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.
Released, the dog leapt up, shook herself vigorously, and then shot off, rushing down the hall after Jem. Fanny rose up on her knees, but before she could get up altogether, the dog came roaring back, paws thundering on the wooden floor. She let out an excited bark at seeing us, ran around the room in circles, and finally leapt on Fanny, knocking her sideways, then stood over her, panting happily and wagging.
“Get off!” Fanny said, giggling as she squirmed out from under the dog. “You thilly thing.” I smiled and, glancing at Jamie, saw him smiling, too. Fanny laughed with the boys, but seldom otherwise.
“Here, Grannie!” Jem dropped the first-aid box on my lap, then dropped to his knees and started boxing with the dog, feinting slaps to one side of her face and then the other. The hound panted happily and made little wuffs, darting her head at Jem’s hands.
“She’ll nip ye, Jem,” Jamie said, amused. “She’s quicker than you are.”
She was, and she did, though not hard. Jem yelped, then giggled. “Thilly thing,” he said. “Shall we call her Thilly?”
“No,” said Fanny, giggling, too. “That’s a thilly name.”
“That poor dog will never get her mouth taken care of if the lot of you don’t stop stirring her up,” I said severely—for Brianna and Jamie were laughing, too. Roger was smiling but not laughing, not wanting to wake Mandy, now sound asleep on his shoulder.
Bree calmed the incipient riot by going to the pie safe and extracting half of a large dried-apple pie, which she distributed to everyone, including a small piece of crust to the dog, who wolfed it happily.
“All right.” I swallowed the last flaky, cinnamon-scented bite of my own slice, dusted crumbs off my fingers—the dog promptly snuffled them up off the floor—and laid out my small splinter-forceps, my smallest tenaculum, a square of thick gauze, and—after a moment’s thought—the bottle of honey-water, the mildest antibacterial I had. “Let’s go, then.”
Once we’d got the dog immobilized on her side—no easy matter; she writhed like an eel, but Jem flung himself on top of her back half and Jamie pressed her down with one hand on her shoulder and one on her neck—it took no more than a couple of minutes to work the bone chip loose, with Fanny carefully holding the candle so as not to drip wax on me or the dog.
“There!” I held it up in the forceps, to general applause, then tossed it into the fire. “Now just a bit of cleanup …” I pressed the gauze over the gum, firmly. The dog whined a little but didn’t struggle. A small amount of blood from the lacerated gum, and what might be a trace of pus—hard to tell, by candlelight, but I brought the gauze to my nose and couldn’t detect any scent of putrefaction. Meat scraps, apple pie, and dog breath, but no noticeable smell of infection.
Once the bone chip was out, interest in my activities waned, and the conversation turned back to dog names. Lulu, Sassafras, Ginny, Monstro (this from Bree, and I looked up and met her eye with a smile, visualizing the toothy whale from Disneyland as plainly as she did), “Seasaidh …”
Jamie didn’t take part in the naming controversy, but he did—for the first time—stroke the dog’s head gently. Did he already know what her name was? I wondered. I rinsed the gum well with the honey-water—the dog lapped and swallowed, even lying down—but most of my attention was on Jamie.
“I left her howling on her master’s grave.” Something too faint to be a shiver ran over me, and I felt the hairs on my forearms lift, stirring in the warm draft from the fire. I was morally sure that Jamie had put the dog’s master in his grave—and that I was the unwilling cause of it.
His face was calm now, shadowed by the fire. Whatever he might be thinking, nothing showed. And his hand was gentle on the dog’s spotted fur. “Absolution,” he’d said.
“What was your dog’s name, Fanny?” Jem said, behind me. “The one you had on the ship.”
“Ssspotty,” she said, making an effort with the “s.” It was only a few months since I had clipped her tongue-tie, and she still struggled with some sounds. “He had a white spot. On his nose.”
“We could call this one Spotty, too,” Jem offered generously. “If you want. She’s got lots of spots. Lots of spots,” he repeated, giggling at the rhyme. “Lots and lots of spots and spots.”
“Now you’re a thilly thing,” Fanny said to him, laughing.
“Maybe you should wait and see if your grandda means to keep her, Jem,” Roger said. “Before you give her a name.”
Plainly, the possibility that we might not keep the dog hadn’t entered the children’s heads, and they were aghast at the notion.
“Oh, please, Mr. Fraser!” Fanny said, urgent. “I’ll feed her, I promise I will!”
“And I’ll take the ticks out of her fur, Grandda!” Jemmy put in. “Please, please, can’t we keep her?”
Jamie’s eyes met mine, and his mouth turned up a little at one side—in resignation, I thought, rather than humor.
“She came to me for help,” he said to me. “I canna very well turn her away.”
“Then maybe you should name her, Da,” Bree put in, quelling Jem’s and Fanny’s exhibitions of relieved delight. “What would you call her?”
“Bluebell,” he said without hesitation, surprising me. “It’s a good Scottish name—and it fits her, aye?”
“Bwoo—Bulubell.” Fanny stroked the dog’s back, and the long plumed tail moved lazily to and fro. “Can I call her Bluey? For short?”
Jamie did laugh then, and rose slowly to his feet, knees cracking from kneeling on the boards for so long.
“Call her anything she’ll answer to, lass. But for now, she needs her bed, and so do I.”
The children coaxed the newly christened Bluebell to come with them, offering more bits of piecrust, and the adults began to gather ourselves, settling for bed. There was a momentary silence as Bree took Mandy from Roger, and as I knelt to smoor the hastily stirred-up fire again, I heard Jem’s and Fanny’s voices on the stair landing.
“What happened to your dog, Spotty?” Jem asked, the question distant but clear. Fanny’s answer was just as clear, and I saw Jamie’s head turn sharply toward the open door as he heard it.
“The bad men threw him into the sea,” she said. “Can Bluey sleep with me tonight? You can have her tomorrow.”
17
Reading by Firelight
THE FRAMING FOR THE second story was done. It would be some time yet before it was completely walled in and a roof put on, but his nights of cool sleeping under the naked stars with Claire were numbered. Jamie felt a slight pang of regret at the thought, but this was at once eclipsed by the cozy vision of them sleeping in a featherbed before a warm hearth, three months hence, the shutters closed against howling wind and plastering snow.
He sank slowly into the big chair by the fire, half enjoying the pain as his joints relaxed, both mind and knees knowing that the bliss of rest was at hand. The household was abed, but Claire had gone to a birthing, near the bottom of the cove. He missed her, but it was a pleasant pain, like the stretch in his backbone. She would be back, likely tomorrow. For now, he had a good fire warming his feet, a glass of soft red wine, and books to hand. He took the spectacles from his pocket, unfolded them, and settled them on his nose.
The house’s entire library stood in two modest piles on the table beside his wineglass. A small Bible bound in green cloth, very much the worse for wear. He touched it gently, as he did every time he saw it; it was an old companion—a friend that had seen him through many bad times. A coverless copy of Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress … he’d best take that one up to the bedroom; Jem hadn’t shown any interest in it yet, but the lad could certainly read well enough to make out what it was about if he did.