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.
“Tell me where you fucking got this, or so help me God I will beat you to death with it!”
His eyes showed white, like a panicked horse, and he backed away from me, hands out in placation.
“He’s dead! He don’t need it no more!”
“Who’s dead?” I hardly heard the words; the blood had surged so hard into my ears that they were ringing. But a big hand clasped me by the shoulder and pulled me away from the boy. He promptly turned to flee, but Bill Amos—for it was he—let go of me and with two giant strides he had hold of the boy, picked him up with both hands, and shook him like a rag.
“What’s going on, Missus?” he asked, setting the boy down and turning to me. The words were calm, but he wasn’t; he was trembling all over with a mixture of bloodlust and reaction, and I thought he might just kill the boy inadvertently; his big fist was squeezing the boy’s shoulder rhythmically, as though he couldn’t stop, and the boy was squealing and begging to be let go.
“This—” I couldn’t hold the rifle; it slipped from my grasp and I barely caught it, its butt jolting into the ground. “It’s Jamie’s. I need to know where he is!”
Amos blew out a long breath and huffed air for a moment, nodding.
“Where’s Colonel Fraser?” he asked the boy, shaking him again, but more gently. “Where’s the man you took this’n from?”
The boy was crying, head wobbling and tears making tracks through the dirt and powder stains on his face.
“But he’s dead,” he said, and pointed a shaking finger toward a small rocky outcrop near the edge of the saddle, maybe fifty yards away.
“He’s bloody not!” I said, and slapped him. I shoved past him, hobbling—his kick had bruised my shin, though I didn’t feel pain—leaving Bill Amos to deal with whatever he felt like dealing with.
I found Jamie lying in a patch of dry grass, just behind the outcrop. There was a lot of blood.
I FELL TO my knees and groped frantically through his heavy clothes, wet with sweat—and blood.
“How much of this blood is yours?” I demanded.
“All of it.” His eyes were closed, his lips barely moving.
“Bloody fucking hell. Where are you hit?”
“Everywhere.”
I was deeply afraid he was right, but I had to start somewhere. I could see that one leg of his breeks was sodden with blood. No arterial spurting, though, that was good … I started feeling my way down his thigh.
“Dinna … fash, Sass …” He wheezed deeply. With tremendous effort, he opened his eyes and turned his head enough to look up at me.
“I’m … no … afraid,” he whispered. “I’m not.” A bout of coughing seized him. It was nearly silent, but the violence of it shook his whole body. He wasn’t coughing up blood …
Why is he coughing? Pneumothorax? Cardiac asthma? His shirt was sodden. If a ball had touched his heart but not penetrated …
“Well, I’m bloody afraid!” I snapped, and tightened my hold on his thigh, digging my fingers into his unresisting flesh. “Do you think I’m just going to sit here and watch you die by inches?”
“Aye.” His eyes closed, and the word was no more than a whisper. His lips were white.
He sounded completely certain about it, and the fear that was swarming over my skin burrowed suddenly inward and seized my heart with its claws.
His blood was spreading slowly, dark and venous. I was kneeling in the blood-soaked mud and there were huge splotches of it on my apron, black-red; it felt warm on my skin, though that must only be the heat of the day.
“You can’t,” I said, helpless. “Jamie—you can’t.”
His eyes opened and I saw them look past and through me, as though fixed on something far, far away.
“For … give me …” he said, his voice no more than a thread, and I didn’t know whether he spoke to me or to God.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, tasting cold iron on my tongue. “Jamie—please. Please don’t go.”
His eyelids fluttered, and closed.
I COULDN’T SPEAK. I couldn’t move. Grief overwhelmed me and I curled into a ball, still grasping his arm, holding it with both hands, hard, to keep him from drowning, from going down into the bloody earth, away from me forever.
Beneath the grief was fury, and the sort of desperation that lets a woman lift an automobile off her child. And with the thought of a child and the reek of blood, I was for a split second not kneeling in Jamie’s blood on a blistering plain of surrender but on splintered floorboards by a sputtering fire, hearing screams and smelling blood, with nothing to hold on to but a wet scrap of life and that one phrase: Don’t let go.
I didn’t let go. I seized him by the shoulder and managed to roll him onto his back, shoved the soaked coat back, and ripped his shirt down the middle. The bullet wound in his chest was evident, slightly left of center, welling blood. Welling, not spurting. And I didn’t hear the distinctive sound of a sucking chest wound; wherever the ball was, it hadn’t—yet—penetrated a lung.
I felt as though I were trudging through molasses, moving with unutterable slowness—and yet I was doing a dozen things at once: yanking tight a tourniquet around his thigh (the femoral artery was all right, thank God, because if it wasn’t, he’d already be dead), applying pressure to the chest wound, shouting for help, palpating his body for other injuries, one-handed, shouting for help …
“Auntie!” Ian was suddenly on his knees beside me. “Is he—”
“Push on this!” I grabbed his hand and slapped it on the compress over the chest wound. Jamie grunted in response to the impact, which gave me a small jolt of hope. But the blood was spreading under him.
I worked doggedly on.
“LISTEN TO ME,” I said, after what seemed a long time. His face was closed and white and the rumble of the crowds reached me like distant thunder from a clear blue sky. I felt the sound move through me and I fixed my mind on the blue, vast and empty, patient, peaceful—waiting for him.
“Listen!” I said, and shook his arm, hard. “You think you’re going to die by inches, but you’re not. You’re going to live by inches. With me.”
“Auntie, he’s dead.” Ian’s voice was low, rough with tears, and his big hand warm on my shoulder. “Come. Stand up now. Let me take him. We’ll bring him home.”
I WOULDN’T LET go. I couldn’t speak anymore, I hadn’t strength for it. But I wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t move.
Ian spoke to me now and then. Other voices came and went. Alarm, concern, anger, helplessness. I didn’t listen.
BLUE. IT’S NOT empty. It’s beautiful.
I FOUND FOUR wounds. A ball had gone clean through his thigh muscle but missed both bone and artery. Good. Another had scored his right side, below the rib cage, a deep furrow, bleeding profusely, but it hadn’t penetrated his abdomen, thank God. Another had struck him in the left kneecap. Fortunate as to minimal bleeding, and as to his walking in future, that could take care of itself. As to the chest wound …
It hadn’t penetrated his sternum entirely or he’d be dead, I thought. But it might have gone through and torn his pericardium or one of the smaller vessels of the heart, its momentum killed by the sternum but still allowing damage.
“Breathe,” I said to him, realizing that his chest wasn’t rising noticeably anymore. “Breathe!”