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.
Lacking anything in the nature of a quartermaster or supply wagons, our motley band existed hand-to-mouth, calling on the hospitality of family members or known rebels whose farms we passed, occasionally raiding the fields and farmhouses of Loyalists—though Sevier and Campbell did exert themselves to keep the men from shooting or hanging the Loyalists they victimized—or going hungry. There were two or three wagons—these constantly bogging down and having to be heaved out of mud or dragged through streams—but they were for the transport of weapons and powder; Mrs. Patton had supplied a satisfying number of barrels. Some men always carried their rifles, shot bags, and powder horns; others would leave them in the wagons unless or until trouble threatened. Jamie and Young Ian always carried theirs. I had two pistols, visible in holsters—and a knife in my belt and another in my stocking. Even Roger was visibly armed, with pistol and knife, though he normally didn’t carry his gun loaded and primed.
“I stand a much better chance hitting someone on the head with it,” he’d told me. “Carrying it loaded just means I could shoot myself in the foot more easily.”
Doctoring was what I did during the nightly wrangling over precedence. It was clear that somebody needed to be in overall charge, but none of the militia leaders was willing to submit his men to the orders of any of the others. Eventually, they settled on William Campbell as the overall leader of the group; he was in his mid-thirties, like Benjamin Cleveland and Isaac Shelby, and a well-known patriot, a planter of substance—and the brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. So far as I could tell, his chief qualification for the present command was that he came from Virginia and therefore was free of the entanglements and competitions amongst the Overmountain men.
“And he has a loud voice,” I observed to Jamie, hearing Campbell’s shouting two campfires away. He appeared to be apostrophizing the rain, the recalcitrant fire, and the fact that someone had taken the canvas off one of the wagons, letting the guns get wet.
“Aye, he does,” he agreed, without much enthusiasm. “Ye need one, aye? If ye’re going to send men into battle or get them out of one.”
“You’d best take care of yours, then,” I observed, handing him a wooden cup of hot, mint-scented water. I’d got a fire started, under a sort of junior lean-to made of canvas—our canvas, not the canvas from the wagon—and a handy bush, but a fitful wind kept springing up, shaking the canvas and blowing wet off the trees, then passing on, only to return again in a few minutes.
“Do you want a drop of whisky in that?”
He considered for a moment, but then shook his head.
“Nay, keep it. We may need it more, later.”
I sat down beside him and sipped my own cup, slowly, warming both my hands and my insides. We hadn’t any food to cook, and precious little to eat: corn dodgers and a bag of apples Roger had coaxed from a farmstead we’d passed. Jamie had made the rounds of his men, making sure they’d got a few scraps of whatever food was available and had places to sleep. Now he leaned back against the trunk of a large pine beside me, took off his hat, and shook the water off it.
“Will I tell ye something, Sassenach?” Jamie said, after a long silence. He leaned back to look up at the crescent moon, briefly visible through the shredding clouds, and set his hand on my knee. It was his right hand, and I could see the thin line of the scar where I had removed his ring finger, white against the cold-mottled darkness of his skin, the four remaining fingers cramped with grasping reins all day.
“You shall,” I said, taking the hand and beginning to massage it. He didn’t seem worried or upset, so it probably wasn’t bad news.
“I was sitting on the porch, just afore we left, and I had wee Davy in my arms, him sucking on my thumb, and Mandy came up the steps covered in mud, to show me a bone she’d found by the lake and ask who’d owned it. I took it, looked at it, and told her it was from the backbone of a beaver, and she looked at me and asked did I hear animals.”
I started to straighten and stretch his fingers, and he settled his back more firmly against the tree and made a small sound of mingled pain and pleasure in the back of his throat.
“Hear them … how?” It had rained on and off all day but had stopped in the evening, and while I was damp all the way to my underthings, I’d established enough equilibrium of body temperature not to be shivering, and it was tranquil here, away from the large campfires.
“Ken she and Jem can tell where each other are, without seeing each other?”
“They can?” I said, a little startled. “No, I don’t think I did know that.” I wasn’t completely surprised to hear it, though. I supposed I’d actually seen them do it a number of times, without really noticing. “Do their parents know, do you think?”
“Aye, she said her mother kent it—had tried them, in Boston, having them go some distance apart and say could each still tell where the other was. Mandy didna pay attention to how far it was—it was only a game to them, though she thought it was strange that her parents couldna tell where she or Jem were, once she realized it.”
“Is it only her and Jem?” I asked. “Or can they, um, hear other people, too? Like their parents, I mean.”
“I asked her that, and she said they can, aye—but not everybody. Just each other and their parents. And you, but not so much.”
That gave me a shiver that had nothing to do with cold.
“Do they, er, hear you?”
He shook his head.
“Nay, I asked. She says I’m a different color in her head. She kens when I’m near her, but canna feel me at a distance.”
“What color are you?” I asked, fascinated.
He made a small sound of amusement. “Water,” he said.
“Really?” I squinted at him. It was dark, and the tiny fire was sputtering on damp wood, but my eyes had adapted to the dark and there was enough moonlight to make out his features. “Any particular kind of water? Blue like the ocean, or brown, like the creek?”
He shook his head. “Just water.”
“You should ask Jem if that’s what he thinks,” I said, and slid my fingers between his, pressing his fingers back to stretch the knuckles.
“I will,” he said, with a slightly odd note in his voice. “If I see him again.”
And there it was. The stone in my heart, the lump of hot lead in my viscera. I’d forgotten, briefly, worn out by the labor of the day. But the thought of what might happen on Kings Mountain was never far from my conscious mind.
Jamie felt my shock, and his fingers closed suddenly over mine, still cold, but firm, and he put his other hand over mine as well, sheltering it.
“If I die this week, I’d ask ye three things, a nighean,” he said quietly. “Three things that I want. Will ye give them to me?”
“You know I will,” I said, though my throat was tight and my voice thick. “If I can.”
“Aye, I do,” he said softly, and raising my hand, kissed it, his breath warm on my cold skin. “Well, then. When ye can, find a priest and have a Mass said for my soul.”
“Done,” I said, and cleared my throat. “It might take some time, though. I think the nearest priest is probably in Maryland.”
“Aye, fine. I’ll stick it out in Purgatory ’til ye manage. I’ve been there before; it’s none sae bad.”
I thought he was joking. About Purgatory, at least.
“And the second thing?”
“Wee Davy,” he said. “Amanda says that he’s like me. The color o’ water. He’s not the same as she and Jem are … and I think that maybe means he canna pass through the stones.”