Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone (Outlander, #9)

by Diana Gabaldon

“Will it be today?” I blurted. Twice before, he’d left me on the edge of a battlefield, telling me that while the day might come that he and I would part—it wouldn’t be today. And both times, he’d been right.

“I dinna think so,” he said at last, soberly. His hand fell away, my cheek suddenly cool where he’d touched it. “But I willna lie to ye, Claire; I think it will be an evil night.”

I'm reasonably sure he lives but wtf will happen?!?!

Tom MacLeod stepped out of the trees and fell into step beside him with a quiet “Mac Dubh.” It gave him an odd feeling, sometimes, when one of his Ardsmuir men called him that. Memories of prison, the hard things—and they were hard—but also the fleeting, regular pulse of the kinship that had kept them alive and would bind them for life. And at the bottom of his heart, always, a faint sense of his father, the Black One whose son he was. “Dean Urnaigh dhomh,” he whispered. Pray for me, Da.

Bobby Higgins, coming up behind him…He smiled at thought of Bobby. Bobby was one of the ten men he had told about tonight. Bobby hadn’t fought anyone save the occasional raccoon in some years, but he’d been a soldier and remembered how. And of the ten, for all he’d been an English soldier, Bobby Higgins was one of the men he would trust with his life.

He wasn’t given to vain regrets, but for a piercing instant, he thought how different this night might be if he had Young Ian by his side, and Roger Mac. If he had Germain and Jeremiah, too, waiting outside and ready to run for more help if it was needed. At least ye won’t get any of them killed. He wasn’t sure if that was his own thought or his father’s voice, but it was a small comfort.

He wants to see how many men I have.

Plainly I wasn’t going to sleep until—and unless—Jamie came home, more or less in one piece.

“Thanks for small mercies,” I said to him, just to break the silence. “At least Jamie will never break his neck riding a motorcycle.”

“You know?” she said, and her voice held both doubt and the horror of realizing that there was no doubt left.

Bluey was on her feet, just behind my knee, and was growling in a low, menacing sort of way. She knew Elspeth and normally would have gone to her for a friendly sniff and pat. Not tonight, Josephine, I thought, but said, “Leave off, dog. It’s all right.” The hell it is was written all over Bluebell’s face, but she stopped growling and backed up slowly to the hearth rug, where she lay down, but kept her hackles raised and a deeply suspicious gaze fixed on Elspeth, who didn’t seem to notice.

For once, I wasn’t bothered by the fact that I had a glass face; it might save explanations.

Nonetheless, Jamie had come in midafternoon to place a loaded pistol under a stone near the door, and he had cartridges and balls in his sporran and Claire’s best knife sheathed and tucked into the small of his back, the hilt hidden by his coat and the tip of it tickling the crack of his arse.

“Ciamar a tha thu, a Mhaighister.” Hiram Crombie looked just as usual—dour as a plate of pickled cabbage—and Jamie found that a comfort.

“Will it be to do with your wee brother, then?” he asked, changing to English, and was pleased to see that hearing the Tall Tree referred to as his wee brother made the corner of Hiram’s mouth quiver.

A formal occasion, then, is it? He had a sudden mental picture of them squaring up to fight a duel, in kilt, cocked hat, and their Masonic aprons. What would be the weapons? he wondered. Cutlasses?

“Aye, well enough,” Jamie said, thinking that Claire’s bees would enjoy hearing about this.

It’ll be outside, then. He took a deep breath and felt a distant bodhran start to beat in his blood.

He didn’t wait for the deep rumble of response but turned on his heel and went out the door, as quick as he could, and broke into a run as soon as he was outside, knife in hand.

Hiram Crombie and the rest were keeping Cunningham and his men busy, from the sounds of it.

While I longed to obliviate myself, I felt that I had to stay sober, had to be ready. For what, I didn’t want to think—thinking was another thing I had exhausted.

“Holy Lord,” I said, finding a more acceptable interjection.

Two old witches, I thought.

I saw Jamie, among a many-headed mass of black confusion, a head taller than his companions and his eyes searching for me. “Help me, Sassenach,” he said, and stumbled into the hall, lurching to one side and striking the wall. He didn’t fall, but I saw the blood on his wet shirt, soaked and spreading.

“Mr. Fraser has a bad cut from his right shoulder down across his chest,” she told me. “It just missed his left nipple, though.” “Well, that’s a bit of good news,” I said, repressing a mildly hysterical urge to laugh. “Did you—”

“He soaked the first compress, but the second one is doing better,” she assured me. “He wants whisky; is that all right?” “Make him stand up,” I said, reaching the waistband of the captain’s breeches. “If he can stand upright for thirty seconds, he can have whisky. If not, give him honey-water and make him lie down flat on the floor. No matter what he says.”

