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.
“The captain’s?” I asked, watching him fold the garment, and he nodded.
Small accoutrements, like the wooden bucket and dipper for the refreshment of long-winded speakers and a stack of paper fans that the children had made for the coming summer, were scattered over the room. We stood for a moment in silence, looking at the wreckage, but neither of us chose to mention the irony—if that was the word—of a meeting of Freemasons, theoretically dedicated to the ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, disintegrating into riot and mayhem. So much for not talking politics in Lodge …
We stepped outside and Oliver carefully closed the door. Then we walked to and fro in widening circles, shouting Gilbert Bembridge’s name.
“Would he perhaps have taken refuge with … one of the captain’s followers?” I asked delicately when we met again outside the Meeting House. “If he was wounded, perhaps?”
“I don’t know.” Oliver was growing agitated, glancing around as though expecting his friend to spring out from behind a tree. “I—I think maybe he was with the men who were, um …”
“Chasing my husband?” I said, rather acidly. “Which way did they go?”
He said he wasn’t sure, but set off downhill with a sudden burst of determination, me following more cautiously in order not to turn an ankle on the rocks and gravel the sudden freshets had left exposed on the trails.
I was beginning to think that there was something odd about Lieutenant Esterhazy’s behavior. He was sweating heavily, though the woods were still very cold, and though he cast aside from time to time, he did so in brief, erratic bursts before returning to a path of his own choosing. I rather thought he knew where he was going, and wasn’t really surprised when we suddenly came to a spot where the woods … weren’t.
We were standing at the edge of a copse of scraggy oak saplings, and below our feet, the ground fell away in a tumble of raw black earth, full of broken trees and shattered bushes, with great gray rocks that had been dislodged by the fall and now lay half buried in the dirt, their undersides exposed, stained and wet with mud and dislodged worms.
“Well,” I said, after a moment’s silence. “So this is the famous landslide. Were you here when it happened?”
He shook his head. His hair was coming out of its neat naval plait and straggled over his sweating face. He wiped it back, absently.
“No,” he said, then repeated, “No,” more definitely.
It wasn’t a huge landslide, though if one was standing at the bottom of it in the dark, it had probably been startling enough. About fifty feet of the mountainside had slipped, rumbling down a steep slope of granite and half blocking a small brook.
“Do you think—” the young man began, then stopped and swallowed, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Gilbert could be … in there?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, eyeing the rubble dubiously. “If he is, though …” We were plainly not equipped to dig through a landslide with our bare hands, and I was on the point of saying so when the lieutenant grabbed my arm with a startled cry, pointing down.
“There! There!”
A smudge of navy blue, mud-smeared and nearly the color of the wet earth, was sticking out of the soil, about twenty feet from where we stood, and before I could say anything, Oliver was sliding and staggering through the wet clods, falling to one knee, then rising again and pushing onward.
I stumbled after him, gripping my emergency pack, though after the first convulsive leap, my heart had sunk like a stone. He couldn’t be alive.
Oliver had unearthed an arm and, leaping to his feet, heaved on it with all his might. I heard something crack and Gilbert’s head, with its dead-white face, burst from the ground in a shower of clods and gravel.
Oliver had let go Gilbert’s arm as though it were red-hot and was more or less gibbering in shock, but I didn’t have time to spare for him. I dropped to my knees and rubbed a hand hard over Gilbert’s face. I thought—but—no. I was right; I had seen a twitch of his eyelids—I saw it again now and my heart sprang into my throat.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ! Oliver! I think he’s alive—help me get him out!”
“He—wh-wh-what … he can’t be!”
I’d dropped my pack and was digging like a badger with my bare hands. Something warm touched my skin—a wisp of breath.
“Gilbert—Gilbert! Hang on, just hang on, we’re getting you out of there …”
“No,” said Oliver’s voice behind me. It was hoarse and high-pitched and I glanced over my shoulder, to see him pulling a torn-off branch out of the muck.
“No,” he said again, more strongly. “I don’t think so.”
JAMIE WOKE FROM a feverish doze to see Frances standing beside his bed, looking grave.
“What’s happened?” he asked. His throat was dry as sand, and the words came out in a faint rasp. “Where’s my wife?”
“She hasn’t come back yet,” Frances said. “She and Lieutenant Esterhazy only left an hour ago, you know.” “You know” came out with a faint tone of question and he made an attempt at a smile. Not a good one; his face was as tired as the rest of him. Frances looked at him assessingly, then lifted the cup she was holding.
“You’re to drink this,” she said firmly. “One full cup each hour. She said so.” The “She” was spoken with the respect due to the local deity, and his smile got better.
He managed to raise his head enough to drink, though she had to hold the cup while he did so. It was only moderately horrible and Frances, the dear child, had evidently taken Claire’s direction “with a little whisky” not only literally but liberally. He laid his head back on the pillow, feeling slightly dizzy, though that might just be the lack of blood.
“I’m to check and see if you’re oozing pus,” Frances told him, in the same firm tone.
“I’m in no condition to stop ye, lass.”
He lay still, breathing deep and slow, as she untied the bandage and lifted the wet compress from his chest. He was interested to see that she handled his body without the slightest hesitation or compunction, pressing here and there beside the line of stitching, a small frown between her soft dark brows. He wanted to laugh, but didn’t; even such breathing as he was doing hurt quite a bit.
“What d’ye think, a nighean?” he asked. “Will I live?”
She made a small grimace meant to acknowledge that she understood he was jesting, but the frown remained.
“Yes,” she said, but stood for a moment, frowning at his patchworked chest. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something and replaced the compress and retied the bandage in a business-like way.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “I would have waited for Mrs. Fraser to come back, but Lieutenant Esterhazy will be with her.”
“Speak, then,” he said, matching her formality. “Sit, if ye like.” He waved a hand toward the nearby stool and drew in his breath sharply at the resultant sensation. Frances looked at him in concern, but after a moment decided that he wouldn’t die, and sat down.
“It’s Agnes,” she said, without preamble. “She thinks she’s with child.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!”
“Just so,” she said, nodding. “She thinks it’s Gilbert’s—Lieutenant Bembridge, I mean.”
“She thinks it’s him? Who else might it be?”