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.
She kept her eyes on him while taking the paper from his hand and unfolding it, glancing away only to read it.
“What is this?”
“It’s a warehouse certificate. You’ve seen them before, surely? Your da has a fistful of them in his strongbox.”
“I have,” she said, giving him a pointed look. “Why do you have a warehouse certificate to a warehouse in Charlotte?”
“Because so far as either I or Frank Randall knows, there won’t be any significant fighting in Charlotte. That’s where I sent the, um, guano. I thought nobody would notice, and nobody did.”
She gave the certificate a careful look, and he saw her note that he’d put her name on it as well as his. Under the circumstances, she didn’t seem to find that comforting.
“So,” he said heartily, “we’ll be back before supper. Oh—and Mandy’s sock is over there, under the candle snuffer.”
FEELING THAT IT didn’t behoove a not-quite-ordained minister to walk about in a black coat with a large knife on his belt in plain view, Roger put on his second-best coat, this being a rather shabby brown number with a visible mend in the sleeve and wooden buttons. Fergus viewed this with approval.
“Yes, very good,” he said. “You look as though you could do business.” The tone of his voice made it clear what kind of business he meant, but Roger assumed this to be a joke.
“Oh, so I’m meant to be your henchman?” He fell into step next to Fergus, who was wearing the same clothes he wore for printing, but with a blue coat little better than Roger’s over them.
“We will hope it doesn’t come to that,” Fergus said thoughtfully. “But it’s as well to be prepared.”
Roger stopped abruptly and grabbed Fergus’s sleeve, bringing him to a halt.
“Would you care to tell me just who we’re going to see? And how many of them?”
“Only one, so far as I know,” Fergus assured him. “His name is Percival Beauchamp.”
That didn’t sound like the eighteenth-century version of a gangster, a dangerous pirate, or a smuggler of uncustomed goods, but names could be deceiving.
“A soldier brought me a note last week,” Fergus said, presumably in explanation. “He was not in uniform, but I could tell. And I think he was from the British army, which I considered to be unusual.”
Very unusual. Though there were occasional red-coated soldiers to be seen in Charles Town now and then, these usually being messengers bound for General Lincoln’s headquarters, presumably with threatening missives urging the general to consider his situation.
Fergus waved the matter of the note-bearing soldier aside for the moment.
“The note was from Monsieur Beauchamp, saying that he was in residence in Charles Town for a short time and would request the honor of a brief visit at his hôtel.”
“Do you know this Beauchamp?” Roger asked curiously. The name rang a faint bell. “He can’t be a relative of Claire’s, can he?”
Fergus gave him a startled glance.
“Surely not,” he said, though his tone wasn’t quite that sure. “It isn’t an uncommon French name. But, yes, I know him.”
“I gather it isn’t altogether a cordial acquaintanceship?” Roger touched the knife on his belt; it was the Highland dirk that Jamie had given him, an impressive foot-long bit of weaponry with a carved hilt bearing the name of St. Michael and a small image of the archangel. He rather admired the capacity of Catholics to sincerely seek peace while pragmatically acknowledging the necessity for occasional violence.
A brief look of amusement flitted across Fergus’s saturnine features.
“Non,” he said. “But let me tell you. This Beauchamp has tried to speak with me several times, offering assorted things—but chiefly, offering me the truth—or what he says is the truth—about my parents.”
Roger glanced at him.
“Even an orphan must have had parents at one time,” Fergus said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I have never known anything about mine, and I take leave to doubt that Monsieur Beauchamp does, either.”
“But if that’s the case, why pretend he does?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose we’re about to find out.” Fergus sounded grimly resigned to the prospect. He squared his shoulders, preparing to go on, but Roger’s hand hadn’t left his sleeve.
“Why?” Roger said quietly. “Why talk to him at all?”
The Adam’s apple bobbed in Fergus’s lean throat as he swallowed, but he met Roger’s eyes straight on.
“If I must lose my livelihood here, if I can no longer be a printer—then I must find a new place, or a new way to support my family, to protect them,” he said simply. “It may be that Monsieur Beauchamp will show me such a way.”
THE MYSTERIOUS MONSIEUR Beauchamp’s address was a grand house on Hasell Street, and Fergus’s knock upon the door was answered by a butler whose livery probably cost more than Bonnie the printing press. This worthy gave no sign of wondering why two vagabonds should have appeared on his master’s doorstep, but upon hearing Fergus’s name, bowed low and ushered them inside.
It was a hot day outside, and the thick velvet drapes at the windows were drawn to keep as much heat out as possible. They kept out all daylight as well, and the parlor into which they were shown was so dark that the single lamp on a table near the window glowed like a pearl inside an oyster.
Roger thought it was rather like being inside an oyster himself: surrounded by a slick, oppressive moistness, the constant touch of mucus on the skin. Granted, the room in which they had been shut was not as searing as the glaring cobblestones outside, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot cooler, either.
“Like being poached, instead of fried,” he whispered to Fergus, mopping his face with the lace-trimmed handkerchief he’d forgotten to exchange for a workman’s bandanna. Fergus blinked at him in momentary confusion, but before Roger could explain, the door opened and Percival Beauchamp walked in, smiling.
Roger didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this chap wasn’t it. Beauchamp wasn’t French, for one thing. When he greeted them—with great courtesy—accepted Fergus’s introduction of Roger, and thanked them effusively for coming, his voice was that of an educated Englishman—but not one educated at Eton or Harrow. Roger thought that the traces of an underlying accent came from somewhere near the edges of the Thames—Southwark, or maybe Lambeth? He was dressed in the height of Paris style—or at least Roger assumed that must be what it was, with six-inch cuffs, a yellow silk waistcoat embroidered with swallows, and a lot of lace. He wore his own hair, though, dark and very curly, casually tied back with a plum-colored silk ribbon.
“I thank you for your kind attention, messieurs,” he said again. “Allow me to send for wine.”
“Non,” Fergus said. He pulled an ink-stained handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat pooling in his deep eye sockets. “This place is like a Turkish bath. I have come to hear what you have to say, monsieur. Say it.”
Beauchamp pursed his lips as though about to whistle, but then relaxed, still smiling, and gestured them to a pair of ornately brocaded chairs near the empty hearth. He also went to the door and, in spite of Fergus’s refusal, ordered some refreshments to be brought.