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.
The journey took no little time, as Agnes needed to come out into the open now and again to get her bearings—she could read stars, she said matter-of-factly—but within an hour, we saw the dim glow of a cabin’s windows, covered by oiled hide.
I slid off Clarence and pulled down the bag that held my kit.
“I’ll mind the horses,” Jamie said, coming up to take Clarence’s reins. “Ye’ll need to hurry, I expect?”
Agnes was already at the door, fluttering like a frantic moth, and even from where we stood, I could hear the deep, guttural noises of a woman deep in labor.
The door opened suddenly inward, and Agnes fell over the threshold. A tall, dark figure yanked her to her feet and slapped her across the face.
“Where the hell you been, girl!”
Clarence’s ears went straight up at the gunshot sound, and when this was succeeded at once by the high-pitched shrieking of small children, he turned around and trotted off into the forest.
“You bloody idiot!” I shouted at him. “Come back here!”
“Ifrinn!” Jamie dived past me and ran after the mule, saving the rest of his breath for the chase.
“Who the damnation are you?”
I turned to see a young Cherokee man standing in the flickering light of the doorway, glaring at me. He was leaning on the doorframe, his long hair disheveled and blood on his shirt.
I took a deep breath, straightened my spine, and walked up to him.
“I, sir,” I said, “am the midwife. Do please go and sit down.” I didn’t wait to see if he obeyed this injunction; I had work to do.
My patient was sitting on a crudely made birthing chair near the hearth, collapsed forward, arms dangling and her dark-blond hair nearly black at the roots with sweat, the ends dripping over her immense belly. Two little boys, of perhaps five and three, clung to one of her legs, howling. Her legs and feet were grossly swollen.
“Come here, Billy.” Agnes, her face dead white save for the scarlet palm print on her cheek and her voice no more than a squeak, took the bigger of the boys by his collar and pulled him away. “Georgie, you come, too—come, I said!” The fright in her voice stirred them, and they turned and clung to her, whimpering. Agnes looked at me, her eyes huge in mute appeal.
“It will be all right,” I said to her, softly, and squeezed her arm. “Take care of the little ones. I’ll see to your mama.”
I knelt down and looked up into the woman’s face. A bloodshot blue eye stared back at me through the snarled wet hair. An eye glazed with exhaustion—but still an intelligent, conscious eye; she saw me.
“My name is Claire,” I said, and laid a hand on her belly. She was wearing a filthy shift, so transparent with sweat that her protuberant navel showed through it. “I’m a midwife. I’ll help you.”
“Jesus,” she whispered, whether in prayer or from simple astonishment, I couldn’t tell. Then her face clenched into a knot and she curled over her belly with a bestial noise.
I kept my hand on her, but bent down to one side and peered up through the hollow of the birthing stool. A narrow slice of pale crown showed for an instant as she pushed, then disappeared.
I felt the spurt of excitement that always came with imminent birth, and my hand tightened on her belly. Another spurt came, this one of sudden fear.
Something bloody was wrong. I couldn’t tell what, but something was very wrong. I straightened up, and as the pain released its grip, I rose and took the woman by her shoulders, helping her to sit up. There were no towels to hand; I lifted my skirt and wiped her face with my petticoat.
“How long have you been pushing?” I asked.
“Too long,” she said tersely, and grimaced. I bent and looked again, and without her shadow obstructing the situation, I saw that she was dead right. The perineum was nearly purple and very swollen. That was it: the child was stuck, the crown of its head battering with each spasm, but not able to come further.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, and both her eyes popped open in astonishment. “Never mind,” I said. “When it lets go”—for the next pain was coming, I could see it in her face—“lean back against the wall.”
Her husband—I assumed that must be the man who’d slapped Agnes—seemed to have gone outside and was apostrophizing the night in an incoherent mix of Cherokee and English.
“Right,” I said, as calmly as possible, and put off my cloak and shawl. “Let’s just see what we have here, shall we, Susannah?”
There were splashes of blood on the dirt floor, but it was dark, with large, visible clots—just bloody show. She wasn’t hemorrhaging, though there was a slick of blood on her thighs. Her waters had broken some time earlier; it was hot and the small room smelled like a Jurassic swamp, fecund and reeking.
The contractions were coming every minute, powerful ones. I had only moments between them in which her belly relaxed enough for me to palpate it, but on the second try I thought I felt … the muscles of her belly tightened like an iron band, and I counted under my breath, hands still on her. Relaxation … I knew where the head was, was the child facing backward? I pressed hard on the relaxed belly, trying to find the curve of the spine …
“Ngg!”
“It will be all right. Count with me, Susannah … one, two …”
“Rrrrggh!”
I counted silently. Twenty-two seconds and the contraction eased. Spine … there was the blunt point of an elbow, and there, a curve that had to be the child’s spine … only it wasn’t.
“Bloody fucking hell,” I said, and Susannah made a noise that might have been a groan or an exhausted laugh. The rest of my attention was focused on the thing under my hand. It wasn’t the curve of a spine, nor yet of buttocks. It was the curve of another head.
It vanished with a new contraction, but I kept my hand doggedly on the spot, and as soon as the spasm waned, I felt frantically, to and fro. My first panicked thought—a memory of a double-headed infant, seen in a jar of spirits of wine—disappeared, succeeded by something that was partly relief, partly new alarm.
“It’s twins,” I said to Susannah. “Did you know that?”
She shook her head to and fro, slow as an ox.
“Thought … maybe. You … sure?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, in a tone that made her laugh again, though the sound was cut off abruptly by the next contraction.
The relief caused by the thought that we probably weren’t dealing with a gross deformity was fading fast, replaced by the next thought—if the first baby wasn’t moving, it was perhaps caught in an umbilical cord, possibly dead, or entangled with its twin in some fashion.
Further palpations, pushing when I thought I had an idea what I was pushing on, groping for a mental picture of what might be going on inside … but even the best midwife can tell only so much, and the only thing I was reasonably sure about was that the placenta—one placenta, or two? If it was one, it might rip loose with the first birth and then we’ll have an abruption that will kill the mother—hadn’t yet detached, though given the position of the baby’s head, there could easily be gallons of blood backed up behind the infant …. No. I looked up at Susannah’s face. No, if she were hemorrhaging, she’d be white and losing consciousness. As it was, she was bright red and clearly still fighting.
But we didn’t have much time. Two umbilical cords, either of which could be wrapped around a neck, or slip down between the child and the pelvic bones and be crushed with a contraction, starving one child of oxygen … and that was the least of it …