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

by Diana Gabaldon

“It would have been at night. There was a fire in the parlor—well, the one time I was in it, at least. And the walls were red, so there was a bit of that in the air. But I only saw her by candlelight. A candle with a brass reflector, a little behind and above her, so the light glowed on the top of her head and ran down the side of her face.”

“Our grandmother was a painter. I was thinking you might have…inherited something from her. Like I did.” The thought made his hands curl, with a slight shock that went through the muscles of his forearms. Our grandmother… “Jesus,” he said. “She looked a lot like me,” Brianna said casually, and reached to open the door for him. “And you. That’s where we got the nose.”

who all stirred with alarm at seeing me.

🙄🥺🙄

There were five women besides Mother Harriet: Doris Hallam, Molly Adair, Fiona Leslie, Annie MacFarland, and Gracie MacNeil. All of them were wives or mothers of tenants Jamie had excommunicated,

He had 12 on the letter.

“Did your husbands put ye up to this?” Jamie demanded. “Get yourselves up, for God’s sake.”

This poor man, no peace whatsoever🙄🙃

The gomerels would sacrifice us and the bairns for the sake of their pride—but…we came anyway.” Jamie made a Scottish noise of disgust. “Your husbands are fools and cowards, and they’ll pay the price of their foolishness. They kent what they were risking when they chose to cast their lots wi’ Cunningham.” “Does a gambler ever think he’ll lose, Laird?” Jamie had opened his mouth to say something further, but shut it at this shrewd stab. Harriet MacIlhenny had lived on the Ridge almost from its founding and knew very well who was the biggest gambler in this neck of the woods.

Harriet moved her skirts to obscure the child and coughed, the interruption giving Jamie enough time to look over the women and calculate exactly how many sons, brothers, uncles, grandsons, and brothers-in-law they possessed among them—and how many of those were men he either included in his gang or would like to. I saw the color rising up his neck, but I also saw the slight slump of his shoulders.

When she turned back, her eyes were fixed on me, not Jamie, which gave me a start. “I’d suppose your wife could answer that for ye, Laird,” she said circumspectly, and let the corner of her mouth tuck in for a moment. Her gaze dropped to Jamie again. “None of the men can cook. But if ye dinna trust what a wife might do to a husband who’s taken the house from over her head and the food out of her bairns’ mouths…perhaps ye can imagine what the brothers and sons of those wives might do to him. If ye’d like me to have my lads come and swear that same oath to ye…”

I guess these 6 get to stay and the other 6 men and their families go?

for your husbands—but

Yes, so the others go.

“But I shall write new contracts, between myself and each of you ladies, for the tenancy of the land and buildings ye live in,

“Mind, this means that each of ye—each one, I say—is responsible for the rents and other terms of her contract. If ye want to accept your husbands’ advice and help, that’s well and good—but the land is yours, not his, and if he should prove false, either to you or to me, he’ll answer for it to me, even unto death.”

even more grateful to God that He’s let us save ye from the guilt of putting women and children out to starve.” She dropped him a deep curtsy, then turned and went out, leaving her followers to curtsy to him, each in turn, and murmur their thanks to their speechless, red-eared landlord.

“I did think o’ the other men, Sassenach. The brothers and sons, I mean. But what I thought was that they’d take care for the women and children—feed them, take them in if their husbands couldna find a place. I never thought…Christ, it was like havin’ my own guns taken and pointed at me!”

Just as well, since both of them ignored me.

😂

“Ye’re an auld woman,” Jamie pointed out, rather brusquely. “What if ye die on the way to wherever ye’re takin’ your son?” “Er…where are you taking him?” I interjected, more in hopes of stopping the conversation going straight off the rails than because I wanted to know.

Elspeth was more than perceptive enough to have grasped the fact that—everything else quite aside—she was an answer to prayer for Jamie.

To have your unmarried maidservant growing visibly pregnant in your house—or hastily married off to someone who was patently not the father—was to invite speculation that you had had something to do with her condition. And we’d both been there before….I shivered, the echo of Malva’s denunciation, “It was him!” ringing in my ears.

the disturbance at the Lodge in February.

Eviction letter was March 30, not February

He nodded slightly and came closer, still with a wary look, in case Jamie had it in mind to bat him over the head with the shovel, Jamie supposed.

“Aye?” He kent well enough what Crombie had come to say, but he wasn’t above making him say it out loud.

“But I suppose ye kent what Cunningham was about, and ye didna warn me.”

This is kinda disjointed compared with the actual chapter and event

That’s reassuring, Jamie thought wryly. He thinks we might win.

SILVIA HAD VOLUNTEERED to rise early—very early—and make the gallons of brose and porridge to feed the militia. The warm, creamy smell crept up the stairs and eased me into wakefulness like a soft hand on my cheek. I stretched luxuriously in the warm bed and rolled over, enjoying the picture of Jamie, long-legged as a stork and stark naked, bent over the washstand to peer into the looking glass as he shaved by candlelight.

Claire works like a dog, and naps and sleeps like my dog😂

“I know that you and your daughters would prefer to die, rather than have other people killed so that you don’t…but you know…you’re our guests. Jamie’s a Highlander, and his laws of hospitality forbid him to let anyone kill his guests. So I’ll have to ask you to stretch your principles a bit and let him protect you.”

“Well, first, because I say so, a charaid,” Jamie said, smiling. “Ye always do what your colonel says, because we’ll fight better if we’re all goin’ in the same direction—and for that to happen, somebody has to decide which direction to go…and that’s me, aye?” A ripple of laughter ran through the men. “Oh. Aye,” McDonald said, uncertainly. Joe was young, only eighteen, and had never fought in a battle, bar fists behind somebody’s barn to settle a grudge.