Always with the whisky🥃

I closed my eyes, the better to listen to what my hands were telling me. I’d found the wound in his back, and it wasn’t good.

I wasn’t going to wake her; the Loyalist wounded would have to see to themselves—or their wives would.

“Come and sit down, Sassenach,” he murmured, and lifted a finger vaguely at a nearby stool. “Ye look worse than I do.” “Not possible,” I said. But I did sit down.

A warm hand curled around my ankle and rested there. “How do you feel?” I murmured. I did want to know, but was having trouble opening my eyes to look. “I’ll do. Hand me the wee jar, Sassenach.” The hand left my ankle and rose up to my lap, where I was holding the small jar of alcohol and sutures. “I’ll do it.” “You’ll do what?” I opened my eyes and stared at him. “Stitch your own chest back together?” “I thought that might wake ye up.” He dropped his arm. “Help me get up, a nighean. I’m stiff as parritch on the third day and I dinna want ye crouchin’ on the floor to stitch me. Besides, I might wake the wee lassie if ye make me howl.”

“Howl, forsooth,” I said, rather cross. “Serve you right if I did. Let me see it, at least, before I try to get you on your feet.”

She's feisty - he'll be fine😁

I was surprised and wondered which one of them had thought to use a wet compress to keep the edges of the wound moist. Whoever it was had also thought to take his shoes off and put the bundle of his rolled-up jacket and shirt under his feet to raise them. Or maybe Jamie had told them, I thought vaguely.

“They both work,” he assured me, squinting down his chest. “So does my cock, if ye’re reckoning such things.” “Glad to hear it.”

“I know,” he said, and immediately started trying to do it anyway.

My Merck Manual lay open on her lap. I stopped dead in the doorway, but she’d heard me coming. She looked up at me, the skin of her face white and stretched so tight across her bones that I could see plainly what she’d look like dead. “Where did you get this?” she whispered, one hand spread across the page as though to hide it. I could see the words “Spinal Cord Injuries” at the top of the page.

“That happened in a landslide?” I knew a cutlass wound when I saw one—and had an eight-inch scar down the inside of my left arm to prove it.

I grabbed him round the waist and the lieutenant got an arm round his rib cage from the back, and we lurched out of the kitchen and up the stairs like a mob of drunks being chivvied by the police.

🥴

“Shoot,” I said, returning to my repairs. “If you don’t mind the reference.”

“Oh, I kent who they were, well before last night,” he assured me, with some grimness. “The list is for you and Bobby and the Lindsays, in case they kill me in the next few days.”

“Well, I dinna mean to let them stay on as my tenants,” he said reasonably. “They tried to kill me last night. Or take me off to be hanged, which isna much better,” he added, and I saw the rage simmering under the thin skin of reason.

Of course some, likely some of the same, weren't exactly helpful when Richard Brown came for Claire 🙄

He’d been looking at the ceiling, but now turned his head to look at me. It was the patient look of a lion who’d been asked if he could really eat that wildebeest over there.

Jamie sat up abruptly and made a noise like a stuck pig. “Bloody lie down!”

Should you seek to return privily to Fraser’s Ridge, you will be shot on Sight.

Good

“Would you really shoot them if they come back?” I asked quietly. He looked at me sharply, and I saw that while he might be heavy of heart, that heart was also burning with a deep anger. “Sassenach,” he said, “they betrayed me, and they hunted me like a wild animal, across my own land, for the sake of what they call the King’s justice. I have had enough of that justice. Should they come within my sight, on my land, again—aye. I will kill them.”

“My—that is—Lieutenant Bembridge has not returned.

I'm getting the feeling these two were (assuming he's dead) a couple.

Besides,” he added, leaning back on his pillow with a grimace as the movement pulled on his stitches, “if nothing’s happened to Mr. Bembridge, he’d be here now. Since he isn’t, it’s odds-on he’s hurt or dead. You’d be the best one to deal with him once he’s found, aye?”

I stared at him. He was slightly whiter than the sheet covering him, his eyes were shadowed and sunken with exhaustion, and his hand trembled where it lay on the coverlet.

“And just when did you make all these arrangements?” I demanded. “When ye went to the privy. Go, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye have to.”

“Do you mean Nicodemus Partland?” I said bluntly. “And the men he’s meant to be bringing from Ninety-Six?”

Nobody had slept last night, and neither had he. While a nice, cheerful young man, he was in fact not the brightest person I’d ever met. Now, between worry and exhaustion, he didn’t seem to have more than a few brain cells still working. I took a deep breath of morning air, summoning patience.