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.
“Eeeeyewww!” Mandy said, giggling.
“Dinna laugh,” Jamie said, smiling. “Your uncle William fell into a privy some years ago, and wasna best pleased about it.”
“Who’s Unca Willam?”
“Your mam’s brother. Ye’ve no met him yet.”
Mandy’s small black brows drew together in a frown.
He glanced briefly up at me and lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Nay point in not talkin’ about him,” he said to me. “Likely we’ll see him again, before too long.”
“Sure about that, are you?” I said dubiously. True, there hadn’t been any open acrimony the last time Jamie and William had met in the flesh, but there hadn’t been any indication that William had reached a sense of resignation regarding the circumstances of his birth, either.
“I am,” Jamie said, eyes on the hole he was drilling. “He’ll come to see about Frances.”
I heard a tiny intake of breath behind me and glanced round to see Fanny, who had come down the trail from the garden, a basket full of greenery on her arm. Her lovely face had gone pale and her eyes quite round, fixed on Jamie.
“Will he—you think he’ll … come?” she said. “Here? To see me?” Her voice rose and cracked a little on the last word.
Jamie looked at her for a moment over his shoulder, then nodded.
“I’d come back, Frances,” he said simply. “So will he.”
I WENT BACK to the kitchen to check the yeast. Sure enough, there was a dirty-looking foam on the surface of the water—and the watch indicated that it had been eleven minutes. Checking the ingredients for the biscuits, though, I discovered that some miscreant had eaten all the butter from the kitchen crock and we had no lard. No one else was in the house; Jamie and Mandy were still chatting on the porch. Time enough for me to nip up to the springhouse and fetch enough cream to churn more butter while the biscuit dough was rising.
I was making my way slowly along the path from the springhouse, carrying two heavy pails of cream-laden milk, when I saw a woman approaching the house. She was tall, with a determined step, and wore a black dress with a broad-brimmed straw hat that she held with one hand to prevent it sailing away on the breeze.
Jamie had disappeared, probably to fetch a tool, but Mandy was still on the porch, sitting on her new toilet seat and singing to Esmeralda. She paid no attention to the woman—a more elderly lady than I had thought from her stick-straight posture and easy gait; closer to, I could see the lines in her face, and the gray hair showing at her temples beneath the cap she wore under her hat.
“Where is your father, child?” she demanded, stopping in front of Mandy.
“I dunno,” Mandy replied. “This is Esmeralda,” she said, holding up her doll.
“I wish to speak with your father.”
“Okay,” Mandy replied amiably, and resumed singing. “Ferra JACuh, Ferra JACuh, dormi vooo …”
“Stop that,” the woman said sharply. “Look at me.”
“Why?”
“You are a very impertinent child and your father should beat you.”
Mandy went very red in the face and scrambled to her feet, standing on her new seat.
“You go away!” she said. “I fwush you down the toilet!” She slapped her hand at the air, miming a handle. “WOOOSH!”
“What in the name of perdition do you mean by that, you wicked child?” The woman’s face was growing rather red, too. I had stopped in fascination, but now set down the buckets, feeling that I had better take a hand before things escalated. Too late.
“I put you in the toilet and I fwush you like POOP!” Mandy shouted, stamping her feet. Quick as a snake, the woman’s hand shot out and cracked against Mandy’s cheek.
There was a split second of shocked silence and then a number of things happened at once. I lunged toward the porch, tripped over one of the buckets, and fell flat on the path in a deluge of milk, Mandy let out a shriek that could have been heard as far as the wagon road, and Jamie popped out of the front door like the Demon King in a pantomime.
He grabbed Mandy up in one arm, leapt off the porch, and was nose-to-nose with the woman before I had even got to my knees.
“Leave my house,” he said, in the sort of calm voice that made it clear the only other option was instant death.
To her credit, the lady wasn’t backing down. She snatched off her broad black hat, the better to glare at him.
“The girl spoke rudely to me, sir, and I will not have it! Evidently no one has sought to discipline her properly. No wonder.” Her gaze raked him scornfully up and down. Mandy had stopped shrieking but was sobbing, her face buried in Jamie’s shirtfront.
“Well, speaking of rudeness,” I said mildly, wringing out my wet apron. “I don’t believe we have the honor of your acquaintance, do we?” I wiped a hand on the side of my skirt and extended it. “I’m Claire Fraser.”
Her face didn’t lose its expression of outrage, but it froze. She didn’t say a word but backed away from me, one step at a time. Jamie hadn’t moved, other than to pat Mandy comfortingly; his face was as fixed and stark as hers.
She reached the edge of the path, stopped dead, and lifted her chin toward Jamie.
“You are all,” she said evenly, sweeping her hat in an arc that encompassed me, Jamie, Mandy, and the house, “undoubtedly going to Hell.” With which pronouncement, she tossed a small package onto the porch, turned her back upon us, and sailed away like a bird of ill omen.
“WHO THE DEVIL was that?” Jamie asked.
“Da Wicked Witch,” Mandy answered promptly. Her face was still red, and her lower lip pushed out as far as it would go. “I hates her!”
“Quite possibly,” I said. I bent and gingerly picked up the small package. It was wrapped in oiled silk, tied with an odd-looking cord, with a number of extraneous knots. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed cautiously.
Even through the murky scent of the oiled silk, the bitter smell of quinine was strong enough that I could taste it at the back of my mouth.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, looking at Jamie in wonder. “She’s brought me Jesuit bark.”
“Well, I did tell ye, Sassenach, that if ye mentioned your need of it to Roger Mac and Brianna, likely ye’d get some. And in that case,” he said slowly, looking at the direction in which our visitor had disappeared, “I think perhaps yon woman is maybe Mrs. Cunningham.”
16
Hound of Heaven
I WAS SOMEWHERE DEEPER than dreams, and came to the surface like a fish hauled out of water, thrashing and flapping.
“Whug—” I couldn’t remember where I was, who I was, or how to speak. Then the noise that had roused me came again, and every hair on my body stood on end.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” Words and sense came back in a rush and I flung out both hands, groping for some physical anchor.
Sheets. Mattress. Bed. I was in bed. But no Jamie; empty space beside me. I blinked like an owl, turning my head in search of him. He was standing naked at the glassless window, bathed in moonlight. His fists were clenched and every muscle visible under his skin.
“Jamie!” He didn’t turn, or seem to hear—either my voice, or the thump and agitation of other people in the house, also roused by the howling outside. I could hear Mandy starting to wail in fear, and her parents’ voices running into each other in the rush to comfort her.
I got out of bed and came up cautiously beside Jamie, though what I really wanted to do was dive under the covers and pull the pillow over my head. That noise … I peered past his shoulder, but bright as the moonlight was, it showed nothing in the clearing before the house that shouldn’t be there.