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

by Diana Gabaldon

Then she looked down and noticed that William, who had not assumed his breeches yet, was standing there unshaved and barefoot, in nothing but his shirt. She gasped, turned, and fled.

The cat stretched luxuriously, then—without opening his own eyes—oozed slowly up the bed and curled into the spot between Roger’s face and shoulder, purring loudly.

“Right now,” she assured him. She shrugged out of her wrapper and tossed it on the floor, where Adso, who had been blinking grouchily, promptly took possession of the nice warm nest thus provided and settled down on it, eyes going back to blissful slits. Brianna blew the candle out; Roger heard the tiny spatter of wax droplets on the tabletop. “That cat sounds like a motorboat. Why is he in here, anyway? Oughtn’t he to be out in the barn hunting vermin?”

“Mama says cats are attracted to people working, so they can get in the way. I guess I’m the only person in the house who was doing anything at this hour.”

“Great. So he can stay and guard the ramparts here with me, Rachel, and Aunt Jenny and the Sachem, while the partisan band—and Mama, because she won’t let Da go alone—and probably you—go roaming the countryside, getting their asses shot off.”

“But I went through my parents’ stuff all the time. I mean, I knew what size my mother’s brassieres and panties were.” “Well, that would have been well worth knowing…No,

Oh ick...

Anyway, I’ve been hiding it in Da’s study. Everybody’s afraid to mess around in there—except Mama, and I suppose I ought to show this to her, anyway. When I’ve thought it out a little further.”

He’d been uncertain about the piping, given the Reverend Thomas’s opinions regarding music in church, but Jamie—of all people—had said that he didn’t think the sound of the pipes should really be called music. “People dance to it,” Bree had said, amused. “Aye, well, folk will dance to anything, if ye give them enough liquor,” her father replied. “The British government says the pipes are a weapon of war, though, and I’ll no just say they’re wrong. Put it this way, lass—ye ken I dinna hear music, but I hear what the pipes are sayin’ fine.”

He was sure that getting a cockstand in a cathedral must be some sort of sin, but as he’d been too embarrassed to explain it in Confession, he had let it pass under the guise of “impure thoughts.” He cleared his throat, glanced at Claire, and straightened up.

Brianna, on his left, smelled of flour and apples, and Claire on his right carried her usual varying scent of green things and flowers. From the corner of his eye, he caught a wee movement; a bee had landed on her head, just above her ear. She lifted a hand absently to brush at the ticklish feeling, but he caught the hand and held it for a few seconds, ’til the bee flew away. She glanced at him, surprised, but smiled and looked back at what was going on in front of them.

Warm drops struck his hands, folded in his lap, but he didn’t care. A murmur of awe and joy rose up from the church, and Roger Mac stood up, his own face wet with tears and shining like the sun.

‘You have a republic…if you can keep it.’ That’s what he said—will say—at the end of the war. But they—we—did keep it. At least for the next two hundred years. Maybe longer.”

IT TOOK WILLIAM ROUGHLY three seconds to conclude that he meant to go after Amaranthus, and the rest of the day was a search for the means of her departure. He didn’t know how long she’d been planning her disappearance—probably since I came back from Morristown, he thought grimly—but she’d done a good job of it.

“Willie, go and tell Moira to boil coffee—very strong and lots of it—and now.” “I’m—” Hal began, but broke off, coughing. He’d pressed his fist into his chest and was turning a nasty color that alarmed William. “Is he—” he began. His father turned on him like a tiger. “Now!” he shouted, and as William hurtled from the room, he heard his father call after him, “Get my saddlebags!” The next few hours passed in a blur of activity, with people running to and fro and fetching things and making anxious, stupid suggestions, while Hal sat on the sofa holding Papa’s hand as though it were a rope thrown to a drowning swimmer, alternating between blowing air, gasping, and drinking black coffee with some sort of herb crumbled into it that Papa had dug out of his saddlebags.

At least they listen to Claire!

mostly listening to Moira and Miss Crabb, from whom he learned that the duke suffered from something called asthma and that (lowered voices, with a cautious glance over the shoulder) Lord John’s wife-but-she-wasn’t-really-and-the-things-folk-said-of-her was a famous healer and had given Lord John the little dry sticks to put in the coffee.

William hid a smile in his napkin, but was curious. He wondered whether Uncle Hal really had opinions on the conduct of the war that he felt obliged to share with the House of Lords or whether he had sought a good excuse to go home to England—and Aunt Minnie.

AT DAWN OF the next day, William fastened his stock, buttoned his buff waistcoat, pulled on the red coat he’d thought he’d never wear again, and went downstairs, his step firm in his freshly polished boots.

“You think I might need a column of infantry to help drag Amaranthus back?” William asked, biting into a warm slice of fresh buttered corn bread, thick with peach jam. “You think you won’t?” his father said, arching an eyebrow. Lord John got up and, coming behind William, undid his hasty plait and rebraided it, tight and neat, before doubling it into a queue and binding it with his own black ribbon. The touch of his father’s hands on his neck, warm and light, moved him.

