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.
“Well, Oliver,” she said. “But she only did it once with him.”
“Sasannaich clann na galladh!”
“What does that mean?”
“English sons of the devil,” he told her briefly. He was struggling to get his elbows bent enough to sit up; this wasn’t news he could deal with lying flat. “Did either of the gobshites … er … try to … with you?”
Surprise wiped the frown off her face.
“I’m never going to lie with a man,” she said with complete certainty, then looked at him, with a little less. “You said I didn’t have to.”
“Ye don’t and ye never will,” he assured her. “If anyone tries, I’ll kill him. How long have ye kent this—about Agnes?”
“She told me just before I came up here,” Frances said, with a slightly guilty look over her shoulder. “I wath—wasn’t sure I should tell you but … she’th—she is afraid that Oliver killed Gilbert last night because he found out she was …”
“Does she ken for sure he found out?”
Frances nodded soberly.
“She told him. Yesterday. He asked her to marry him and she said she couldn’t, because …”
He wanted very badly to go downstairs and shake Agnes until her silly head rattled, but something much worse was dawning on him, and he pushed himself upright, disregarding pain and dizziness.
“Go down and get Kenny Lindsay for me,” he said urgently. “Now, Frances.”
“YOU DON’T THINK so?” I said, staring at Oliver Esterhazy.
“I mean—he’s dead, Mrs. Fraser! Come away, don’t touch him!” Oliver grabbed my arm, but I shook him off.
“He’s not dead,” I said, “but he may well be in the next few minutes, if we don’t get him out. Get down here and help me!”
He looked at me, mouth half open, then looked wildly at Gilbert—who did indeed look dead, but …
“Help me!” I said, and began scrabbling at the wet, heavy earth. I dug madly, trying to free enough of Gilbert’s chest for him to draw breath. He was lying mostly on his side, and luckily there wasn’t a lot of earth over his upper body, though his legs seemed to be buried more deeply. If only I could get him free enough to do chest compression and his bones weren’t shattered …
Oliver squatted beside me. He was cursing steadily under his breath, and now nudged me, trying to push me aside.
“Let me do it,” he said curtly. “I’m stronger.”
“I’m—”
“Move!” he said violently, and pushed me to the side. I lost my balance, fell sprawling, and the loose earth moved under me. I rolled in a shower of wet dirt, arms and legs flung out, and skidded to a stop against the exposed root tangle of an uprooted tree, partway down the slope. I was dazed and frightened, my heart pounding. I’d been so concerned with rescuing Gilbert Bembridge that it hadn’t occurred to me that the slipped earth was by no means settled in its new bed and might easily slide further. I rolled onto my hands and knees and began crawling back up the slope, as fast as I could manage without losing my precarious balance.
Oliver Esterhazy was digging, but not around his friend. He pawed a broken pine branch half free of the clinging mud, then stood up and yanked it free. He turned toward Gilbert’s protruding head, and with a determined expression staggered through the mud and swung the branch down on it.
“You … swine …” came a sepulchral voice from under the muddy pine needles. It was labored and hoarse, but plainly propelled by breath. Before I could rise to my feet, Gilbert’s free arm swung into the air and grappled the end of the branch.
Completely panicked, Oliver let go and leapt back. I saw one booted foot sink calf-deep in the loose dirt and then he, too, lost his balance and with a muffled shriek toppled over backward and hurtled down the slope like an ungainly toboggan.
I sat back on my heels and breathed for a minute. I’d lost my hat and my hair had escaped. I shoved it out of my face and started my laborious climb once more. I had to reach Gilbert and free him—or arm myself (I had a scalpel and two probes in my emergency pack—to say nothing of a few poisonous toadstools I’d collected last time I was out) before Oliver got hold of himself and caught up with me.
I glanced over my shoulder; Oliver was about forty feet downslope, wrapped around a stout poplar that had withstood the landslide. Someone was standing beside him, looking down at him.
I jerked round to look again. Loyalist or rebel, I didn’t care; either one would help me.
I waved my arms and shouted, “Hallooo!” and the man looked up. It was an Indian, and one I didn’t know. I suffered a brief spurt of panic when I thought that Scotchee Cameron might have failed us after all, but a second glance told me that this man wasn’t Cherokee. He was medium height and quite slender, and his hair was gray, roached and tied in a knot at the back of his neck. He wore a breechclout and leggings, with an embroidered silk vest—and nothing else above the waist but a collection of silver bracelets. He waved a hand to me, clinking audibly.
“I say, madam!” he called, in something like an English accent. “Are you in need of assistance?”
“Yes!” I shouted back, and pointed at Oliver’s body. “Is that man dead?”
The Indian glanced down and toed Oliver in the buttock. Oliver twitched, groaned, and reached back to swat away the nuisance.
“No,” he said, and put a hand to his belt, where I now saw that he carried a substantial knife of some sort. “Do you want him to be?”
I got to my feet and edged crabwise down the slope until I was in conversational range of the stranger—and Oliver, whose eyes were squinched shut, but who was plainly conscious and wishing he weren’t.
“Having you dead would solve a good many problems,” I told him. “But I’m told that two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Really?” said the Indian, smiling. “Who told you that?”
“Never mind,” I said. “At the moment, I need to look at this man and be sure that he isn’t badly hurt, and if not, then I need to go back up there”—I jerked a thumb over my shoulder—“and finish digging up the man who’s buried, so I can take care of him.”
“He’s not dead?” the Indian asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he surveyed the slope. “He looks dead.”
He did, but I was hoping that appearances might be deceiving. I was about to say this when a slight rustle in the wet brush betokened another arrival, and Young Ian stepped out, holding a little boy who was sucking his thumb and regarding me warily.
“Oh, there ye are, Auntie,” said Young Ian, his face lighting at sight of me. “I thought I heard your voice!”
I felt as though I might just dissolve with relief, and flow downhill myself, to puddle at the bottom.
“Ian!” I waded out of the mud and seized him in a one-armed hug. “How are you? Is this Oggy? He’s so big! Where’s Rachel?”
“Ach, all the women are havin’ a pish in the woods,” he said with a shrug. He nodded at the elderly Indian. “I see ye’ve met the Sachem. This is my auntie, Okàrakarakh’kwa; the one I told ye about.”
“Ah,” said the Sachem, and bowed, hand on his embroidered waistcoat. “It is my pleasure, honored witch.”
“Likewise, I’m sure,” I replied politely, twitching my mud-clogged hem in the ghost of a curtsy. Then I turned back to Ian.
“What do you mean, ‘all the women’? And who,” I added, suddenly catching sight of a larger boy of perhaps seven or eight, hovering shyly in the shadow of the wood, “is this?”
“This is Tsi’niios’noreh’ neh To’tis tahonahsahkehtoteh,” he said, smiling as he put his free hand on the boy’s shoulder. “My elder son. We call him Tòtis.”