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.
Silvia blinked and pushed a lank strand of hair behind her ear.
“Where are we going?”
He grinned at her—reassuringly, he hoped.
“I’m takin’ ye to meet my mother.”
IAN TOOK A bit of time riding toward Philadelphia. There was no shortage of suitable places for what he had in mind, but it was more than likely that he’d have to do it in the dark. Once he’d found it—a thicket of mixed oak and pine, with a towering single pine behind it that would be visible against even the night sky—he dismounted and scrabbled about until he found what he wanted. This he stuffed into his saddlebag and spurred up along the Philadelphia road.
He managed to hire a sturdy horse with a kind eye from a farm two miles out and returned with it to find the Hardmans wearing everything they possessed, with the remainder of their meager belongings wrapped up in a ratty quilt tied with string. Mrs. Hardman, he noticed, had a crudely made knife with a string-wrapped handle thrust through her belt. This seemed slightly odd for a professed Friend, but then he realized that it was likely her only knife, used for chopping vegetables, butchering, and digging in the garden. Likely she’d never considered stabbing anyone with it.
If she had, he thought, grunting with effort as he and Silvia manhandled the Justice over the saddle of his own horse, this fellow would have died long before now.
“All right,” he said, jerking the rope that bound the corpse tight. “Mrs. Hardman—”
“Call me Silvia, Friend,” she said. “And thee is Ian?”
“I am,” he said, and patted her shoulder gently. “Ian Murray. Can ye ride at all, Silvia?”
“I haven’t, for some years,” she said, biting her lip as she examined the horse he intended for her. “But I will.”
“Aye. This fellow doesna seem a bad sort, and ye won’t be galloping at all, so dinna fash too much about it. So. You’ll ride him, wi’ Prudence behind ye and Chastity before.” He thought the three of them together didn’t equal his weight, and he was not a burly man.
“Wait a moment. Thee should take this, I think.” Silvia reached down and picked up a leather valise from the ground. It wasn’t new but had clearly been a piece of some quality in its prime. It smelled of apples.
“Och,” he said, realizing. He glanced at the Justice’s horse, which wasn’t at all happy with its burden, but not disposed to create a ruckus—not yet, anyway. “It’s his?”
“Yes. He—brought us food. Every time he came.”
Her eye lingered on the awkward shape, but her face was unreadable.
“That’s no a bad epitaph,” he told her, taking the valise. “When my time comes, I hope mine is as good. Mount up. I’ll take care of this.”
He helped her up, then lifted Prudence, who squealed with excitement, and Chastity, who just stared, round-eyed, and sucked her thumb hard.
“Patience, ye’ll come wi’ me, aye?” He tied the bundle of possessions at the back of his saddle, boosted Patience up in front, then swung up behind her, a rope to the bridle of the Justice’s horse in one hand. He clicked his tongue to the horses and the grim little cavalcade lurched off into the lightly falling snow. None of the Hardmans looked back.
Ian did, feeling obscurely that a place where people had dwelt for a long time deserved at least a word of farewell.
The house was small and gray and beaten, its hearth cold and the fire long dead. And yet it had sheltered a family, had witnessed a meeting of the Continental generals, had given Uncle Jamie refuge when he needed it.
“Bidh failbh ann a sith,” he said quietly to the house. “Go back to the earth in peace. You have done well.”
Patience clutched the pommel like grim death and he could feel her shivering against him, despite the several layers of flimsy garments she wore.
“Have ye ever been on a horse before, lass?”
She nodded, breathless.
“Daddy would put me and Pru up on his nag now and then. But we never did more than walk round the yard.”
“Well, that’s something. Ehm … your father’s dead, I take it?”
“Maybe,” she said sadly. “Mummy thinks the militia shot him because they thought he was a Loyalist. Me and Pru think maybe Indians took him. But he’s been gone since before Chastity was born, so he’s likely dead. Otherwise, don’t you think he would have got free and come back to us?”
“I do,” Ian assured her. “But ken, Indians can be good folk. I’m a Mohawk, myself.”
“Thee is?” She turned round in the saddle to stare at him, with a combination of interest and horror.
“I am.” He tapped the tattooed lines that ran across his cheekbones. “They adopted me, and I lived wi’ them for some time. I stayed wi’ them willingly, mind—but I did come back to my family at last. Maybe your da will do the same.”
And if he did, he wondered, looking at the wraithlike shapes of Silvia Hardman and her daughters on the horse ahead of him, what would he do when he found out the shifts his absence had put his wife to?
And what shifts has Emily been put to, without a man? She’d have people, though … A Mohawk woman would never be alone in the way Silvia Hardman was alone, and that thought comforted him slightly.
When they reached the Philadelphia road, he dismounted carefully, led his horse up to Silvia’s, and tied a neck rope to the pommel of her saddle, in case Patience should lose hold of the reins.
“Ye’ll go on ahead,” he said to Silvia, and pointed down the road, which was broad, clear, and empty in the waning light. “Ye mustn’t be anywhere near me while I’m taking care of Mr. Fredericks.”
She shuddered at the name, casting a haunted glance back at the humped shape on the third horse’s back.
“With luck, I’ll catch ye up within half an hour,” he said. “There’s nay moon, but it’s a snow-lit sky; I think ye’ll be able to see the road, even after full dark. If anyone offers to molest ye, tell them your husband is behind ye and ride on. Give them your bundle if they want it, but don’t let them get ye off the horses.”
“Yes.” Her voice was high with fear, and she coughed to lower it. “We will. We won’t, I mean. Thank thee, Ian.”
HE TOOK THEM half a mile down the Philadelphia road, to be sure they could manage the horses. They were only walking, but ye never kent when something might happen, and he warned them about paying attention and keeping hold of the reins.
Patience’s eyes were round as saucers when he slid off and tucked the reins into her hands.
“Alone?” she said, in a very small voice. “I’m riding … alone?”
“Not for long,” he assured her. “And your mam will be holding the rope. I’ll be back, quick as I can.”
He untied Fredericks’s horse then and led the gelding in the other direction, well past the lane that led to the Hardman cottage. It was beginning to snow in earnest, but the flakes were small and hard and only skittered across the hard-packed road, the wind making thin white lines on the dirt.
Being in the open, in possession of a fresh corpse, was never comfortable, but it was particularly uneasy work when in the vicinity of white people, who were inclined to think everyone’s private business was also theirs. Luckily, the cold weather had kept the body from swelling, and it wasn’t making eerie noises yet.
There it was: the tall pine, black against the snow-lit sky. He’d trampled down a patch of brush on his previous visit and now led the horse carefully into it, and between two close-spaced saplings. The horse was suspicious, but did follow, and one of the saplings gave way with a crack.