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 and Tòtis were sitting at the table, eating bread and honey, conversing with Fanny and Agnes in a mélange of languages: I recognized English, Gaelic, and what I assumed to be Mohawk, plus a few words of French and a certain amount of sign language regarding food.
“So there you are!” I said, not quite accusingly.
“Here we are,” Ian agreed, amiably. “I hear ye’ve a visitor, Auntie.”
“We’ve had more than one,” I replied, and sat down, suddenly aware that it had been many hours since I’d eaten anything. “Did the girls tell you?”
“They’ve told me about the black soldiers,” he said, smiling at the girls. “And the man whose leg ye’ve sawed off? But I daresay ye ken a bit more about what’s happened, Auntie?”
“I do.” I reached for a slice of bread and the honey pot and filled him in. His eyes went round when I told him about the reappearance of Ulysses, whom he knew but hadn’t seen since that worthy’s departure from River Run years before. The same eyes narrowed when I told him just what Ulysses had said.
“Aye,” he said, when I’d finished my tale. “What does Uncle Jamie mean to do about it?”
“He hasn’t told me yet,” I said uneasily. “But he didn’t take out after the man. I mean, he could have followed Ulysses after the fight and left someone else to bring Corporal Jackson back here, but he didn’t.”
Ian lifted a shoulder, dismissing this.
“Well, he doesna really need to chase him, does he? Ye say Ulysses has a good-sized band of men—anyone could track a group like that, especially wi’ the ground like it is.” He bent and lifted Tòtis’s foot up high, to display the coating of mud that covered the boy’s moccasin and fringed the edge of his leggings. “And Uncle Jamie’s got a prisoner,” he added, putting down the foot and ruffling Tòtis’s hair, which made the boy giggle. “No point in chasing Ulysses without the militia—and it would take half a day to gather Uncle Jamie’s men.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t do that,” I said, pouring a cup of milk. “The last thing he’d want is a pitched battle that might get men killed—on either side. Let alone kill soldiers and bring down the wrath—well, more wrath—of the British army.”
“Aye, that would cause talk,” Ian said thoughtfully. “And the fewer folk who ken about that letter, the better.”
“Jesus, I hadn’t even thought about that,” I said. The bread and honey was restoring my depleted blood glucose and I was beginning to be able to think coherently. For the contents of that letter to become widely known—and thus known to Loyalists, not only on the Ridge but from the nearby backcountry—would be disastrous. They’d like nothing better than to rally a so-called Committee of Safety—cover for anything from blackmail to brigandage—and come arrest the Fraser of Fraser’s Ridge. Or burn his new—illicit—house over his head, as Ulysses had threatened.
“King beaver, forsooth,” I muttered under my breath.
“Uncle Jamie’s not damaged?” Ian said, an expression that couldn’t quite be called a smirk on his face as he looked me over.
“He’s asleep,” I said, ignoring the undertones. “Would you like some apple-and-raisin pie, Tòtis?”
Tòtis was normally a rather solemn little boy, but at this suggestion, he grinned hugely, displaying the gap where a late baby tooth had recently fallen out.
“Yes, please, Great-auntie Witch,” he said.
Fanny giggled.
“Great-auntie Witch?” I said, giving Ian an eye as I got up to fetch the pie.
He shrugged. “Well, the Sachem calls ye …”
The Sachem lived by himself, in a small dwelling he’d built that looked like part of the forest, but I gathered that he spent a great deal of time with the Murrays.
The Sachem was one thing; the inhabitants of the Ridge were something else. I couldn’t stop the more suspicious-minded tenants thinking—or saying—that I was a witch, but it was another thing to have my own great-nephew saying so in public.
“Hmm,” I said to Tòtis. “Perhaps you could call me by the Mohawk name for witch?”
He frowned at me, puzzled. Ian, with a slightly odd look on his face, bent down and whispered something in the boy’s ear. Both of them then looked at me, Tòtis in awe and Ian with circumspection.
“I dinna think so, Auntie,” he said. “There is a Mohawk word for it, but it’s a word that means ye have powers, without sayin’ quite what kind of powers.”
“Oh. Well, just Great-auntie, then, please.” I smiled at Tòtis, who returned the smile, but with an expression of caution.
“Aye, that’ll do fine.” Ian got up and brushed crumbs off his buckskins. “Tell Uncle Jamie I’ve gone to have a wee keek at Ulysses. I want to make sure he’s really got off the mountain and isna lurkin’ about. And I want to ken which way he’s going. So as we can find him when we want him.”
132
Man’s Medicine
THE HOUSE BEGAN TO breathe again, as things eased gradually through the evening. Ian hadn’t returned, but I’d sent Jem and Tòtis up to tell Rachel where he’d gone, and both boys returned for supper. The weather cleared and warmed, and a wonderful sunset spread a blazing curtain of bright-gold cloud in the western sky. Everyone went to sit on the porch and enjoy it, and I told Jamie—who had come down to eat—where Ian was. He’d paused for a moment, brow furrowed, but then nodded and relaxed, taking my hand. The vibrations of Ulysses’s visitation were still with us but beginning to fade, though the presence of Corporal Sipio Jackson in my surgery was an uneasy reminder.
I organized the four older girls into shifts to sit with Corporal Jackson and administer food, if wanted, honey-water, whether wanted or not, and laudanum, if needed. Then I fumbled my way upstairs, my eyes already closing, and fell asleep with no memory of undressing.
When I woke, somewhere past midnight, I discovered that this was because I hadn’t undressed at all but merely collapsed onto the bed. Jamie was sleeping deeply and didn’t stir when I got up and went down to relieve the watch and check on my patient.
Agnes was dozing in my rocking chair, but stirred and rose groggily when I came into the surgery. I put a finger to my lips and waved her back. Her knees folded at once; she was asleep again almost before her bottom hit the cushion. The chair rocked gently back under her weight—she was visibly pregnant by now—then came to rest. The only light came from the smothered embers in the tiny brazier on the counter, but the diffuse glow made the surgery seem soft and dreamlike, glimmering among the bottles, hazy among the hanging herbs drying overhead.
Corporal Jackson was asleep now, too; I’d looked in twice before going to bed, and finding him the last time wakeful, feverish, and in what hospital personnel tactfully call “discomfort,” had given him a tea of willow bark and valerian, with a few drops of laudanum. His face was slack and calm, mouth a little open, breathing with a slight congestive sound. I put both hands gently on his leg; one below the plaster dressing, a thumb on the pulse in his ankle, and the other on his thigh. His flesh was still noticeably warm, but not alarmingly so. I could feel the pulse of his femoral artery, slow and strong, and felt my own pulse in the fingertips of the hand on his ankle. I stood still, breathing slowly, and felt the pulses equalize between my hands.
The slow beat of the mingled pulses made me think suddenly of Roger’s throat—and of Brianna’s heart. And then of William. So she’d met her brother, at last.
That thought made me smile and at the same time experience a deep pang of regret. I’d have given a great deal to see that meeting.