talk to her formally, if she mislikes the notion. But if the lassie doesna mind him visiting—and he is a sweet-tempered lad—then … aye, it might help Hiram when I need to ask him to ride with me and bring his men.”
I tried to envision Hiram Crombie riding into battle at Jamie’s side—and surprisingly, found it not all that far-fetched. Bar the riding part … the Thurso people did of course have the occasional mule or nag for transport, but on the whole, they were deeply suspicious of horses and preferred to walk. I supposed they could be infantry …
“But I dinna mean Frances to be made uneasy,” he said. “I’ll talk to her—and you should, too, like women, ken?”
“Like women, forsooth,” I murmured. But he was right. Fanny knew much, much more of the risks of being a woman than the average twelve-year-old did, and while I doubted that Cyrus would be any sort of threat to her, I must reassure her that this proposition was entirely hers to decline.
“All right,” I said, still a bit reluctant. “Do you know anything about Cyrus, other than his being tall?”
“Hiram spoke well of the lad. Paid him what I think was a verra high compliment.”
“What’s that?”
Jamie tossed off the rest of his gin, belched slightly, and set down his cup.
“He says Cyrus thinks like a fish.”
RATHER TO MY surprise, Fanny didn’t seem averse to Cyrus visiting more formally, when I carefully broached the subject with her.
“He doesn’t really speak any English, though,” she said thoughtfully. “A lot of the people up at that end of the cove don’t, Germain told me.”
Germain was right; many of the fisher-folk spoke only Gaelic; it was one reason why they remained as a tight-knit group, somewhat separate from the other residents of the Ridge.
“I’m learning the Gàidhlig,” she assured me, pronouncing it correctly. “And I suppose I’d learn more from Cyrus.”
“Why?” I asked, rather astonished. “I mean—what makes you want to learn Gaelic?”
She flushed a little but didn’t look away or down. That strong sense of self-possession was one of the things that occasionally made Fanny a little unnerving.
“I heard them singing,” she said. “In the church, with Roger Mac. Some of the Wilsons and Mr. Greig and his brother came down to listen to him preach—I think you were gone that day, so you wouldn’t have heard them—but after the sermon, Roger Mac asked Mr. Greig if he knew …” She shook her head. “I can’t even say the name, but it was a song in Gaelic, and they sang it, all of them, and they were beating their hands on the benches like drums and—the whole church … it was …” She looked at me, helpless to explain, but I could see the light in her face. “Alive.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed that.”
“If Cyrus comes to visit me, maybe some of his family will come down and sing again,” she said. “Besides,” she added, a slight shadow crossing her face, “with Germain and Jemmy gone, Cyrus will be somebody to talk to, whether he understands me or not.”
HER MENTION OF Germain made me slightly wary, and I went to find Jamie, who was repairing the barn wall where Clarence, in a fit of pique, had kicked it and broken one of the boards.
“Do you think maybe you should talk to Hiram before Cyrus comes?” I said. “I mean, naturally, we don’t want to tell anyone about … where Fanny came from. But if Cyrus were to—er—make any, um, inappropriate moves toward her … she might—feel obliged to respond?”
He’d sat back on his heels to listen to me, and at this, he laughed and stood up, shaking his head.
“Nay bother, Sassenach,” he said. “He’ll not lay a finger on the lass, or Hiram will break his neck, and Hiram will ha’ told him so.”
“Well, that’s reassuring. Do you think perhaps you should drop a word in his ear yourself? As Fanny’s loco parentis, I mean?”
“Locum,” he said, “and no. I’ll just bid him welcome and terrify him wi’ my presence. He won’t dare breathe on her, Sassenach.”
“All right,” I said, still a little dubious. “I think she believed us—believed you—when we told her we didn’t expect her to become a whore, but … she spent half her life in a brothel, Jamie. Even if she wasn’t … participating, her sister was, and Fanny surely knew everything that was going on. That sort of experience leaves a mark.”
He paused, head bent, looking down at the ground, where a small pile of fresh mule apples marked Clarence’s mood.
“Ye healed me of something a good deal worse, Sassenach,” he said, and touched my hand gently. He’d touched me with his right hand, the maimed one.
“I didn’t,” I protested. “You did that yourself—you had to. All I did was … er …”
“Drug me wi’ opium and fornicate me back to life? Aye, that.”
“It wasn’t fornication,” I said, rather primly—though my hand turned, my fingers lacing tight with his. “We were married.”
“Aye, it was,” he said, and his mouth tightened, as well as his grip. “It wasna only you I was swiving, and ye ken that as well as I do.”
If I did, it wasn’t anything I was ever going to admit, let alone discuss, and I let it lie.
“But I grant ye, neither of us could do the like for Frances. Maybe Cyrus can—by not touchin’ her.” He kissed my hand, let it go, and bent to pick up his hammer.
OF COURSE I had seen Cyrus Crombie before, at church, but beyond a second glance at his height hadn’t really taken notice of him. Jamie had arranged for him to come to the house later in the week with a couple of cousins, to help with the framing for the third story—and be formally presented to Fanny.
And so it was that two days later, I climbed to the precarious top of the house, where the third floor was slowly taking shape amid the creaking and flapping of rope, wood, and canvas.
“I’m amazed that you aren’t seasick,” I said, finding Jamie in the act of measuring along one edge of the lofty platform that would someday be an attic, making chalk marks that were probably less random than they looked.