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.
Her father got down and set about unhitching the horses; he gave her an eye and tilted his head toward one of the ramshackle sheds higher up the bank, where three people were standing in a group, evidently arguing about something. One of them was a woman, and her posture—arms folded and head bent, but in a way that suggested not submission, but a barely restrained urge to butt her interlocutor in the nose—argued that here was The Boss.
Brianna nodded and set off toward the shed, aware from the sudden silence behind her that either Mr. Patton, Mr. Shelby, or both were eyeing her rear aspect. Not that they’d see much; she was wearing a hunting shirt that came nearly to her knees, but the mere fact that she had on breeches under it …
She heard Shelby cough suddenly, and deduced that he’d just met her father’s eye.
“Jamie Fraser,” she heard Shelby say, trying for nonchalance. “I know a good many Frasers. Would you be from up around the Nolichucky?”
“No, we have a place near the Treaty Line in Rowan County,” her father said. “It’s called Fraser’s Ridge.”
“Ah! Then I’ll know you, sir!” Shelby sounded relieved. “Benjamin Cleveland told me of meeting you. He—”
The voices behind her faded as the group near the shed noticed her. All of them looked startled, but the woman’s look changed almost immediately into a dour amusement.
“Good day to ye, Missus,” she said, openly eyeing Brianna’s hunting clothes. She was about Brianna’s age and wearing a canvas apron, much worn and stained, with small blackened holes where sparks appeared to have fallen. The dark-brown skirt and long-sleeved man’s shirt beneath were rough homespun, though fairly clean. “What might I be doin’ for ye?”
“I’m Brianna MacKenzie,” Bree said, wondering whether she ought to offer a hand to shake. Mrs. Patton—for surely she had to be—didn’t extend one, so Brianna contented herself with a cordial nod. “My father and I are, um, seeking to buy some gunpowder. Are you by chance Mrs. Patton?” she added, as the woman made no move to introduce herself.
The lady in question glanced over her shoulder, then slowly gazed round from side to side, as though looking for someone. One of the young men she’d been arguing with giggled, but shut up sharp when Mrs. Patton’s eye fell on him.
“I don’t know who else I’d be,” she said, but not unpleasantly. “What make of powder are ye after, and how much?”
That stopped Brianna cold for a moment. She knew absolutely nothing about makes of powder—or even how to refer to them. What she wanted to know was how to make the stuff in quantity and with a reasonable degree of safety.
“Powder for hunting,” she said, opting for simplicity. “And maybe something for … blowing up stumps?”
Mary Patton blinked, then laughed. The two young men joined her.
“Stumps?”
“Well, ye could set one on fire, I suppose, if ye touched off a bit of powder on top of it,” the elder of the young men said, smiling at her. The “on top” triggered belated realization, and she smacked her head in annoyance.
“Bloody hell,” she said. “Of course—you’d have to shape the charge. So … more something like a grenade, then.”
Mrs. Patton’s rather square face shifted instantly to surprise, and just as swiftly to wary calculation.
“Grenadoes, is it?” she said, and looked Brianna over with more interest. Then she glanced beyond Bree, and realization came into her eyes.
“Yer father, is it? That him?”
“Yes.” The woman was staring in a way that made Bree turn to look over her own shoulder. Her father had taken the horses down the bank to drink and was standing on the gravel there, talking to Mr. Shelby. He’d taken his hat off in order to splash water on his face, and the sun was sparking off his hair, which, while streaked with silver, was still overall a noticeable red.
“Red Jamie Fraser?” Mrs. Patton looked back sharply at her. “He’s the one they called Red Jamie, back in the old country?”
“I—suppose so.” Bree was flabbergasted. “How do you know that name?”
“Hmp.” Mrs. Patton nodded in a satisfied sort of way, her eyes still fixed on Jamie. “My pap’s older brothers, two of ’em, fought on both sides of the Jacobite Rising. One was transported to the Indies, but his brother went and found him, bought his indenture, and the two of them came to settle here where John and I had land. Those”—she gave a deprecating nod to the two young men, who had retired to a respectful distance—“are their sons.”
“Quite the family concern, isn’t it?” Bree nodded round to the mill and sheds, now noticing that there was a small cluster of cabins and a good-sized house standing perhaps a quarter mile away, inside a copse of maple trees.
“’Tis,” Mrs. Patton agreed, now amiable. “One o’ my uncles spoke often of your pa, fought with him at Prestonpans and Falkirk. He had some bits and pieces kept by, mementos o’ the war. And one thing he had was a broadsheet with a drawing of Red Jamie Fraser on it, offering a reward. A handsome man, even on a broadsheet. Five hundred pounds the Crown offered for him! Wonder what he’d be worth now?” she said, and laughed, with another look at the man in question, this one longer.
Bree assumed this to be a joke, and gave a tight smile in return. Just in case, she noted primly that her father had been pardoned after the Rising, and then firmly returned the conversation to gunpowder.
Mrs. Patton appeared to feel that they were now on friendly terms, and willingly showed her the two milling sheds, noting casually the crude construction of the walls.
“Something blows up, the roof just flies off and the walls fall out. No great matter to put it up again.”
“So these are milling sheds—but surely that’s the mill?” Bree nodded at the stone building, quite evidently a mill, its waterwheel turning serenely in the golden light of late afternoon.
“Aye. Ye grind the charcoal, then the saltpeter—know what that is, do ye?”
“I do.”
“Aye, and the sulfur. Ye do that with water, aye? Melts the saltpeter and ye grind it all together; while it’s wet, it’ll not burn, will it?”
“No.”
Mrs. Patton nodded, pleased at this evident understanding.
“So then. Ye’ve got black powder, but it’s coarse stuff, with bits and pieces of uncrushed charcoal in it, bits o’ wood, bits o’ stone, rat dung, all manner o’ stuff. So ye dry that in cakes—we store those in the other shed—and then at your leisure, so to speak, ye crush and grind it—and that ye do out here in this shed, away from everything else, because it damn well will explode if ye happen to strike a spark whilst ye’re doing that—and if ye’ve made a cloud of it when the spark goes off, God help ye, ye’ll go up like a torch.”
The prospect didn’t seem to concern her.
“Then ye corn it—which means putting it through screens, to divvy it into different sizes. Finest corning is for pistols and rifles—that’s what ye’d want for hunting, mostly. The coarser sizes are for cannon, grenadoes, bombs, that class o’ thing.”
“I see.” It was a simple process, as explained—but judging from the state of Mrs. Patton’s apron and the singe marks on some of the boards in the shed, rather dangerous. She could probably manage to make enough powder for hunting, if they really had to, but dismissed the idea of trying to do it in large quantities.
“Well, then. What’s your price, for the sort of powder you’d use for hunting?”
“Hunting, is it?” Mrs. Patton had pale-blue eyes and gave Brianna a shrewd look out of them, then glanced at Mr. Shelby and her father, still conversing by the river. Why? she wondered. Does she think I need his permission?