He saw her hair and Mandy’s for a moment, their mad curls swirled together, and felt such love that he kent if he died just then, it would be fine.

“And His Grace the Duke of Pardloe begs me to convey his deepest regards. He wrote sort of a note for you.” “Sort of?” I’d seen one or two missives from Hal, in the course of my brief marriage to John—and I’d heard a lot more about them from John. “Did he sign it with his whole name?”

“He came to the Brumbys’ house—Lord John just sent him to see ‘the Lady Painter’; he hadn’t told him about me, either. What is it with those two?” she demanded suddenly, looking up. “Da and Lord John. Why would they do that? Not tell us about each other being in Savannah, I mean.”

And Jamie, at least, had been very much afraid that his children might not like each other, and his wish that they would was too important to speak of, even to me.

“Poor William. He’s such a good guy, but my God! How does anyone that young manage to have such a complicated life?” “Your life wasn’t that simple in your early twenties, as I recall…” I untied the ribbon of her shift and placed the flat bell of the Pinard against her chest. “Poor choice of parents, I expect. Deep breath, darling, and hold it.”

Poor choice of parents!😂🤣😂

“I kept taking the willow bark,” she assured me. “Only after a while, I started grinding the leaves up and making pills out of them with cheese, because the tea made me pee all the time, and I couldn’t stop painting every fifteen minutes to go find a chamber pot. I don’t think cheese would neutralize the willow bark, do you?” “No,” I said, laughing. “Congratulations—you’ve invented the world’s first cheese-flavored aspirin. They didn’t upset your stomach?”

The note emerged—a small, neat block of intricately folded paper, with a swan flying across a full moon stamped into the wax that sealed it. It was addressed on the outside to Mrs. James Fraser, Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina, but true to John’s description of Hal’s correspondence habits, had no salutation and a message consisting of slightly fewer words than were strictly necessary. He had signed it, though.

“Maybe you’re jokin’, Sassenach—but he isn’t. Whatever he said to ye.”

PostScriptum: Your name is Michel. Your mother had a Medallion, given her by her French Grandmother, with the image upon it of Michael, Archangel, and she wished you to have his Protection.

“Have you ever been on a ship?” William asked suddenly.

William has!🤢

“Thank you.” The wind had restored Cinnamon’s usual ruddy glow. “Thank you,” he said again, and seized William’s hand in a grasp of crushing earnestness. “And tell your sister—how much…how much…” The tide of rising emotion choked him, and he shook his head and wrung William’s hand harder. “You told her,” William said, easing the hand free and repressing an urge to count his fingers. “She was happy to do it. She’s happy for you. So am I,” he added, patting Cinnamon affectionately on the forearm, as much to avoid being seized again as from the very real affection he felt. “I’ll miss you, you know,” he added diffidently.

“Au revoir, Michel,” he said, under his breath. “Now who am I going to talk to?”

He breaks my heart, such a walking disaster. Go to Bree and Rachel (and Ian and Fanny), A relationship with Jamie will have time to develop later.

“What would she have done if that happened and we didn’t know the truth?” William shrugged and spread his hands in an affectation of complete ignorance. “God knows,” he said, with complete truth. “But it didn’t.”

His father sighed heavily. He was looking rather disheveled, and a faint smell of spoilt milk hung about him, likely connected to the imperfectly cleaned whitish stain on his charcoal-colored sleeve. Trevor had been weaned but had not yet mastered the mysteries of drinking from a cup. “You need a nursemaid,” William said. “Yes, I do,” his father said promptly. “You.”

William had quite forgotten her, in the excitement, but at once took the shoes and stockings from her other hand and urged her to sit down and let him help re-shoe her. She did, and laughed, in small breathless spurts. “Really. William. What do you think me? A…mare?” “No, no. Certainly not. A filly, maybe.” He grinned at her, and pulled her last stocking up to her knee.

Lord John’s new housekeeper, a tall, irritable woman aptly named Miss Crabb,

🦀

“Ye mean to say as how ’twas black men that turned upon their masters, and that’s how the city fell? Good on ’em!” “Mrs. O’Meara!” Miss Crabb exclaimed. “You cannot mean that!” “The divil I don’t,” Moira replied stoutly, plunking the pot back on the table with such force that tea sputtered across the cloth. “And ye’d mean the same, if ye’d ever been a ’denture, like I was. Death to the masters, says I!”

“I suppose he is. Intense, I mean. Sir Henry sent him out to collect Loyalists for a provincial militia, and I understand he’s done quite well. His Loyalists fought with Major Tarleton’s troops to take Monck’s Corner—and that cut off the main line of retreat for the Americans. So then—”

Is there more tea, please, Moira?” “There is,” she said, getting ponderously to her feet. “But if it was my choice to make, son, I’d be gettin’ out the fine brandy. Seems as though such a victory’s deservin’ of it.”

Lord John eyed the shambles of his sitting room, shrugged, sat down, and, picking up the bottle, drained it.

by contrast, his present life was shapeless and lacking…something. Everything.

“It’s not a bad time to rejoin,” his father said judiciously. “You want to get in before the fun’s over, I mean. Cornwallis says the Americans won’t last another winter. Bear that in mind.”

Nooo Cornwallis is wrong, Willie

“He made his choice,” he said, speaking directly to Amaranthus. “I can’t change that. And I would rather have him killed cleanly than captured and executed as a traitor. A good death might be the only thing I still could give him.”