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.
Three days later, he walked into Number 12 Oglethorpe Street and found Amaranthus in the parlor, poking the fire. She swung round at the sound of his step and dropped the poker with a clang. An instant later, she was hugging him, but not with the fervor of a lover. More the action of a stranded swimmer reaching for a floating log, he thought. Still, he kissed the top of her head and took her hands.
“Uncle Hal’s gone,” he said. “North.” Her eyes were already dark with fear. At this, the little blood remaining in her face drained away.
“He’s going to see Ben?”
“I can’t think what else he could be doing. Have you had any word from Papa? Has he come back?”
“No,” she said, and swallowed. She nodded at an open letter that lay on a small table under the window. “That came this morning, for Father Pardloe, but I opened it. It’s from a man named Richardson.”
William snatched the letter up and read it quickly. Then read it again, unable to make sense of it. And a third time, slowly.
“Who is that man?” Amaranthus had retreated a little, eyeing the letter as though it might suddenly spring to life and bite. William didn’t blame her.
“A bad man,” William said, his lips feeling stiff. “God knows who he really is, but he seems to be—I don’t know, exactly. ‘Major General Inspector of the Army’? I’ve never heard of such an office, but—”
“But he says he’s arrested Lord John!” Amaranthus cried. “How could he? Why? What does he mean ‘infamous and scandalous acts’? Lord John?”
William’s fingers felt numb and he fumbled the sheet of paper, trying to refold it. The official stamp beneath Richardson’s signature felt rough under his thumb, and he dropped the letter, which caught a whiff of air and spun across the carpet. Amaranthus stamped on it, pinning it to the floor, and stood staring at William.
“He wants Father Pardloe to go and speak to him. What the devil shall we do?”
138
Inherited Evil
IT WAS QUIET, BAR the usual shipboard noises and shouted orders from the deck of the Pallas, echoed faintly across the water from other anchored ships.
Grey had quite recovered from the effects of his abduction and was somewhat prepared when two deckhands came to fetch him from his small cabin. They bound his hands loosely in front of him—a bit of thoroughness that he appreciated as professional caution, though he deplored its immediate effects—and propelled him forcibly up a ladder and across the deck to the captain’s cabin, where Ezekiel Richardson was waiting for him.
“Sit, please.” Richardson gestured him to a seat and stood looking down at him.
“I have as yet had no word from Pardloe,” he said.
“It may be some time before you can reach my brother,” Grey remarked, as casually as possible in the circumstances. And where the devil are you, Hal?
“Oh, I can wait,” Richardson assured him. “I’ve been waiting for years; a few weeks doesn’t signify. Though it would, of course, be desirable for you to tell me where you believe him to be.”
“Waiting years?” Grey said, surprised. “For what?”
Richardson didn’t answer at once, but looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.
“Mrs. Fraser,” he said abruptly. “Did you really marry her simply to oblige a dead friend? Given your natural inclinations, I mean. Was it a desire for children? Or was someone getting too close to the truth about you, and you married a woman to disguise that truth?”
“I have no need to justify my actions to you, sir,” Grey said politely.
Richardson seemed to find that amusing.
“No,” he agreed. “You don’t. But you do, I suppose, wonder why I propose to kill you.”
“Not really.” This was in fact true, and the disinterest in Grey’s voice needed no dissimulation. If Richardson truly meant to kill him, he’d already be dead. The fact that he wasn’t meant that Richardson had some use for him. That, he wondered about, but chose not to say so.
Richardson drew a slow breath, looking him over, then shook his head and chose a new tack.
“One of my great-grandmothers was a slave,” he said abruptly.
Grey shrugged. “Two of my great-grandfathers were Scotch,” he said. “A man can’t be responsible for his ancestry.”
“So you don’t think the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children?”
Grey sighed, pressing his shoulders against the chair to ease the stiffness in his back.
“If they were, I should think humanity would have ceased to exist by now, pressed back into the earth by the accumulated weight of inherited evil.”
Richardson shrugged slightly, whether in acknowledgment or dismissal of the point, Grey couldn’t tell. Richardson turned to the wall of glass panes and looked out, presumably to give himself time to think up a new conversational gambit.
The sun was sinking and the light from the big stern window glittered from a million tiny wavelets, coruscating across the glass, the ceiling—did you call it a ceiling, in a ship?—and across the table at which Grey sat. It flickered over his hands, which were still rather the worse for wear. He flexed them, slowly, considering various nearby objects in terms of their effectiveness as weapons. There was a rather solid-looking clock and the bottle of brandy, but both were some distance away, on the far side of the cabin … God damn it, that was his bottle of brandy! He recognized the handwritten label, even at this distance. The bastard had been burgling his house!
“I beg your pardon?” he said, suddenly aware that Richardson had asked him something.
“I said,” Richardson said, with a pretense of patience, “how do you feel about slavery?” Not getting an immediate response, he said, much less patiently, “You were governor of Jamaica, for God’s sake—surely you’re well acquainted with the institution?”
“I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Grey said, gingerly touching the healing but still-swollen laceration on his scalp. “But if you insist … yes. I’m reasonably sure I know a great deal more about it than you do. As to my feelings regarding slavery, I deplore it on both philosophical and compassionate grounds. Why? Did you expect me to declare myself in favor of it?”
“You might have.” Richardson looked at him intently for a moment, and then seemed to come to some decision, for he sat down across the table from Grey, meeting his eyes on the level. “But I’m glad you didn’t. Now …” He leaned forward, intent. “Your wife. Or your ex-wife, if you prefer …”
“If you mean Mrs. Fraser,” Grey said politely, “she was in fact never my wife, the marriage between us having been arranged under the false impression that her husband was dead. He’s not.”
“I’m well aware of it.” There was a note of grimness in that remark, and it gave Grey an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.
The clock on the distant table uttered a clear ting!, then did it four more times, just to make its point. Richardson looked over his shoulder at it and made a displeased noise.
“I’ll have to go soon. What I want to know, sir, is whether you know what Mrs. Fraser is.”