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.
“Speaking of Germain,” Jamie said, suddenly aware that his grandson was missing, “where the devil is he?” It was completely unlike Germain to be absent from any interesting situation. He was much more often right in the middle of—
“Did he go with ye to look for the bear’s track?” Jamie asked sharply, interrupting Gillebride’s recriminations. Ian looked blank for a moment, recollecting, but then nodded.
“Aye, he did. But … I was sure he was just behind me as I came down …” He turned involuntarily and glanced behind him now, as though expecting Germain to spring up through the floorboards. With a deep foreboding in his heart, Jamie swung round to face Gillebride.
“Did Jem come back with ye, Gilly?”
MacMillan, a tall, soft-spoken man, took off his hat and scratched his bald pate.
“Aye,” he said slowly. “I suppose so. He ran ahead, though, whilst I was gathering the dogs. Didna see him again.”
“Crìosd eadar sinn agus olc.” Jamie made the horns against the Devil and crossed himself hurriedly. “Christ between us and evil. Let’s go.”
HOW OLD WAS Mrs. Cunningham? I wondered. She looked older with her clothes on. Three husbands, four children—but death was a casual and frequent visitor in these days. Her hands were old, with thick blue veins and knobbed joints, but still agile; she blotted the blood away with a damp cloth, brushed the soft brown hair from the intact side of Amy’s skull, and, arranging it carefully to hide as much damage as she could, braided it into a single thick plait that she laid gently on Amy’s breast.
I’d taken care of the eye—it was sitting on the counter behind me; I’d wrap it discreetly and tuck it into the shroud—and inserted a small wad of lint into the crushed socket, stitching the lid shut over it. There was no concealing that Amy had died by violence, but at least her family would still be able to look at her.
“Mrs …. do you mind if I call you by your Christian name?” I asked abruptly.
She glanced up from her contemplation of the corpse, slightly startled.
“Elspeth,” she said.
“Claire,” I said, and smiled at her. I thought a smile touched her own lips, but before I could be sure, the quilt hanging over the doorway twitched violently and one of Gillebride’s big bear dogs shouldered his way in, sniffing eagerly along the floor.
“And what do you think you’re doing?” I asked. The dog ignored me and made a beeline for the counter, where he rose gracefully onto his hind legs, gulped the eye, and then dropped and ran out in answer to his master’s annoyed call from the hallway.
Elspeth and I stood in frozen silence as the hunting party departed noisily through the front door, the dogs yelping in happy excitement.
As the house fell quiet, Elspeth blinked. She looked down at Amy, peaceful and composed in the embroidered shroud she had woven while expecting her first child. It was edged with a trailing vine, with pink and blue flowers and yellow bees.
“Aye, well,” she said at last. “I dinna suppose it matters so much whether a person’s eaten by worms or by dogs.” She sounded dubious, though, and I suppressed a sudden insane urge to laugh.
“Being eaten by dogs is in the Bible,” I said, instead. “Jezebel.” She raised one sparse gray brow in surprise, evidently at the unexpected revelation that I’d actually read the Bible, but then nodded.
“Well, then,” she said.
JAMIE’S SENSE OF grim urgency was growing more urgent—it was midafternoon already—but there was the one more thing that had to be done. He had to tell Bobby Higgins what they were about and hope that the man was either too shattered to insist on coming, or wise enough not to—and convince him that it was right for Aidan to go. He should have paused to scoop up the wee boys; they were the best reason for Bobby to stay put—but he hadn’t thought of it in time.
His anxiety was eased a good bit by the sight of Jem, loitering outside the Higgins cabin. His relief at finding the lad, though, was immediately tempered by Jem’s impassioned desire to join the hunting party.
“If Aidan can go—” Jem said, for roughly the fourth time, chin jutting out. Jamie bent down and grabbed him by the arm, speaking low so as not to upset Aidan.
“Your mother wasna eaten by a bear, and she’ll no be pleased if you are. Ye’re stayin’.”
“Then Aidan shouldn’t go! His da won’t like it if he gets eaten, will he?”
That was a thought that had been gnawing at Jamie, but he didn’t repent allowing the boy to come.
“His mother was eaten by a bear, and he’s the right to come and see her avenged,” he said to Jem. He let go of the lad’s arm, took him by the shoulder, and turned him toward the cabin. “Go get your da; I want to talk to him.”
The other members of the hunting party were restive, and he told Ian to go on ahead with Gillebride and the dogs, see if they could get upon Germain’s track. Aidan looked wild, still white-faced, his black hair stood on end, and Jamie took hold of him again to quiet him.
“Stay by me, Aidan. We willna be more than a minute, but we must tell your da what’s ado.”
It was much less than a minute before Roger came out of the cabin, blinking in the sunlight, with Jem behind him, looking excited but solemn. Roger Mac bore the same traces of shock that they all did, though he had himself well in hand, and his face relaxed a little, seeing Jamie. Then it tightened again as he saw the rifle.
“You’re—”
“We are.” He motioned the boys firmly away and dropped his voice. “I need to tell Bobby, but I dinna want him to come. Will ye help me talk him round?”
“Of course. But—” He glanced toward Aidan and Jemmy, slouched at the side of the cabin. “Ye’re not taking them?”
“I willna take Jem if ye say no—that’s yours to say. But I think Aidan must come.”
Roger gave him a look of intense skepticism, and Jamie shrugged.
“He must,” he repeated stubbornly. All the reasons why not were clustering like flies round his head, but the remembered sense of an orphaned boy’s helpless despair was an iron splinter in his heart—and that weighed heavier than the rest.
THE FIRE HAD gone out. In the cabin, and in Bobby, too. He sat hunched and sagging in the corner of the settle by his cold hearth, head bent over his open hands as though he sought some meaning in the lines on his palms. He didn’t look up when they came in.
Jamie sank down on one knee and laid his hand over Bobby’s; it was cold and flaccid, but the fingers twitched a little.
“Robert, a charaid,” he said quietly. “I am going now to hunt the bear. With God’s help, we will find it and kill it. Aidan wishes to come with us, and I think it is right that he should.”
Bobby’s head rose with a jerk.
“Aidan? You want to take Aidan after the bear that—that—”
“I do.” Jamie took hold of Bobby’s other hand and squeezed them. “I swear on my own grandson’s head that I willna let any harm come to him.”
“Your—you mean Jem? You’re taking him as well?” Confusion showed briefly through the deadness in Bobby’s eyes, and he looked over Jamie’s shoulder at Roger Mac. “He is?”
“Aye.” Roger’s Mac’s voice broke on the word, but he said it, bless him. Inspiration blossomed in Jamie’s mind, and with an inward prayer, he rolled his dice.
“Roger Mac will come as well,” he said, hoping he sounded completely sure of it. “He’ll mind both lads and see them safe.” He could feel Roger Mac’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head, but he was sure it was the right thing. Blessed Michael, guide my tongue …