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.
He was going to have to find out what Percy was up to, though, and why. A thread of heat ran down his back again, as though someone had poured hot coffee down his neckband.
Across the room, he saw Amaranthus’s long forefinger come to rest gently on William’s chest, pointing out something obvious.
HER FINGER RESTED—JUST barely—on the largest of the beetles on his waistcoat, a two-and-a-half-inch monster in brilliant-yellow silk with black-tipped horns. And, of course, tiny red eyes.
“Dynastes tityus,” she said, with approval. “The eastern Hercules beetle.”
“Really?” William said, laughing. “Dynastes tityus means, if I’m not mistaken, Tithean rebel. Was Hercules a Tithean?”
“A Titan, was he not?” Amaranthus tilted her head, lifting one brow. Her brows were soft but well marked, a darker blond than her hair.
“Yes. Perhaps that’s what the person who named this thing meant—but why rebel? Is this fellow known to be rebellious?” He looked down his nose at his chest—and Amaranthus’s long, slim index finger. Her wedding band glimmered on the fourth finger, and he took a deep breath that made her pointing finger sink slightly into the ochre silk. She smiled up at him, and slowly withdrew the finger.
“As to the beetle, I wouldn’t know. But you are, aren’t you?”
“Me? How do you mean?”
“I mean that you don’t intend to live your life to please other people’s expectations. Do you?”
That was a lot more direct than he’d expected—but then, she was startlingly direct.
“Your expectations?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she said, dimpling. “I expect nothing, William. From you or anyone else.” She paused for an instant, and her eyes fixed with his. They were gray now that she wore violet satin, and translucent as rain on a windowpane. “Unless you refer to the modest proposal I made you?”
In spite of the internal struggle going on inside him, he smiled at her reference to Jonathan Swift—though in truth, her own proposal had been nearly as shocking as Swift’s satirical essay advocating infant cannibalism as a remedy for poverty.
“That was what I had in mind, yes.”
“I’m pleased to know that you’re considering it,” she said, and though the dimple had left her cheek, it was plainly audible in her voice.
He opened his mouth to deny that he was doing any such thing—but while he had firmly refused to think about her outrageous suggestion, he was aware that his body had already accomplished its considerations and was making its equally firm conclusions known to him.
He coughed and glanced casually around the room. Papa was talking to the French diplomat and not looking in his direction, thank God.
“Well.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands behind his back. “I don’t know that ‘consideration’ is the right word, precisely—but the matter is irrelevant for the moment. I came this afternoon to see you—”
“Indeed?” She looked pleased.
“In order to tell you that I am leaving in the morning and don’t know how long it may be until I return.”
She ceased looking pleased, and he regretted that, but there was nothing to be done about it.
“Come,” he said, and touched her hand, nodding toward the French doors, open to the garden. “I’ll tell you why.”
She caught his mood at once and gave a slight nod.
“Not together,” she said. “I’ll go first. Go and have a drink, then take your leave through the front door and walk round.”
HE FOUND HER, at length, at the far end of Mrs. Fleury’s enormous garden, contemplating a small grotto, in which a stone putto was urinating on a toad that sat in the middle of a carved stone basin, its round eyes gleaming black beneath the stream.
“It’s a real toad,” she remarked, glancing briefly at him before returning her attention to the amphibian in question. “A Scaphiopus of some kind. They live mostly underground, but they do like water.”
“Obviously,” William said, but he wasn’t letting her distract him, and without ado he told her about the letter Denzell Hunter had sent to Uncle Hal. She went white and pulled her cape tight across her body, as though stricken by a sudden chill.
“Oh, no. No. Oh, poor woman!” To his surprise, her eyes were full of tears. But then he remembered that she, too, had a child, and must at once have imagined losing Trevor in such fashion.
“Yes,” he said, a lump in his own throat. “It’s very terrible. Uncle Hal naturally wants Dottie here, where he can take care of her, make sure she’s safe. So I’m going to go and fetch her.”
“Of course.” Amaranthus’s voice was unaccustomedly hoarse and she cleared her throat with a small, precise “hem,” then let go of her cape, straightening up. “I’m glad that your cousin will be restored to her family—to be alone, with such a dreadful loss … How long do you think the journey will take?”
“I don’t know,” William said. “If everything goes smoothly, perhaps a month, six weeks … If it doesn’t—illness, bad weather, travel mishaps—troop movements …” As usual, he felt a slight pang at thought of the army, and the sense of constant purpose it embodied. “It could be longer.”
Amaranthus nodded. The toad suddenly inflated its throat and let rip an enormous, resonant whonk! It repeated this cry several times, as William and Amaranthus watched it in astonishment, then gave them an accusing look and shuffled out of its basin and away under a frond of something green.
Amaranthus giggled, and William smiled, charmed at the sound. The tension between them had broken, and he reached to draw the cape back around her shoulders, quite naturally. Just as naturally, she stepped into his arms, and no one could have said, then or afterward, whose idea the kiss had been, nor yet what followed.
101
On the Road Again
JOHN CINNAMON HEAVED WILLIAM’S saddlebags aboard the mare, then looked the animal over carefully, circling her with squinted eyes, trying to pick up her forefoot, attempting to tighten the cinch (and loosening it in the process), and generally annoying the horse. Cinnamon was somewhat embarrassed at being rescued from the Saint-Domingue navy and had been taking particular care not to be a nuisance since the adventure.
“She’s a good horse, but she’ll probably kick you if you don’t leave off pestering her.” William was amused, but also moved at Cinnamon’s clumsy solicitude. He knew Cinnamon wished to go with him—probably not trusting him to manage the task of retrieving Dottie by himself without being arrested, hanged by accident, or killed by highwaymen—but not enough to leave without his portrait being finished.
“It will be all right,” he said, clapping Cinnamon on the shoulder and bending to retighten the cinch. “It will be nearly winter by the time I get to Virginia. Armies don’t fight in winter. I’ve been in the army; I know.”
“Yes, imbécile,” Cinnamon replied mildly. “I know. Didn’t you tell me that the last time you were in the army you got hit on the head by a German deserter and thrown into a ravine, where you almost died and had to be rescued by your Scottish cousin that you hate?”