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 had no idea how many women might share their husbands’ opinions, but share them or not, they’d be forced to live or die by the outcome.
“Bell, book, and candle,” he said, his eyes still on my face, and not without sympathy.
“What?”
“Ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle,” he said quietly, and touched the paper on my knee. “It’s the rite of excommunication and anathema, Sassenach—and that’s what I have done.”
Before I could think of anything whatever to say, I heard solid male footsteps coming up the stairs, and a moment later there was a knock at the door.
“Come,” Jamie said, his voice neutral.
The door opened, revealing Lieutenant Esterhazy, his face twenty years older than his age.
“Sir,” he said formally, and stood ramrod-straight in front of the bed. “My—that is—Lieutenant Bembridge has not returned. May I have permission to go and look for him?”
I was startled at that, and looked at Jamie, who was not startled. It hadn’t occurred to me that the lieutenant was no longer a friend of the house but rather Jamie’s prisoner—but evidently they both thought so.
Jamie was completely able to hide what he was thinking, but he wasn’t bothering to do so at the moment. If he let Esterhazy go, who might he see, and what might he tell them? It was obvious that Jamie was in no condition to defend himself or his house, let alone police the Ridge. What if the lieutenant went out and came back with a small mob? Left altogether and went to join Ferguson, with intent to lead him back here?
I was sure nothing of the sort was in the boy’s mind; he hadn’t any thought but his friend at the moment. But that didn’t mean he mightn’t think of other things, once away from the house.
“You may,” Jamie said, as formal as the lieutenant. “Mrs. Fraser will go with you.”
114
In Which the Earth Moves
“YE HAVE TO, SASSENACH.”
Those words wouldn’t leave my ear; they remained stubbornly trapped inside, a tiny, high-pitched echo that buzzed against my eardrum.
That’s what Jamie had said, when Oliver Esterhazy had left the room to go and take leave of his chief—or rather, of Elspeth—in the surgery.
“There’s nobody else,” Jamie said reasonably, making a slight gesture toward the empty corners of the bedroom. “I canna send Bobby or the Lindsays, because I need them here. Besides,” he added, leaning back on his pillow with a grimace as the movement pulled on his stitches, “if nothing’s happened to Mr. Bembridge, he’d be here now. Since he isn’t, it’s odds-on he’s hurt or dead. You’d be the best one to deal with him once he’s found, aye?”
I couldn’t argue with that, as a logical statement, but I argued anyway.
“I’m not going to leave you here alone. You’re in no shape to fight back, if anyone—”
“That’s why I need the Lindsays here,” he said patiently. “They’re guardin’ the door. Doors,” he corrected. “Kenny and Murdo are on the stoop and Evan’s round the back.”
“And where’s Bobby?”
“Gone to fetch a few more men and to spread the word that the captain is …” He hesitated.
“Hors de combat?” I suggested.
“In no condition to be moved,” he said firmly. “I dinna want anyone thinkin’ they ought to come storm the house and try to get him back.”
I stared at him. He was slightly whiter than the sheet covering him, his eyes were shadowed and sunken with exhaustion, and his hand trembled where it lay on the coverlet.
“And just when did you make all these arrangements?” I demanded.
“When ye went to the privy. Go, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye have to.”
I went, perturbed in mind. It went against my grain to leave wounded men, even if they were all stable at the moment and unlikely to take a sudden turn for the worse. And Elspeth, Fanny, and Agnes were completely capable of handling any minor medical emergency that might arise, I told myself.
“… so I’m going out with Lieutenant Esterhazy to look for his friend,” I said to Elspeth, taking down my field kit from the hook where I kept it. She didn’t look much better than Jamie, but nodded, her eyes fixed on her son. He was beginning to twitch and moan.
“I’ll manage things here,” she said quietly, and glanced up at me, suddenly. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bagged with fatigue, but alert. “Be careful.”
I stopped, looking at her, and a faint pink rose in her cheeks.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “But things seem … very unsettled. To me.”
“Do you mean Nicodemus Partland?” I said bluntly. “And the men he’s meant to be bringing from Ninety-Six?”
The pink in her cheeks vanished like a frost-bitten flower.
“Hmph,” I said, and left.
Oliver was waiting for me on the porch, and at once offered to take the pack with the field kit.
“No, I’ll keep that. You take this one.” I handed him another pack, this one with water, honey-water, some food, a folded blanket, a jar of leeches, and a few other things that might come in handy. “All right, then—where shall we start?”
He looked off the porch, bewildered.
“I don’t know.” Nobody had slept last night, and neither had he. While a nice, cheerful young man, he was in fact not the brightest person I’d ever met. Now, between worry and exhaustion, he didn’t seem to have more than a few brain cells still working. I took a deep breath of morning air, summoning patience.
“Well, where did you see him last?” I asked.
This question invariably annoyed the members of my household searching for lost items, but Oliver Esterhazy blinked and then squinted in concentration, finally saying, “Near the Meeting House.”
“Then we’ll start there.”
“I already looked there.”
“We’ll start looking there.”
The rain had stopped, but the forest was dripping and my skirts were wet to the knee before we were halfway there. I didn’t mind. Birds were chirping, the air was alive with the sharp, fresh scents of red cedar and spruce, sprouting dogwood and rhododendron, and the mountainside was running with dozens of tiny rills and streams. Spring was in the air, and the peace of the morning wood was seeping into me, the anxiety of the night and the urgencies of the morning settling into something approaching perspective.
Jamie wasn’t dying or in any immediate danger of doing so. Everything else could be handled, and true to form, he was doing just that, even flat on his back and too weak to sit up by himself.
I still wanted to be with him, but he was right—there was no one else he could have sent, under the circumstances. Though his concern lest Lieutenant Esterhazy raise a mob of Loyalists seemed unnecessary at the moment. We saw and heard no one on the trail, and everyone seemed to be keeping deliberately out of sight. We knocked at two cabins on the way, to inquire after Lieutenant Bembridge, but were met with closed faces and negative shakes of the head.
The Meeting House itself was abandoned. The door had been left open, half the benches were overturned, beer was puddled on the floor, and two raccoons were inside, busily chewing on a Masonic apron that someone had dropped.
“Get out of here!” Oliver grabbed a broom that had also been knocked to the floor and drove the raccoons out with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, then tenderly retrieved the remnants of the apron. It was a luxurious one, of white leather, with a white silk pleated edging and canvas ties, somewhat gnawed. The Masonic compass had been painted on it, with considerable skill.