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.
“I thought your father might take it amiss,” he said, smiling. A slightly startled expression crossed her face, and her hand tightened on his.
“It’s true,” she whispered, staring up at him. “Ye saw Da, talked to him—only a few months ago? Your voice doesna sound like … Ye dinna talk like ye think he’s dead.” Her voice was filled with wonderment.
Jamie made a soft noise, deep in his throat, and moved out of the shadows, touching her arm.
“Brianna, too,” he said quietly, and tilted his head toward the fire, where Roger saw Bree holding Oggy, talking to the other children, her long red hair lifting in the warm rising air from the fire. She was waving the baby’s podgy little hand in regal gestures, talking for him in a deep, comic voice, and the bairns were all giggling.
“She saw Da, too, though she didna get to speak to him. It was in the burying ground at Lallybroch; she said he knelt by Mammeigh’s stone, and he’d brought her holly and yew, bound wi’ red thread.”
“Mammaidh …”
Jenny’s voice caught in her throat with a small click, and Roger saw tears well suddenly in her eyes. He let go of her hand as Jamie put his arm round her and drew her close, and brother and sister clung together, faces hidden in each other, holding love between them.
He was still staring at them when he felt Claire beside him. She was watching them as well, her face smooth and her heart in her eyes. Silently, she took his hand.
9
Animal Nursery Tales
IT TOOK A MONTH, rather than two weeks, but by the time the wild grapes began to ripen, Jamie, Roger, and Bree—with precarious ceremony and a lot of giggling from the groundlings below—tacked a large sheet of stained white canvas (salvaged and stitched together from pieces of the damaged mainsail of a Royal Navy sloop that was refitting in Wilmington when Fergus happened to be strolling along the quay) onto the framing of the New House’s new kitchen.
We had a roof. Of our own.
I stood under it, looking up, for a long time. Just smiling.
People were trooping in and out, carrying things over from the lean-to, up from the Higginses’ cabin, out of the springhouse, in from the shelter of the Big Log, down from the garden. It reminded me, suddenly and without warning, of making camp on an expedition with my Uncle Lamb: the same higgledy-piggledy bustle of objects, good spirits, relief and happiness, expectation.
Jamie set down the pie safe, easing it gently onto the new pine floor so as not to dent or mar the boards.
“Wasted effort,” he said, smiling as he looked up at me. “A week and it’ll be as though we’d driven a herd of pigs through it. Why are ye smiling? Does the prospect amuse ye?”
“No, but you do,” I said, and he laughed. He came and put an arm around me, and we both looked up.
The canvas shone a brilliant white, and the late-morning sun glowed along its edges. The canvas lifted a little, whispering in the breeze, and multiple stains of seawater, dirt, and what might possibly be the blood of fish or men made shadows that shimmered on the floor around our feet, the shallows of a new life.
“Look,” he whispered in my ear, and nudged my cheek with his chin, directing my gaze.
Fanny stood on the far side of the room, looking up. She was lost in the snowy light, oblivious to Adso the cat, twining about her ankles in hopes of food. She was smiling.
JAMIE DUG THE hole. A shallow groove in the black, mica-flecked soil under the chimney breast, about ten inches long.
He and Roger and Ian had—puffing, gasping, and cursing in Gaelic, French, English, and Mohawk—carried the big slab of serpentine meant for the hearthstone down from the Green Spring the day before. It leaned now against the chimney, waiting.
The bottom of the stone was smeared with dirt and rootlets, and I saw a small spider emerge from a hollow, venturing an inch or two, then freezing in bewilderment.
“Wait,” I said to Jamie, who had sat back on his heels and reached up toward Bree, waiting with the black chisel in her hand. He lifted a brow but nodded, and the children clustered round me to see what was the holdup. I picked up the edge of my apron and attempted to move it under the spider without frightening it. It promptly ran straight up the stone, leapt off into thin air, and landed on Jamie’s shirt. He clapped a cupped hand over it, and—still with raised brow—stood carefully, walked to the outer edge of the half-framed room, and, removing his hand, took hold of the hem of his shirt and flapped it vigorously between the studs.
