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 flushed, embarrassed. Of course it was. She cleared her throat and tried to offer comfort, saying that Charles didn’t mean to kill Jamie, only to take him prisoner, and …
“And take him off to Patrick Ferguson to be hanged,” I finished, nastily. “For the sake of his own bloody advancement!”
“For the sake of his King and his honor as an officer of that King!” she snapped, glaring at me. “Your husband is a pardoned traitor and now he has forfeited the grace of that pardon! He has earned his own—” She realized what she was saying—what she plainly had been thinking for quite some time—and her mouth snapped shut like a trap.
The rain turned suddenly to hail, and hailstones beat upon the shutters with a sound like gunfire. We glanced at each other, but didn’t speak; we couldn’t have heard each other if we had.
We sat for some time by the fire, our chairs side by side, not speaking. Two old witches, I thought. Divided by loyalties and love; united in our fear.
But even fear becomes exhausting after a time, and I found myself nodding, the fire making white shadows flicker through my closing eyelids. Elspeth’s breathing roused me from my doze, a hoarse, rough sound, and she shifted suddenly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her face buried in her hands. I reached across and touched her and she took my hand, holding tight. Neither of us spoke.
The hail had passed, the wind had dropped, the thunder and lightning had stopped and the storm settled down to a heavy, soaking, endless rain.
We waited, holding hands.
110
… Confused Noise and Garments Rolled in Blood …
SOMETIME LATER—TIME HAD CEASED to have meaning by then—we heard them. The sounds of a body of men and horses. Trampling and the sounds of urgency.
The noise had roused Fanny and Agnes; I heard their bare feet pattering down the stairs.
I was at the door with no memory of getting there, fumbling with the mortise bolt—I hadn’t barred the door when Elspeth came. I yanked the heavy door in as though it weighed nothing, and in the dark and flickering candlelight I saw Jamie, among a many-headed mass of black confusion, a head taller than his companions and his eyes searching for me.
“Help me, Sassenach,” he said, and stumbled into the hall, lurching to one side and striking the wall. He didn’t fall, but I saw the blood on his wet shirt, soaked and spreading.
“Where?” I said urgently, seizing his arm and looking for the source of the blood. It was running down his arm beneath the sleeve of his jacket; his hand was wet with it. “Where are you hurt?”
“Not me,” he said, chest heaving in the effort to breathe. He jerked his head backward. “Him.”
“CHARLIE!” ELSPETH’S CRY made me jerk round to see Tom MacLeod and Murdo Lindsay negotiating a makeshift stretcher composed of jackets strung on hastily lopped branches around the doorjamb, trying not to drop or injure the contents. Said contents being Charles Cunningham in a noticeable state of disrepair.
They knew where the surgery was and proceeded there at a trot. Jamie pushed himself off the wall and called to them hoarsely in Gaelic, at which they immediately slowed down, walking almost on tiptoe.
“He’s shot in the back, Sassenach,” Jamie said to me. “Maybe … a few other places.” His hand was trembling where it pressed against the wall, and his fingers left bloody smears.
“Go and sit down in the kitchen,” I said briefly. “Tell Fanny I said to get your clothes off and find out how bad it is, then come and tell me.”
The stretcher party had reached the surgery and I rushed in behind them, in time to superintend the moving of the captain onto my table.
“Don’t pick him up!” I shouted, seeing them about to lay the stretcher on the floor. “Put the whole thing on the table!”
Cunningham was alive, and more or less lucid. Elspeth was already on the other side of the table, and between us we cut his clothes off, as gently as possible, she speaking reassuringly to him, though her hands were shaking badly.
He’d been shot twice from the front; a ball in the right forearm that had broken the radius just above the wrist, and a shot that had scored his ribs on the left but fortunately not entered the body. One side of his face was scratched and bruised, but from the presence of bark in some of the scratches, I thought he had likely collided with a tree in the dark, rather than been in a fistfight with one.
“Jamie says you’ve been shot in the back,” I said, bending low to speak to him. “Can you tell me where the wound is? High? Low?”
“Low,” he gasped. “Don’t worry, Mother, it will be fine.”
“Be quiet, Charles!” she snapped. “Can you move your feet?”
His face was dead white, beard stubble like a scatter of pepper across his skin. I had my hands under him, feeling my way between the jackets of the stretcher and the layers of his own clothes, trapped under him. His clothes were sodden, but so were those of all the men—I could hear the dripping out in the hall, as several men were crammed in the doorway, listening. I pulled one hand out from under him, gingerly, and looked at it. It was scarlet to the wrist. I glanced at his feet. One of them twitched and Elspeth gasped. She was stanching the blood from his arm, but at this stopped and bent over him.
“Move the other, Charles,” she said urgently.
“I am,” he whispered. His eyes were closed and water ran from his hair. I looked down the table. Neither foot was moving.
Fanny pushed her way through the men at the door and came in, her hair loose over her wrapper and her eyes huge.
“Mr. Fraser has a bad cut from his right shoulder down across his chest,” she told me. “It just missed his left nipple, though.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good news,” I said, repressing a mildly hysterical urge to laugh. “Did you—”
“We put a compress on it,” she assured me. “Agnes is pushing on it. With both hands!”
“How fast is the blood soaking through?” I had my hands back under Captain Cunningham, feeling my way through layers of sopping cloth, in search of the wound’s exact location.
“He soaked the first compress, but the second one is doing better,” she assured me. “He wants whisky; is that all right?”
“Make him stand up,” I said, reaching the waistband of the captain’s breeches. “If he can stand upright for thirty seconds, he can have whisky. If not, give him honey-water and make him lie down flat on the floor. No matter what he says.”
“We’ve already been giving him honey-water,” she said, and looked closely at our patient. “Should the captain maybe have some, too?” I had one hand on the captain’s femoral artery—we’d cut his breeches, jacket, and shirt down the fronts and peeled the cloth away from his body—and the other underneath him. His pulse was surprisingly strong, which encouraged me. So did the fact that while blood was dripping off the table, it wasn’t pulsing out into my hand. I thought the shot hadn’t struck a major vessel. On the other hand … his feet still weren’t moving.
“Yes,” I said. “Bring some; Mrs. Cunningham can give it to him while I … see about this.”
Elspeth laid her son’s bandaged arm gently across his middle and smoothed the wet hair off his forehead, wiping his face with a towel.
“You’ll be all right, Charles,” she said. She spoke gently now, but her voice was rock-steady. “You’ll be warm and dry in no time.”
I closed my eyes, the better to listen to what my hands were telling me. I’d found the wound in his back, and it wasn’t good. A ball had entered between the last thoracic and first lumbar vertebrae. It still was between the vertebrae; I could feel it with my middle finger, a small hard lump, and stuck fast; it didn’t move when I pushed it a little. The flesh of his back was hard and cold, the muscles all in spasm.