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.
I grabbed him round the waist and the lieutenant got an arm round his rib cage from the back, and we lurched out of the kitchen and up the stairs like a mob of drunks being chivvied by the police.
We dropped him on the bed like a bag of cement and I was obliged to lean over and put my hands on my knees, gasping for air until the small black flecks left my field of vision. When I could stand up again, I thanked the lieutenant, himself red in the face and breathing like a steam engine, and sent him downstairs to be given something hot to drink. Then I went to stir up the fire and open the shutters; I was going to need both heat and light.
Jamie lay flat on the bed, pale as wax, the stained compress pressed grimly to his chest. I put a hand on his and pried his stiff fingers loose. Seen in the watery daylight from our window, the wound looked nasty but not terribly serious. It hadn’t severed any tendons, nor had it gone entirely through the pectoralis, and I thought it had barely nicked his collarbone.
“It bounced off your sternum,” I told him, as I prodded gently here and there. “Otherwise, it would have cut down deep into your chest on this side.”
“Oh, good,” he murmured. His eyelids were closed tight, but I could see the eyes under them moving restlessly to and fro.
“All right.” I swabbed the area carefully with saline and fished a threaded silk suture out of the jar. “Do you want something to bite on while I stitch this, or would you rather tell me what the hell happened last night?”
He opened bloodshot eyes and considered me for a moment, then closed them again, and—muttering something in which I thought I distinguished the words “Spanish Inquisition …”—he clenched both fists in the bedclothes, took a deep breath, and relaxed as much as possible under the circumstances.
“Have ye got a piece of paper nearby, Sassenach?” he asked. I glanced at the bedside table, where I’d left my current journal—nothing in the way of Deep Thoughts or spiritual meditations; more a noting of the trivia of which days are composed: the small copper pot had been left on the fire too long and had a small hole melted in it; I must remember to send it to Salem to be mended when Bobby Higgins went there next week; Bluebell had eaten Something Awful and the hearth rug in the girls’ room should be boiled …
“Yes,” I said, piercing the skin with a quick jab. He grunted but didn’t move.
“Will ye set a paper handy, then, Sassenach, wi’ something to write with? I’ll be tellin’ ye names as I go.”
I put in three more stitches, then swiveled round to get the journal. As I normally wrote in bed, I used a small stick of graphite wrapped round with a strip of rag, rather than ink and a quill, and I fetched that, too.
“Shoot,” I said, returning to my repairs. “If you don’t mind the reference.”
His stomach twitched in brief amusement.
“I don’t. It’s a list of the Loyalists who were wi’ Cunningham last night. Put down Geordie Hallam, and Conor MacNeil, Angus MacLean, and—”
“Wait, not so fast.” I picked up the pencil. “Why do you want a list of these men? You obviously remember who they are.”
“Oh, I kent who they were, well before last night,” he assured me, with some grimness. “The list is for you and Bobby and the Lindsays, in case they kill me in the next few days.”
The graphite snapped in my hand. I put it down, wiped my hand carefully on a wet rag, and said, “Oh?” in as calm a voice as I could manage.
“Aye,” he said. “Ye didna think last night settled matters, did ye, Sassenach?”
Given the current state of Captain Cunningham, actually I had rather thought that. I swallowed hard and picked up the needle again.
“You mean there’s a possibility that we may have a visitation by the Cherokees?”
“Aye, them,” he said thoughtfully, “or maybe Nicodemus Partland, wi’ a band of men from over the mountain. Mind, it may not happen,” he added, seeing my face. “And my own men will be ready if it does. But just in case, ye’ll need to get rid of the Loyalists here, if I’m gone. So ye need to ken who they are, aye?”
I paused to pick up a fresh suture thread and breathed carefully, my eyes on my work.
“Get rid of them?”
“Well, I dinna mean to let them stay on as my tenants,” he said reasonably. “They tried to kill me last night. Or take me off to be hanged, which isna much better,” he added, and I saw the rage simmering under the thin skin of reason.
“That’s a point, yes.” I dabbed blood away from the wound and made two more stitches. I’d poked up the fire and added fresh wood, but I felt cold to the marrow. “Can you—I mean, will they just … leave, if you tell them to go?”
He’d been looking at the ceiling, but now turned his head to look at me. It was the patient look of a lion who’d been asked if he could really eat that wildebeest over there.
“Um,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Tell me about the landslide.”
His face lightened, and he told me about his flight from the Lodge, four or five of his own men close behind him, and the Loyalists running into them, to be delayed while he escaped into the darkness.
“Only the trail I meant to take was washed away by the rain—ouch—and I got lost for a bit, looking for another. Then it began to thunder and the lightning was strikin’ close enough I could smell it, but at least I could see my way now and then.”
He’d struck back in the direction he thought home to be, hoping to encounter some of his men, whom he’d told to guard the New House from the rear and capture such men of Cunningham’s as came that way.
“Capture them?” I said, tying a suture, clipping it, and picking out a fresh thread. “Where did you mean to put them? Not the root cellar, I hope.” Our food levels were perilously low after a long winter, and such dried fruits and early vegetables as we had were all in the root cellar, along with bags of chestnuts, walnuts, and peanuts, and I could just imagine the havoc a lot of resentful captives might wreak in there.
He shook his head. His eyes were open now, fixed on the ceiling joists in order to avoid looking at what I was doing to his chest.
“Nay, I’d told Bobby they should put anyone they caught into the pigs’ cave, tied up.”
“Dear God. And what if the White Sow took it into her mind to show up?” While the legendary Beast of the Ridge had declined to establish a new lair under the present house—thank God—she did still roam the mountainside, eating her fill of chestnut mast and anything else that took her fancy, and she did, now and then, visit the pigpen and liberate a few of its inhabitants, most of these her own descendants.
“The fortunes of war,” he said callously. “They should ha’ kent better than to follow a man who canna choose between the King and God. Ng!”
“We’re more than halfway,” I said soothingly. “As for the captain … most Loyalists would assure you that as God appointed the King, His interests lie in the same direction. Go on telling me about last night.”
He grunted and shifted his weight uneasily, but then settled again and took a cautious breath.
“Aye. Well, by the time I could tell for sure where I was, I was close to Tom MacLeod’s place—did Gillebride say Tom’s nose is broken?—and I thought I’d best take refuge there. So I was sloggin’ through the mud and bushes, trying to keep track of where I was by what I could see when the lightning went, and all of a sudden there was a thunderclap that split the sky and a monstrous flash that left me blind, and the rain turned to poundin’ hail, just like that—” He snapped his fingers. “So I pulled my plaid over my head to shield it, and next thing I ken, the captain’s run into me in the dark. Only I didna ken who it was, and neither did he, and then the lightning went again and I went for my pistol and he went for his cutlass and …” He waved a hand at the half-sewn gash in his chest.