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:

#1 New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon returns with the newest novel in the epic Outlander series.
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.

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The City Tavern was an actual tavern in Salisbury and was actually called “City Tavern.” (For the benefit of sharp-eyed readers who will be thinking to themselves that “city tavern” shouldn’t be capitalized …) The Salisburyites were apparently a pragmatic lot, given the names of local attractions such as “Town Creek” and “Old Stone House (1766).” “Great Wagon Road” is about as romantic as it got in that neck of the wood—and Salisbury didn’t name the road, just abutted it.

Colonel Johnson of the Southern Department (Indian agents)—There were two Johnsons who headed the department, one succeeding the other, though I don’t think they were related.

Non-English Figures of Speech

a vos souhaits / a tes amours—The traditional French Canadian blessing upon hearing someone sneeze. Translated literally, it means “to your dreams / to your loves.” (A little more graceful than “Gesundheit” or the onomatopoetic “Blesshu” perhaps …)

stercus—“Excrement” (Latin).

filium scorti—“Son of a bitch” (Latin).

cloaca obscaena—“Obscene sewer” (Latin).

“tace is the Latin for a candle”—This is a common tag in eighteenth-century conversation among the upper classes (who spoke Latin). “Tace” is the imperative meaning “keep silent,” and the candle is symbolic of light. Ergo, the expression means (essentially) “keep it dark”—in other words, “be discreet and don’t say anything regarding what we’ve been talking about.”

pozegnanie—“Farewell” (Polish).

Gáidhlig phrases and figures of speech are defined in the text.

William Butler Yeats—The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Miscellany

Shreddies—RAF-issue underwear. So called, apparently, because the woven pattern of the cloth from which they were made strongly resembled the appearance of a Shredded Wheat biscuit.

Part Three’s Heading is derived from a quote by the novelist Florence King:

“In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.”

—FLORENCE KING

Black Freemasons—At one point, Claire wonders whether there are black Freemasons. In fact, there were. Prince Hall, a well-known abolitionist and black leader, established Prince Hall Freemasonry (Boston).

Haitian Navy

You see frequent references in historical accounts to the “Haitian Navy” Chasseurs-Volontaires, who fought with the Americans during the Siege of Savannah. In fact, Haiti didn’t exist as a polity at this point in history, and these black volunteers were actually from Saint-Domingue (later the Dominican Republic) and other places, and their background is fascinating, but not something I was able to go into during my discussion of the Battle of Savannah. The following details, however, are from the blackpast.org website and give a fuller picture:

D’Estaing’s troops were mainly composed of colonial regiments coming from various locations such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. The 800 men from the French Caribbean colonies were organized into a regiment called Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue. These soldiers were des gens de couleurs libres (free men of color) who voluntarily joined the French colonial forces. The gens de couleur were mixed-race men of African and European origin from Saint-Domingue. They were born free and thus were distinct from free slaves, or affranchise, who were born enslaved or became enslaved during their lives and then freed themselves or were freed. This distinction allowed the gens de couleur a higher social and political role in the French colonial West Indies. According to the 1685 French Black Code, they had the same rights and privileges as the white colonial population. In practice, however, strong discrimination by white French colonial residents impeded the gens de couleurs from fully exercising them.

Cultures and Language

This is not the time or place to discuss the portrayal of cultures in fiction, save to say that

No two people who belong to a culture experience it in the same way, and

If writers felt constrained to write only about their own experience, culture, history, or background … libraries would be full of dull biographies, and a lot of what makes a culture—the variety and vigor of its art—would be lost, and the culture would die.

That said, when you write about anything outside your own personal experience, you need the assistance of other people, whether you get it from books (necessary, if you’re writing about historical situations and events) or from personal stories and advice.

During the last thirty-three years, I’ve had the good luck to come across a number of kind and helpful people who were more than willing to advise me about the details of their own culture (as experienced by them), and consequently, I think the various portrayals of those cultures have deepened and improved over the course of the writing of these books. I hope so.

When this happens, though, naturally details will vary, and as you acquire more contacts and more knowledge, you’ll run into some conflicts between accounts. Given that you really can’t go back and revise major events and characters in an earlier book, the best you can do is to adjust the current writing so far as is possible, and use the improved information when writing the next book.

In the final phases of writing Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, I had the serendipitous honor of meeting kahentinetha bear, an eighty-two-year-old Mohawk activist, who was more than helpful in supplying me with cultural details, as well as Eva Fadden, the Mohawk-language consultant to the Outlander TV show. Eva and her family are the curators of the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center (www.6nicc.com). Both these ladies gave me fascinating information—some of which was at odds with historical accounts (all written by non-Mohawk people) that I’d used in previous books. So I used these ladies’ helpful information to the greatest extent possible, and will continue to apply it (and whatever further advice they and other people give me) in future books.

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