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.
Nothing could have saved her and we both knew it, but I felt the sting of helplessness and guilt, nonetheless.
Bobby began to cry, in the awful, wrenching way that men do. Brianna had been pale and blotchy with grief and shock; now she flushed, her own eyes welling.
Rachel moved near my shoulder, and next thing I knew, she’d taken Bobby from Bree as easily as she might have accepted a fresh egg in her hand, careful of him, but calm.
“Let us sit with thy wife for a bit,” she said softly, and guided him to a stool. She cast a quick look over her shoulder at Brianna, and nodded to me before sitting down beside Bobby.
I walked Bree out of the surgery and straight out of the house, thinking that she wouldn’t want the other women to see her so distraught. I must give her something for the shock, I thought, but before I could suggest anything, she’d turned and gripped me by the elbow, wet eyes blazing through her tears.
“Da’s gone,” she said. “And he’s taken Roger and Jem and Aidan with him! To hunt that bloody bear!”
“Oh, aye,” Jenny said behind me, before I could speak. She laid a hand on Brianna’s arm and squeezed. “Dinna fash, lass. Jamie’s a hard man to kill, and Ian’s painted his face. And I said the blessing for them both—the one for a warrior goin’ out. They’ll be fine.”
ROGER CAUGHT UP with Jamie and the two boys—he was glad to see that they’d met Germain along the way—just short of the opening to the small gorge where the grapevines grew in abundance. They’d heard him crashing along and had paused to wait for him.
He stopped, breathing heavily, and nodded toward the rocky wall where the vines rippled and quivered in the light breeze. “This is where it happened?” The smell of ripe muscats was strong and sweet above the rough, bitter smell of the leaves, and his stomach growled in response; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Jamie reached into his sporran and handed him half a crumbling bannock, without comment.
“Farther on, Dad,” Jemmy said. “We were over there, up on top of the cliff. Mam and Mrs. Higgins were down below—see where that big shadow is, that’s where—” He broke off abruptly, stared, then shrieked. “The bear! The bear! There it is!”
Roger dropped the bannock and his staff and seized Jemmy by one arm and Aidan by the collar, dragging them back. Jamie and Ian didn’t move. They looked down the length of the gorge, looked at each other, then shook their heads.
“Dinna fash, a bhalaich,” Jamie said to Aidan, kindly. “It’s no the bear.”
“Ye’re … sure of that, are ye?” Roger felt as though the breath had been knocked out of him. He could see what Jemmy’d seen: a small growth of hemlocks on the left rim of the gorge cast deep shadow over the vines on the right, and something was moving in that shadow.
“Foxes,” Ian said, with a one-shouldered shrug. “Come to—ah—” He broke off, noticing Aidan, who was breathing like a steam engine.
“Sanguinem culum lingere,” Jamie said tersely. “Bluebell! Come to me, a nighean.”
All the dogs were interested in the foxes, tugging at their leashes and whining, but not barking.
To lick the blood. Roger’s mind made the Latin translation and rapidly readjusted itself to events, presenting him with a stomach-dropping sense of what had happened here, only a few hours ago.
Jamie was talking to Ian and Gillebride in Gaelic now, gesturing along the ridge. Jem and Aidan clustered close to Roger, silent and big-eyed. The breeze had changed direction, and he heard the squealing and barks of the foxes.
“Did you see what happened to Mrs. Higgins?” Roger asked Jem, low-voiced.
Jem shook his head. “Mandy did,” he said. “Mam came up the grapevines and got us. Like Tarzan,” he added.
“Like what?” Ian had picked that up and turned to look down at Jem, puzzled. Roger made a dismissive gesture, and Ian turned back to the discussion. This lasted no more than a few moments, and they set off along the edge of the gorge, the dogs sniffing eagerly to and fro.
29
Remember, Man …
“GO,” HER MOTHER HAD said firmly. “You need to move, and someone needs to go and tell Tom MacLeod that we’ll be needing a coffin. As soon as possible.” Her mother cast a quick, haunted glance back into the house. “If we can have it by tonight, for the wake …”
“So soon?” Brianna had thought she was numbed by the shocks of the day, but this was a fresh one. “She’s—she—it was only a few hours ago!”
Her mother sighed, nodding.
“I know. But it’s still warm out.”
“Flies,” Mrs. Cunningham added baldly. She had come to the door, presumably looking for Claire. She nodded bleakly at Brianna. “I’ve been to wakes in hot weather where there were maggots dropping from the shroud and wriggling across the floor. At least if there’s a coffin, they—”
“We’ll put her body in the springhouse for now,” her mother said hastily, with a reproachful look at Elspeth Cunningham. “It will be all right. Go, darling.”
She went.
TOM MACLEOD BOASTED that he was the only coffin maker between the Cherokee Line and Salem. Whether this was true, Brianna didn’t know, but as he told her, he did usually have at least one coffin a-building, in case of sudden need.
“This one’s near finished,” he said, leading Brianna into an open-sided shed smelling of the fresh wood shavings that covered the floor. “Higgins, you say … not sure I know which lady that might be. How big would you say …?”
Brianna mutely held a hand at the level of her chest, and Mr. MacLeod nodded. He was old, leathery, and mostly bald, with a half-sprouted gray beard and shoulders stooped by constant bending over his work, but he exuded a sense of calm competence.
“This’ll do, then. Now, as to when …” He squinted at the half-finished coffin, balanced on wooden sawhorses. Pine planks in different stages of preparation leaned against the walls. She could hear the rustle of what were probably mice in the shadows, and found it oddly soothing, almost domestic.
“I could help you,” she blurted, and he looked up at her, startled.
“I’m a good builder,” she said. There were tools hanging on one wall, and she stepped across and took down a plane, holding it with the confidence of one who knows what to do with it. He saw that, and blinked slowly, considering. Then his eyes passed slowly up her body, taking in her height—and her bloodstained clothes.
“You’re Himself’s lass, are ye not?” he said, and nodded, as though to himself. “Aye, well … if ye can drive a nail straight, fine. Otherwise, ye can sand wood.”
ROGER SAID A silent prayer as they passed through the gorge. One for the soul of Amy Higgins, and on its heels another for the safety of the hunting party. The boys walked soberly, keeping near him as they’d been told to, glancing to and fro as though expecting the bear to leap out of the grapevines.
Perhaps a half hour later, the walls of the gorge spread apart and flattened into forest, and they walked into the shadow of tall pines and poplars, the dogs shuffling shoulder-deep in the fallen leaves and dry needles, forging the way. Ian was in the lead; he stopped at the bottom of a steep slope and nodded to the other men, pointing upward.
“Is the bear up there?” Aidan whispered to Roger.
“I don’t know.” Roger took a firmer grip on his staff. He had a knife on his belt, but it wouldn’t begin to penetrate the hide and fat of a bear.
“The dogs do,” Germain observed.