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.
“My sister’s showing her how to comb goats.”
“Aye?”
“For the hair. I want it to mix wi’ the plaster for the walls.”
“Oh, aye.”
Roger nodded, threading a stringer through the fish’s dark-red gill slit.
The sun came low through the trees, but the trout were still biting, the water dappling with dozens of bright rings and the frequent splash of a leaping fish. Roger’s fingers tightened for a moment on his rod, tempted—but they had enough for supper and next morning’s breakfast, too. No point in catching more; there were a dozen casks of smoked and salted fish already put away in the cold cellar, and the light was going.
Jamie showed no signs of moving, though. He was sitting on a comfortable stump, bare-legged and clad in nothing but his shirt, his old hunting plaid puddled on the ground behind; it had been a warm day and the balm of it still lingered in the air. He glanced at the boys, who had forgotten their argument and were back at their lines, intent as a pair of kingfishers.
Jamie turned to Roger then, and said, in a quite ordinary tone of voice, “Do Presbyterians have the sacrament of Confession, mac mo chinnidh?”
Roger said nothing for a moment, taken aback both by the question and its immediate implications and by Jamie’s addressing him as “son of my house”—a thing he’d done exactly once, at the calling of the clans at Mount Helicon some years before.
The question itself was straightforward, though, and he answered it that way.
“No. Catholics have seven sacraments but Presbyterians only recognize two: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” He might have left it at that, but the first implication of the question was plain before him.
“D’ye have a thing ye want to tell me, Jamie?” He thought it might be the second time he’d called his father-in-law Jamie to his face. “I can’t give ye absolution—but I can listen.”
He wouldn’t have said that Jamie’s face showed anything in the way of strain. But now it relaxed and the difference was sufficiently visible that his own heart opened to the man, ready for whatever he might say. Or so he thought.
“Aye.” Jamie’s voice was husky and he cleared his throat, ducking his head, a little shy. “Aye, that’ll do fine. D’ye remember the night we took Claire back from the bandits?”
“I’m no likely to forget it,” Roger said, staring at him. He cut his eyes at the boys, but they were still at it, and he looked back at Jamie. “Why?” he asked, wary.
“Were ye there wi’ me, at the last, when I broke Hodgepile’s neck and Ian asked me what to do with the rest? I said, ‘Kill them all.’”
“I was there.” He had been. And he didn’t want to go back. Three words and it was all there, just below the surface of memory, still cold in his bones: black night in the forest, a sear of fire across his eyes, chilling wind, and the smell of blood. The drums—a bodhran thundering against his arm, two more behind him. Screaming in the dark. The sudden shine of eyes and the stomach-clenching feel of a skull caving in.
“I killed one of them,” Roger said abruptly. “Did you know that?”
Jamie hadn’t looked away and didn’t now; his mouth compressed for a moment, and he nodded.
“I didna see ye do it,” he said. “But it was plain enough in your face, next day.”
“I don’t wonder.” Roger’s throat was tight, and the words came out thick and gruff. He was surprised that Jamie had noticed—had noticed anything at all on that day other than Claire, once the fighting was over. The image of her, kneeling by a creek, setting her own broken nose by her reflection in the water, the blood streaking down over her bruised and naked body, came back to him with the force of a punch in the solar plexus.
“Ye never ken how it will be.” Jamie lifted one shoulder and let it fall; he’d lost the lace that bound his hair, snagged by a tree branch, and the thick red strands stirred in the evening breeze. “A fight like that, I mean. What ye recall and what ye don’t. I remember everything about that night, though—and the day beyond it.”
Roger nodded but didn’t speak. It was true that Presbyterians had no sacrament of Confession—and he rather regretted that they didn’t; it was a useful thing to have in your pocket. Particularly, he supposed, if you led the sort of life Jamie had. But any minister knows the soul’s need to speak and be understood, and that he could give.
“I expect ye do,” he said. “Do ye regret it, then? Telling the men to kill them all, I mean.”
“Not for an instant.” Jamie gave him a brief, fierce glance. “Do ye regret your part of it?”
“I—” Roger stopped abruptly. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about it, but … “I regret that I had to,” he said carefully. “Very much. But I’m sure in my own mind that I did have to.”
Jamie’s breath came out in a sigh. “Ye’ll know Claire was raped, I expect.” It wasn’t a question, but Roger nodded. Claire hadn’t spoken of it, even to Brianna—but she hadn’t had to.
“The man who did it wasna killed, that night. She saw him alive two months past, at Beardsley’s.”
The evening breeze had turned chilly, but that wasn’t what raised the hairs on Roger’s forearms. Jamie was a man of precise speech—and he’d started this conversation with the word “Confession.” Roger took his time about replying.
“I’m thinking that ye’re not asking my opinion of what ye should do about it.”
Jamie sat silent for a moment, dark against the blazing sky.
“No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”
“Grandda! Look!” Jem and Germain were scrambling over the rocks and brush, each with a string of shimmering trout, dripping dark streaks of blood and water down the boys’ breeks, the swaying fish gleaming bronze and silver in the last of the evening light.
Roger turned back from the boys in time to see the flicker of Jamie’s eye as he glanced round at the boys, the sudden light on his face catching a troubled, inward look that vanished in an instant as he smiled and raised a hand to his grandsons, reaching out to admire their catch.
Jesus Christ, Roger thought. He felt as though an electric wire had run through his chest for an instant, small and sizzling. He was wondering if they were old enough yet. To know about things like this.
“We decided we got six each,” Jemmy was explaining, proudly holding up his string and turning it so his father and grandfather could appreciate the size and beauty of his catch.
“And these are Fanny’s,” Germain said, lifting a smaller string on which three plump trout dangled. “We decided she’d ha’ caught some, if she was here.”
“That was a kind thought, lads,” Jamie said, smiling. “I’m sure the lassie will appreciate it.”
“Mmphm,” said Germain, though he frowned a little. “Will she still be able to come fishin’ with us, Grand-père? Mrs. Wilson said she won’t be able to, once she’s a woman.”
Jemmy made a disgusted noise and elbowed Germain. “Dinna be daft,” he said. “My mam’s a woman and she goes fishin’. She hunts, too, aye?”
Germain nodded but looked unconvinced.
“Aye, she does,” he admitted. “Mr. Crombie doesna like it, though, and neither does Heron.”