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’ve always wondered,” I remarked, tying Elspeth’s sling. “What, exactly, does ‘grass-combing’ mean? Is it actual bad language, or just descriptive?”
She’d been holding her breath as I made the final adjustments but now let it out with a small sigh, gingerly testing the sling.
“Thank you. As to ‘grass-combing,’ it usually means someone who is either idle or incompetent. Why combing grass should imply either attribute is unclear, but it’s not actually bad language as such, unless the term ‘bugger’—sometimes multiple buggers—is attached. Though I can’t say I’ve ever heard it without ‘bugger,’” she added fairly.
“I daresay you’ve heard more than that, if you’ve been at sea. I think you may have shocked Fanny. Not the language itself, but that you don’t look like a whore.”
She snorted briefly.
“Women tend to be much freer in their speech when there are no men present, regardless of profession; surely you’ve noticed that?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Including nuns.”
“Do you know any nuns? On a personal basis?” she asked, with a trace of sarcasm. Her face was beginning to show a tinge of color, and her breathing was easier.
“I did, once.” And in fact, while I’d seldom heard any of the sisters of the Hôpital des Anges say anything like “grass-combing bugger,” I’d certainly heard them mutter “Merde!”—and a few more colorful sentiments—under their breaths while dealing with the more trying aspects of practicing medicine among the poor of Paris.
And suddenly I had a vivid memory of Mother Hildegarde, who seldom said even “Merde,” but who had told me quite frankly that the King of France would expect to lie with me if I went to beg him for Jamie’s release from prison. And then she’d dressed me in red silk and sent me off to do exactly that.
“Merde,” I muttered, under my own breath. Elspeth didn’t quite laugh—probably because it would hurt her shoulder—but snorted a little.
“It’s been my observation,” she said, “that either sex is much more constrained in language when in the presence of the other than when they are solely in the company of their own kind. Save perhaps in brothels,” she added, with a glance toward the kitchen, where Fanny was singing “Frère Jacques” to herself while rolling quails in clay. “That is a remarkable child, but you must really try to persuade her not to—”
“She knows not to say things like that in public,” I assured Elspeth, and poured some whisky into a cup. “But you’ll be quite free to say anything you like tonight, because I’m not having you go back to your cabin in your condition.”
She gave me a considering look but then shoved a straggle of steel-gray hair behind one ear and acquiesced.
“I’m not sure whether by my ‘condition’ you mean injured or intoxicated, but in either case, thank you.”
“Shall I send Fanny up to your cabin to smother your fire?”
“No. I drowned it before I left, with a pitcher of cold tea. Quite a waste, but I couldn’t tell how soon I should be back.”
“Good.” I took her by her sound arm and helped her off the table. “I’ll help you upstairs to lie down for a bit.”
She didn’t argue, and I saw how much the injury and the journey to reach me had exhausted her. She lifted her feet with slow care, to keep from stumbling on the stairs. I parked her on one of the children’s beds, provided her with a quilt, a pitcher of cold water, and a stiff dram, then went down to help Fanny with the supper preparations.
Brianna had shown her how to pack quails in clay for baking in the ashes, but this was the first time she’d done it alone, and she was frowning at the row of pale clods and smears of mud on the table.
“Do you think that’s enough mud?” she asked me, dubiously. There was a long streak of clay down her cheek, and quite a bit in her hair. “If it’s not enough, Bree says, it will crack before they’re cooked and burn the meat, but if it’s too much mud, they’ll be raw inside.”
“I expect we’ll be too hungry to care much by the time they’re cooked,” I said, but gave one of the little packages a light squeeze and felt the clay give under my fingers. “I think we may have a few air pockets in the clay, though. Squish them—lightly—with your hands all over, to be sure we’ve got rid of all the air—otherwise, when the steam hits an air pocket, the quail—well, the package, not the actual quail—will explode.”
“Oh, dear,” Fanny said, and began determinedly squeezing the embedded quail. I drew breath and rubbed two fingers between my brows.
“Have you a headache?” Fanny asked, brightening. “There’s fresh willow bark; I could brew you some tea in a moment!”
I smiled at her. She was fascinated by herbs and adored all the grinding, boiling, and steeping.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m fine. Just trying to think what the devil to eat with the quail.” Meals were the daily bane of my existence; not so much the constant work of picking, cleaning, chopping, cooking—though those activities were fairly baneful in themselves—but primarily the never-ending chore of remembering what we had on hand, and balancing the effort required to make it edible against the knowledge of what might spoil if we didn’t eat it right away. Bother nutrition; I crammed apples, raisins, and nuts into people more or less constantly, and poked green stuff down their reluctant gullets whenever I got the chance, and no one had died of scurvy yet.
“We have lots of beans,” Fanny said dubiously. “Or rice, I suppose … or maybe turnips? Er … neeps, I mean.”
“That’s a thought. Bashed neeps aren’t bad, so long as there’s butter and salt, and I know we have salt.” Two hundred and fifty pounds of it sheltering in the smoking shed, as a matter of fact. Tom MacLeod had brought it by wagon from Cross Creek last week—the year’s supply for the entire Ridge, in time for the hunting, butchering, and preserving. A meager eighty pounds of sugar, but I did have honey …
“Right. Baked quail with buttered bashed neeps, and—dried peas boiled with onion? Maybe a little cream?”
In the end, the three of us sat down an hour later to a very reasonable dinner—only one of the quails had exploded, and in fact, the smoky meat was very tasty, and the slightly burnt onions actually improved the creamed peas, I thought. There wasn’t much conversation, though; Fanny and I were tired to the bone and Elspeth Cunningham was old, tired, and in pain.
Still, she made an effort to be civil.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, looking round the enormous kitchen, “that there are only the two of you left to run this house?”
“The house and the livestock and garden,” I agreed, stifling a yawn with a jam-spread bannock. “And the butchering.”
“And the bees,” Fanny put in helpfully. “And all of Mrs. Fraser’s medicines to be made, and all the people she puts back togeth … Er … all the people she helps,” she ended, rather more tactfully than she’d begun.
“And the cleaning, too, of course,” Elspeth added, looking thoughtfully at the expanse of foot-marked wooden flooring that disappeared into shadow at the far end of the room. She glanced at me in a way I recognized at once: diagnosis.
Whatever she saw, she was tactful enough to keep it to herself, but she took the whisky bottle I pushed in her direction, nodded her thanks, and said, “I owe you a great deal, Mrs. Fraser. Please allow me to repay you—in part—by sending down one of my son’s lieutenants to take care of the more … manly chores, while your husband is away. Two of them will be coming next week, to stay with us for a time.”