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.
“Well, you have options, don’t you?”
“Options?” he said. He was amused, but the word still gave him a sense that he’d swallowed a live eel. You have no idea, sister mine …
“Lord John says you own a small plantation in Virginia,” she pointed out. “If you didn’t want to go back to England, I suppose you could live there?”
“It’s possible, I suppose.” He could hear the doubt in his own voice, and so could she; she glanced sharply at him, eyebrow lifted.
“The place is a ruin,” he said, “though the fields have been kept in fairly good condition. But the war—” He gestured at the nearest house, pocked by cannonballs and its bright-blue paint scorched and fire-blackened on one side. “I think it might not just flow round me like a rock in the water, you know.”
Something odd moved over her face, and he looked at her in considerable surprise.
“You’ve thought of something?” he asked.
“Yes, but it’s not—I mean—it’s not relevant right this minute.” She waved away whatever the thought had been. “I know Lord John and your uncle—the duke still thinks of himself as your uncle, I know—”
“So do I,” William said, wryly, but with a small sense of relief at the thought. Uncle Hal truly was a rock, over whom floods and torrents had often passed, leaving him unmoved.
“They want you to go back to England,” Brianna said. “I was wondering, myself—you’re an earl; doesn’t that mean you have … people? Land? Things that need taking care of?”
“There is an estate, yes,” he said tersely. “I—what the devil?” His horse had stopped dead, and Brianna’s mount was trying to turn around in the alley, whuffling at some disturbing scent.
Then his feebler olfactory sense perceived it, too—a stink of death. A wagon stood at the end of the alley, its sides draped with black cloth, this threadbare and bleached by age into rusty folds. The wagon was unhitched, and there were neither horses nor mules in evidence, but a small group of roughly clad men, both black and white, stood in a patch of sun just beyond the alley’s mouth, in attitudes of watchful expectation.
There was a sound of voices in the distance, subdued, but several of them, a murmuring that was punctuated abruptly by a piercing wail that made the waiting men flinch and look away, shoulders hunched.
Brianna turned in her saddle, looking over her shoulder and gathering up her reins, evidently wanting to go back—but there were people coming into the alley behind them, mourners in dark veils and armbands. Bree glanced at William, and he shook his head and nudged his own horse toward hers, jockeying toward the side of the alley in order to give the newcomers space to pass. This they did, a few sparing a glance at the riders—one or two with eyes widened at sight of Brianna astride with her skirts hiked up and an indecent expanse of calf showing—but most so focused on present grief as to be indifferent to spectacle.
Movement near the wagon drew William’s attention back; they were bringing out the body—bodies.
He whipped off his hat, pressed it to his heart, and bowed his head. To his astonishment, Brianna did the same.
There were no coffins; this was a funeral of the poor. Two small bodies wrapped in rough shrouds were borne out on planks and gently lifted into the wagon.
“No! No!” A woman, who must be the children’s mother, broke from the arms of her supporters and ran to the wagon, trying to climb in, screaming, “Noooo!” at the top of her voice. “No, no! Let me go with them, don’t take ’em away from me, no!”
A wave of horrified, stricken friends closed round the woman, pulling her back, trying by sheer force of compassion to quiet her.
“Oh, dear God,” Brianna said in a choked voice. William glanced at her and saw that tears were running down her face, her eyes fixed on the pitiful scene, and he recalled with a shock the children he had heard playing outside the Brumby house—hers.
He reached out a hand and grasped her arm—she let go of the reins with that hand and seized his as though she were drowning, clinging for dear life, remarkable strength for a woman. Several men had come to take up the shafts, and the wagon’s wheels creaked into motion, the small procession beginning its mournful journey. The mother had ceased wailing now; she moved as though sleepwalking after the wagon, stumbling as her knees gave way every few steps in spite of the support of two women who held her up.
“Where is her husband?” Brianna whispered, more to herself than to William, but he answered.
“He’ll likely be with the army.” Much more likely, he was dead as well, but his sister probably knew that as well as he did.
Her own husband … God knew where he was. She’d avoided answering him when he’d asked, but it was apparent that MacKenzie was a rebel. If he’d been in the recent battle—but no, he’d survived that, at least, William reminded himself. She didn’t ask about him, while we were in camp … why the devil not? Still, he could feel a small constant tremor running through his sister’s hand, and he squeezed back, trying to give her reassurance.
“Monsieur?” A high-pitched voice by his left stirrup startled him and he jerked in the saddle, making his horse shift and stamp.
“What?” he said, looking down incredulously. “Who the devil are you?”
The small black boy—Christ, he was wearing the remnants of a dark-blue uniform, so he must be, or recently had been, a drummer—bowed solemnly. His face, ear, and hand were black with soot on one side, and there was a deal of blood on his clothes, but he didn’t seem to be wounded.
“Pardon, monsieur. Parlez-vous Français?”
“Oui,” William replied, astonished. “Pourquoi?”
The child—no, he was older than he looked; he stood up straight and looked William in the eye, maybe eleven or twelve—coughed up a wad of black phlegm and spat it out, then shook his head as though straightening his wits.
“Votre ami a besoin d’aide. Le grand Indien,” he added as an afterthought.
“Is he saying something about John Cinnamon?” Brianna asked, frowning. She brushed at the tears streaking her face and sat up straight, gathering her own wits.
“Yes. He says—I take it you don’t speak French?”
“Some.” She gave him a look.
“Right.” He turned to the boy, who was swaying gently to and fro, staring at something invisible, plainly in the grip of exhaustion. “Dites-moi. Vite!”
This the boy did, with admirable simplicity.
“Stercus,” William muttered, then turned to his sister. “He says a press-gang from the French ships heard Cinnamon speaking French to someone on the shore; they followed him and tried to take him. He got away from them, but he’s hiding—the boy says in a cave, though that seems unlikely … anyway, he needs help.”
“Let’s go, then.” She gathered up her reins and looked behind her, judging the turning space.
He’d almost given up being surprised by her, but evidently not quite.
“Are you insane?” he inquired, as politely as possible. “Steh,” he added firmly to his own horse.
“What language are you speaking now?” she said, seeming impatient.
“‘Steh’ is German for ‘stand still’—when talking to a horse—and ‘stercus’ means ‘shit,’” he informed her crisply. “You have children, madam—like the ones you have just been weeping over. If you don’t want yours to be similarly afflicted, I suggest you go home and tend them.”
The blood shot up into her face as though someone had lit a fire under her skin and she glared at him, gathering up the loose ends of her reins in one hand in a manner suggesting that she was considering lashing him across the face with them.