“Thalla le Dia!” said Jemmy.
“What?” said Fanny, who had been watching this byplay with openmouthed wonder.
“Go with God,” Jemmy said reasonably. “What else would ye say to a spider?”
“What indeed,” said Jamie. Patting Jem on the shoulder, he once more knelt by the open hearth and lifted a hand toward his daughter. Rather to my surprise, Bree kissed the chisel as though it were a crucifix and laid it gently in his hand.
He also lifted it to his lips and kissed it as though it were his dirk, then laid it gently in its burrow and scooped dirt over it with his left hand. He sat back on his heels again and looked deliberately from face to face. It was only the family present: ourselves, Brianna, Roger, Jem and Mandy, Germain, Fanny, Ian, Rachel, and Jenny, holding a sleeping Oggy.
“Bless Thou, O God, the dwelling,” he said,
“And each who rests herein this night;
Bless Thou, O God, my beloved ones
In every place wherein they sleep;
In the night that is to-night,
And every night;
In the day that is to-day,
And every day.
May this sacred iron be witness
To the love of God and the guarding of this house.”
The solemn attention of the assembly lasted for roughly five seconds of silence.
“Now we eat!” Mandy said brightly.
Jamie laughed with everyone else, but broke off and touched her cheek.
“Aye, m’annsachd. But no until the hearthstone’s laid. Stand back a wee bit, out of the way.”
Brianna snared Mandy and moved her well back, gesturing Jem, Fanny, and Germain into a similar, though reluctant, withdrawal. The men flexed their shoulders and hands a few times, then at Jamie’s signal bent and seized the stone.
“Arrrrrgh!” shouted Jem and Germain, enthusiastically mimicking the men, who were all making similar noises. Oggy sprang awake, mouth a perfect “O” of horror, and Jenny, with perfect timing, stuck her thumb into it. He reflexively closed his mouth and started to suck, though still round-eyed with amazement.
A lot of grunting, maneuvering, muttered directions, cries of alarm as the stone slipped, laughing and chattering among the spectators as it was caught, and, with a final gasp of effort, the stone was turned flat and dropped into place.
Jamie was bent over, hands on his knees, panting. He straightened slowly, red in the face, sweat running down his neck, and looked at me.
“I hope ye like this house, Sassenach,” he said, and took a deep gulp of air, “because I’m never building ye another.”
Gradually, everyone sorted themselves, and we reassembled at the edge of the new hearth for the final blessing. To my surprise—and to theirs—Jamie beckoned Roger and Ian and made them stand on either side of him where he stood before the hearth.
“Bless to me, O God,” he said, “the moon that is above me.
“Bless to me, O God, the earth that is beneath me,
Bless to me, O God, my wife and my children,
And bless, O God, myself who have care of them;
“Bless to me my wife and my children,
And bless, O God, myself who have care of them.
Bless, O God, the thing on which mine eye doth rest.
Bless, O God, the thing on which my hope doth rest,
Bless, O God, my reason and my purpose.
Bless, O bless Thou them, Thou God of life;
Bless, O God, my reason and my purpose,
Bless, O bless Thou them, Thou God of life.
“Bless to me the bed-companion of my love.
Bless to me the handling of my hands.
Bless, O bless Thou to me, O God, the fencing of my defense.
And bless, O bless to me the angeling of my rest;
Bless, O bless Thou to me, O God, the fencing of my defense.
And bless, O bless to me the angeling of my rest.”
With a nod of his head, he indicated that we should join him, and we did.
“Bless Thou, O God, the dwelling,
And each who rests herein this night;
Bless Thou, O God, my dear ones
In every place wherein they sleep;
In the night that is to-night,
And every single night;
In the day that is to-day,
And every single day.”
Amid murmured instructions, everyone picked up a stick of wood and brought it to the hearth, where Brianna laid it and carefully pressed handfuls of kindling under her construction.
I took my own deep breath, and, taking the twist of straw she handed me, I thrust it into the firepot from my surgery, then knelt on the new green stone and lit the fire.