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.
Brianna, who had a knife on her belt, did the honors and a blessed silence descended, broken only by slurping noises and the spitting of seeds. The atmosphere was liquid; her clothes clung to her and perspiration ran in trickles from her bundled hair down the back of her neck and dripped from her chin.
“How does anybody live here in the summertime?” she asked, wiping her face on a sleeve and reaching for another slice of melon.
Marsali shrugged philosophically.
“How does anybody live through the winter in the mountains?” she countered. “Sweat’s better than frostbite. And here, there’s plenty of food year-round; ye’re no livin’ off venison shot six months ago and pickin’ mouse droppings out of what corn ye’ve saved from the squirrels.”
“That’s a point,” Brianna admitted. “Though I’d think the army eats a good deal of what’s available, don’t they?” She nodded toward a column of marching Continental soldiers, coming down the street toward the drilling ground at the edge of town, muskets over their shoulders.
“Mmphm.” Marsali waved to the officer at the head of the column, who took off his hat and bowed to her as they passed. “I feel a deal safer wi’ them here, and they’re welcome to whatever they need.”
Something in her tone made Brianna’s scalp itch, and she thought suddenly of the fire in Philadelphia. Her mother said that no one knew whether it had been an accident or …
She choked that thought off.
“Do you have much trouble? With Loyalists, I mean?”
“Can we open another, Mam? Pleeease?” Joan and Félicité were shiny-faced with melon juice, but looking hungrily at the remaining heap.
“Speak o’ the devil,” Marsali muttered, but not to her daughters. Her eyes were fixed on a pair of men who had come out of a tavern on the far side of the street. They were young but full-grown and looked like workmen, their clothes rough and grubby at the edges, and one carried a canvas sack over one shoulder. They paused outside the tavern, looking up, and Brianna saw that they were inspecting the sign, this being a piece of canvas tacked over the original sign.
The canvas bore a rather unskilled rendering of a soldier in white wig and enormous epaulets sporting huge loops of yellow lace, and a caption informing passerby that this tavern was The General Washington. Bree had just time to wonder what the original name of the place had been, prior to the occupation of the city, before the young man with the bag had reached into it and emerged with a handful of ripe tomatoes. He shoved these into his companion’s hands, scooped out another handful of tomatoes for himself, and hurled them at the sign overhead, bellowing, “God save the King!” at the top of his voice.
“God save the King!” his friend echoed. His aim was less sure than the first young man’s, and two of his tomatoes splattered against the front wall of the tavern, while another fell to the roadway and smashed on the cobbles.
A corner of the canvas sign had come loose under the assault and now flopped down, revealing enough of the sign underneath as to make it a good bet that the place had previously been known as The King’s Head.
“I’ll find out their names, Mam. So you can put them in the paper,” Joanie said in a business-like voice, and hopping to her feet started purposefully across the street.
“Joanie! Thig air ais an seo!” Marsali also leapt to her feet, just in time to seize Félicité by the arm and keep her from following her sister. “Joanie!”
Joanie heard and hesitated, looking back over her shoulder, but the young vandals, who had rearmed themselves with more tomatoes, heard too. Flushed with excitement, they ran across the street, flinging tomatoes wildly at Joanie, who screamed in panic and raced for her mother.
“Back off!” Brianna shouted at the top of her own voice, just in time to catch a tomato smack in the middle of her chest, where it exploded in a splotch of red juice and slimy seeds. “What do you morons think you’re doing?”
Marsali had shoved the girls behind her and was standing her ground, fists clenched at her sides, white with fury.
“How dare ye attack my daughter?” she bellowed.
“Ain’t you the printer’s wife?” one young man asked. He’d lost his cap and his hair was standing up in matted spikes, sweat streaming down his face from heat and excitement. He narrowed his eyes at Marsali, then her girls. “Yes, you are! I know you, damned rebel bitch!”
“Friggin’ mudlarks,” his friend said, panting. He wiped his brow on a sleeve, then pushed the sleeve up, showing a reasonably brawny arm. “Let’s throw ’em all ’n the river. Teach the printer to mind his manners.”
Bree drew herself up to her full height—she had a good four or five inches on both young men—and took a step forward.
“You little pipsqueaks clear off,” she said, as menacingly as she could. They looked at her, surprised, and burst into laughter.
“Another rebel bitch, eh?” One young man grabbed her by the arm, fast and hard, and at the same moment, the young man with the bag let it drop off his shoulder and, gripping the strap, swung it and hit her on the side of the head.
She lost her balance, staggered, and fell. Squishy contents notwithstanding, the bag was heavy, and her nose and eyes watered from the sudden impact. The young men were hooting with laughter. The girls were both yelping and Marsali was trying to keep them behind her, hovering in obvious hopes of being able to kick one of the miscreants. She wasn’t able to get close to them before one had stooped and grabbed Brianna’s ankles, yanking her legs up.
“Grab her shoulders!” he shouted at his friend, who promptly did just that.
They half-dragged, half-carried her down the bank, behind the screen of willows that edged the river. She was struggling but couldn’t breathe. Her lungs didn’t work and she couldn’t find purchase with hands or feet from which to strike them.
“Buinneachd o ’n teine ort!” There was a sharp cry, and the man holding her shoulders dropped her.
Her lungs filled and she jerked her feet free and rolled away, scrambling up onto her knees, groping for a stone, a branch, anything with which to fucking hit somebody.
Marsali was breathing hard, teeth clenched, Brianna’s knife in her hand. Brianna’s eyes were still watering, but she made out Joanie and Fizzy on the bank above, each with a melon in her hands, and as she struggled to her feet, Félicité flung her melon as hard as she could. It struck the ground well short of the young men but rolled slowly downhill, coming to rest at the foot of a shrub of some kind.
The vandals roared with laughter, one of them dancing toward Marsali, feinting as though to grab the knife, slapping at her with his other hand as she hesitated.
Bree had got her body back and she rose, a solid rock in one hand, and pasted the jerk who’d held her ankles in the back with it, as hard as she could. The rock thunked home and he made a high-pitched noise and dropped to his knees, cursing breathlessly.
His friend looked back and forth between Marsali and Brianna, then stepped away, careless.
“You best tell your husband to mend his ways and mind what he prints in that paper, missus,” he said to Marsali. The glee of destruction had left him, though the anger hadn’t. He waved a hand at the girls, pressed close together in the shade of a willow. “You got a passel o’ punkin-headed young’uns. Might be as you could spare one, eh?”
Without warning, he darted forward and kicked the melon on the ground, bursting it into juice, seeds, and broken shards.
Brianna was frozen again, but so was everyone. After a long, long moment, the young man she’d hit with the rock got to his feet, gave her an evil look, then jerked his head at his friend. They turned and left, pausing only to pick up the canvas bag and shake the pulp of smashed tomatoes out onto the ground.