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.
He started walking back up the trace, but Cleveland, who moved quickly despite his bulk, was right beside him.
“If we’re to have militia, we need guns,” Cleveland said. “That stands to reason, don’t it?” Seeing that Jamie wasn’t disposed to answer rhetorical questions, he tried another tack.
“The Indians have guns,” he said. “The British government gives the Cherokee a good-sized allotment of shot and powder every year, for hunting. Was that the case when you were an agent?”
“Good day, Mr. Cleveland.” He walked faster, though the exercise was making his wounded leg throb. Cleveland grabbed his arm and jerked him to a stop.
“We can talk about guns later,” Cleveland said. “There’s just the one other thing I had in mind to speak to you about.”
“Take your hand off me.” The tone of his voice made Cleveland let go, but he didn’t back away.
“A man named Cunningham,” he said, his small brown eyes steady on Jamie’s. “Ex-navy captain. A Tory. Loyalist.”
That made a small, cold hole in Jamie’s middle. Captain Cunningham was indeed a Loyalist—so were a dozen others of his tenants.
“I hate a Tory,” Cleveland said, reflectively. He shook his head, but Jamie could see the gleam of his eyes beneath his hat brim. “Hung a few of ’em, down home. Put a scare into the others, and they left.” He cleared his throat and spat, landing a gob of yellowish phlegm near Jamie’s foot.
“Now. This Captain Cunningham writes letters. Essays in the papers. Someone with the captain’s welfare in mind might want to have a word with him about that. Don’t you think?”
WHEN JAMIE CAME back to the house site, he found the fire made up and a good smell of something cooking in the cauldron. Roger and Ian were there, talking to Claire while the shouts of children playing echoed among the trees near the creek. That’s right; Jenny would be coming to dinner tonight. He’d nearly forgot, in his annoyance with the blether of yon Cleveland.
“Someone with the captain’s welfare in mind might want to have a word with him about that. Don’t you think?”
This was not, in fact, bad advice, but knowing that didn’t help his mood any. He disliked being threatened, he disliked being condescended to, and he very much disliked being loomed at by a man larger than himself. He didn’t like Cleveland’s news, either, but he didn’t hold the man responsible for that.
The air of peaceful domesticity reached out for him, soothing, tempting him to join his family, drink the cold beer Fanny had pulled out of the well, sit down, and rest his aching leg. But the conversation with Cleveland was still boiling under his breastbone and he didn’t want to talk to anyone about it until he’d parsed it for himself.
He waved briefly to Claire as he passed through the site to where his shovel was waiting, thrust into the ground by the half-dug privy; the effort of digging would calm him as he thought things through. He hoped.
ROGER HAD SEEN Jamie disappear quietly into the shadows behind the half-built chimney and assumed that he’d gone for a piss. But when he didn’t reappear within a few minutes, Roger detached himself from the conversation—this presently centering on the infinite possibilities for wee Oglethorpe’s eventual real name—and followed his father-in-law into the gloaming.
He found Jamie standing on the edge of a large rectangular hole in the ground, evidently lost in contemplation of its depths.
“New privy?” he asked, nodding into the pit. Jamie looked up, smiling at sight of him, and Roger felt a rush of warmth—on more than one account.
“Aye. I’d only meant it to be the usual, ken, wi’ a single seat of ease.” Jamie gestured at the hole, the last of the sun touching his hair and skin with a golden light. “But with four more—and maybe yet more, in time? As ye say ye mean to stay, I mean.” He glanced sideways at Roger, and the smile came again.
“Then there’s the folk who come to see Claire, too. One of the Crombie boys came down last week to get a remedy for a case o’ the blazing shits, and he spent so long gruntin’ and groanin’ in Bobby Higgins’s privy that the family were all havin’ to trot into the woods, and Amy wasna best pleased at the state of the privy when he left, I can tell ye.”
Roger nodded.
“So ye mean to make it bigger, or make two privies?”
“Aye, that’s the question.” Jamie seemed pleased that Roger had grasped the essence of the situation so quickly. “See, most o’ the places wi’ families have a necessary that will accommodate two at once—the McHughs have a three-hole privy, and a thing of beauty it is, too; Sean McHugh is a canny man with his tools, and a good thing, what wi’ seven bairns. But the thing is—” He frowned a little and turned to look back toward the fire, presently hidden behind the dark bulk of the chimney stack. “The women, ken?”
“Claire and Brianna, you mean.” Roger took Jamie’s meaning at once. “Aye, they’ve notions of privacy. But a wee latch on the inside of the door …?”
“Aye, I thought of that.” Jamie waved a hand, dismissing it. “The difficulty’s more what they think of … germs.” He pronounced the word very carefully and glanced quickly at Roger under his brows, as though to see if he’d said it right, or as if he weren’t sure it was a real word to start with.
“Oh. Hadn’t thought of that. Ye mean the sick folk who come—they might leave …” He waved his own hand toward the hole.
“Aye. Ye should ha’ seen the carry-on when Claire insisted on scalding Amy’s privy wi’ boiling water and lye soap and pourin’ turpentine into it after the Crombie lad left.” His shoulders rose toward his ears in memory. “If she was to do that every time we had sick folk in our privy, we’d all be shitting in the woods, too.”
He laughed, though, and so did Roger.
“Both, then,” Roger said. “Two holes for the family, and a separate privy for visitors—or rather, for the surgery. Say it’s for convenience. Ye dinna want to seem highfalutin by not letting people use your own privy.”
“No, that wouldna do at all.” Jamie vibrated briefly then stilled, but stayed for a moment, looking down, a half smile still on his face. The smells of damp, fresh-dug earth and newly sawn wood rose thick around them, mingling with the scent of the fire, and Roger could almost imagine that he felt the house solidifying out of the smoke.
Jamie left off what he was thinking, then, and turned his head to look at Roger.
“I missed ye, Roger Mac,” he said.
ROGER OPENED HIS mouth to reply, but his throat had closed as hard as if he’d swallowed a rock, and nothing came out but a muffled grunt.
Jamie smiled and touched his arm, urging him toward a big stone at what Roger assumed would be the front of the house. The stone foundation ran out at ninety-degree angles from the big stone. It was going to be a sizable house—maybe even bigger than the original Big House.
“Come walk the foundation with me, aye?”
Roger bobbed his head and followed his father-in-law to the big stone, and was surprised to see that the word “FRASER” had been chiseled into it, and below that, “1779.”
“My cornerstone,” Jamie said. “I thought if the house was to burn down again, at least folk would ken we’d been here, aye?”
“Ah … mm,” Roger managed. He cleared his throat hard, coughed, and found enough air for a few words. “Lallybroch … y-your da …” He pointed upward, as though to a lintel. “He put—the date.”
Jamie’s face lit. “He did,” he said. “The place is still standing, then?”
“It was last time I … saw it.” His throat had loosened as the grip of emotion left it. “Though … come to think—” He stopped, recalling just when he’d last seen Lallybroch.