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.
“See?” I said, and got awkwardly to my feet. “Don’t laugh. I’ll be back.”
I was moving much better on my way back to the surgery, my head clearing and my brain beginning to work again. Aside from the impressive knife wound across his chest, he seemed uninjured. No signs of shock or disorientation, and the wound was clean, that was good …
Elspeth was still sitting in my surgery chair, but she was awake. My Merck Manual lay open on her lap. I stopped dead in the doorway, but she’d heard me coming. She looked up at me, the skin of her face white and stretched so tight across her bones that I could see plainly what she’d look like dead.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered, one hand spread across the page as though to hide it. I could see the words “Spinal Cord Injuries” at the top of the page.
“My daughter brought it to me from—er … Scotland,” I said, improvising out of a momentary panic. But then I remembered: I’d destroyed the copyright page. No one outside the family knew, or could know, and I breathed again.
“I can ask Fanny to copy out some of the passages for you, if you’d like. Though I don’t know how much use they might be,” I added reluctantly. “Some of the procedures they mention just aren’t available in the colonies—nor yet in most of Europe.” I crossed my fingers under my apron, thinking, Nor anywhere else in the world. “And even as advanced as some of the things mentioned there are … they might not be useful to—to your particular concerns.”
I looked at Charles Cunningham as I said this, and wanted to cross my fingers again—for luck, this time. Instead, I drifted to the foot of the table and gently lifted the bottom of the vomit-yellow coverlet to expose his bare feet. They looked perfectly normal.
But of course they would. Even if his spinal cord hadn’t been severed—and I didn’t think it had—it had clearly been compressed and damaged to some extent. And spinal cord injuries were often permanent. But it would take a little time for the visible effects—wasting of muscles, twisting of limbs—to become apparent. A sharp stink made my nostrils twitch and compress.
Loss of bowel and bladder control. Expected, but not good.
“Have you seen anyone like this before?” Elspeth’s voice was sharp and she rose to her feet, as though drawn to defend her son.
“Yes,” I said, and she heard everything in my voice and sat down again as though she, too, had been shot in the back.
Jesus, who shot him? Please, God, don’t let it have been Jamie …
I pushed back the coverlet and cleaned him gently with a wet cloth. He was unconscious and didn’t stir. Nothing stirred under my hands, and my lips tightened. Men have very little conscious control over their erectile responses, as Jamie had just demonstrated to me, and I’d had a lot of men with quite severe wounds stiffen at my touch. Not this one. Still, it might be the laudanum … that really did affect libidinal response.
I held on to that minuscule shred of hope for the moment and covered the captain again. Elspeth was sitting upright now, but her attention was inward, and I knew she was envisioning the same things I was: caring for a beloved child for whom there was no real hope. Her last child. Months, years—Five years, came the searing thought—of wiping his arse and changing his sheets, moving his dead legs four times a day to prevent atrophy. Of dealing with the bitterness of a man who had lost his life, but had not died.
There was light behind the shutters now, though it was pale and watery; the sound of the rain had settled to the steady drumming of an all-day downpour. I walked behind Elspeth and opened the shutters, then cracked the window enough to bring a waft of cold, clean, damp air into the room.
I had to go and see to Jamie; there was nothing more I could do here. I turned and put my hands on Elspeth’s shoulders and felt her bones, hard and brittle under the black of her shawl.
“He’ll be able to talk and to feed himself,” I said. “Beyond that … time will tell.”
“It always does,” she said, her voice colorless as the rain.
112
We Met on the Level …
AS I LEFT THE surgery, the front door opened behind me, admitting Lieutenant Esterhazy. He looked as shocked and disordered as everyone else this morning, but was at least on his feet and not visibly damaged.
“Come with me,” I said, seizing him by the arm. “Your captain is sleeping and won’t need you for a bit, but I do.”
“Of course, ma’am,” he muttered, and shook his head as though to throw off some heavy thought before following me to the kitchen.
“Where is Lieutenant Bembridge?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. I half-expected him to come through the door; the two lieutenants were so seldom apart that I sometimes forgot which was which.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, his voice quivering a little. “He—didn’t come back to the rendezvous last night, nor this morning—I went down by the Meeting House and walked round, calling out. So I came to report to the captain, before I go back to look for him some more.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, sincerely. “I heard there was a landslide last night—were you there when that happened?”
“No, ma’am. But I heard. So when Gilbert didn’t come back, I thought perhaps …”
“I see. What about this landslide I hear so much about?” I said to Jamie, who had managed to get himself up on one elbow and was eyeing the lieutenant with some wariness. “What happened?”
“A good bit of hillside came down wi’ the rain,” he said. “Trees and rocks and mud. But I canna say more than that. I dinna even ken where we were when it happened. Maybe somewhere near the wagon road.” He touched his chest gingerly, grimacing.
“That happened in a landslide?” I knew a cutlass wound when I saw one—and had an eight-inch scar down the inside of my left arm to prove it.
“Just before,” he said tersely. He hadn’t taken his eyes off young Esterhazy, and it finally occurred to me that the lieutenant might just be young enough, foolish enough, and under sufficient mental strain as to think he could take Jamie captive in his own house. He was wearing a pistol and an officer’s dirk. And Jamie isn’t armed. A small, cold finger touched the back of my neck, but then I looked carefully at the young man, then back at Jamie. I shook my head.
“No,” I said simply. “He’s worried about his friend. And probably his captain, too,” I added. Esterhazy turned sharply to stare at me, eyes wide.
“What’s happened to the captain? You said he was sleeping!”
“Shot,” I said briefly. “He’ll live, but he’s not going anywhere for the moment.”
“Did you shoot him, sir?” The young man addressed Jamie seriously.
“I tried,” Jamie replied dryly. “I fired just as he came at me wi’ his cutlass. I dinna ken if I hit him or no—but it wasna me that shot him in the back, I can tell ye that much. I saw his face plain, in the lightning. And then the mountain fell on us,” he added, as a distinct afterthought.
“Shot in the back?” Esterhazy turned to me, shocked.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, only halfway under my breath. “Yes. I took the ball out and he’s resting comfortably. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, Lieutenant, I need you to help me get Colonel Fraser off the bloody floor and up to his bed. Now,” I repeated, seeing that he was disposed to ask further questions.
The conversation roused Fanny, and Agnes appeared from above, frowsty with sleep. Both of them were mortified at being seen by the lieutenant in their nightdresses and wrappers, but I made them go and start slicing onions for a poultice, grinding up goldenseal root, and seeing to Mrs. Cunningham’s bodily needs while Lieutenant Esterhazy and I levered Jamie up in stages, first to a seat on the bench, where Bluebell nosed him anxiously and licked his bare knees, and then to his feet, with the two of us gripping his elbows for dear life as he swayed to and fro, on the edge of fainting.