“Mmphm.” William heard the grunt of agreement he’d made and stopped dead for an instant, a forkful of egg suspended, dripping yolk over his plate. “You probably don’t want to hear this…but Da makes that sort of noise all the time.” He glanced swiftly from his father to his uncle, but neither of them seemed to have noticed anything odd in his response, and the party relapsed into a silent, steady engulfment of breakfast.

“William—if she is going to Ben, and she gets to him…don’t—I repeat, don’t make any effort to take her away from him. Next time—if there is a next time—he probably will kill you.” There was enough blunt finality in that opinion that decided William not to argue with it, though his pride thought strongly otherwise.

“Ellesmere!” Randall exclaimed, spotting him. “Ransom,” William corrected. Denys waved a hand, indicating that it was all one.

“I know,” William said dryly. A group of Hessian deserters had tried to kill him during Monmouth—and came bloody close to doing so, too. If his wretched Scottish cousin hadn’t found him in the bottom of a ravine with his skull cracked…but no need to dwell on that. Not now.

The fact that he, William, plainly didn’t know whom he’d been dealing with was becoming painfully obvious. “So…you’re a turncoat, but you haven’t bothered actually taking it off and turning it inside out, is that it?”

“My real father was a soldier, you know, and he left me a comfortable sum of money, with the stipulation that I should use it to buy a commission—if I should turn out to be a boy, that is. He died before I was born.”

Ha!

“I did. This”—he waved his free hand down the front of his red coat—“is just to give me countenance—and safe passage—while I look for my cousin’s wife.” Denys’s eyes widened. “This is the girl you’re after? Is she lost?” I notice that you don’t ask which cousin. “No, she’s not lost; she had a falling-out with her husband”—to say the least—“and decided to go to her father’s house. But my uncle became concerned about her safety on the road and sent me to see that she reached her destination safely. I thought that if she passed through Charles Town—which she likely would—she might call upon Ban Tarleton for any assistance; she and her husband are acquainted with him.”

Richardson pulled up a stool and sat down at the small, round table, between William and Denys. Well within grabbing—or shooting or stabbing, for that matter—distance.

The proverbial bad penny

mood for trifling. “No commission, no rank, and not ‘my lord.’ Be so kind as to remove your hand, sir, or I shall remove it for you.” William made a slight gesture with his spoon, which was flimsy but made of tin and whose handle came to a triangular point. Richardson paused, and William’s muscles tightened. The hand lifted, though, just in time.

“I know your sister,” he said.

Agnes had agreed, with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, to go to Charles Town with the Cunninghams, and then to London, by which time she would theoretically have made up her mind as to which of the two lieutenants would be her husband. The captain had survived, but had had a setback that delayed their departure. He had rallied but was still in fragile health, and Jamie had told him that he was welcome to stay until the roads were safer. There was no chance of his riding; his legs were still paralyzed, though he did have sensation in his feet and I thought I’d seen a faint twitch of his left toe.

So March to July, 3mos plus another 3-ish. Hope no one DOES think it's Jamie's🙄

I wasn’t picky. I was still reveling in the novelty of having several someone elses who would deal with the constant juggling act of turning food into meals, to say nothing of helping with things like soap and candle making. And laundry…

If he meant to spend the day at home, perhaps I could induce him to retire with me for a short rest after lunch…

“Jenny would disown you.” “Likely,” he said, undaunted at the prospect.

“Taste that. Not like that!” I said, seeing him about to engulf the bite. He froze, the bread halfway to his mouth. “How am I meant to taste it, if I’m not to put it in my mouth?” he asked warily. “Have ye thought of some novel method of ingestion?”

“Oh.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “Well, it’s got a fine, light nose.” He raised his eyebrows, eyes still closed. “And a nice bouquet, to be sure…lily o’ the valley, burnt sugar, something a wee bit bitter, maybe…” He frowned, concentrating, then opened his eyes and looked at me. “Bee dung?” I made a grab for the bread, but he snatched it away, stuffed it in his mouth, closed his eyes again, and assumed an expression of rapture as he chewed. “See if I ever give you any more sourwood honey!” I said. “I’ve been saving that!” He swallowed, blinked, and licked his lips thoughtfully. “Sourwood. Is that no what ye gave Bobby Higgins last week to make him shit?”

The boys nodded, breathless, and I pushed past them with a brief look strongly suggesting that they’d best not even think of trying to haul me out the back door and shove me up a tree, no matter what happened. They all looked shifty, but hung their heads.

“I bid ye welcome, sir,” he said, his voice pleasant, but neutral. “Ye’ll pardon my not using your surname; I never kent what it was.”

JAMIE INVITED “CAPTAIN STEVENS” to come in, with the sort of exquisite courtesy that meant he was doing a mental rundown of the location of all weapons inside the house.

I’d last seen Ulysses at River Run plantation, near Cross Creek,

Really? Jamie saw him after that, with Gideon, in the stable on the Ridge. And that's where Claire saw them🙄 Editor!!!!! "I opened the door to a knock one afternoon in October, to find three weary horses and a pack mule in the dooryard, and Jocasta, Duncan, and the black butler Ulysses standing on the stoop." - ABOSAA

and had killed at least one man and—just possibly—Hector Cameron, Jocasta’s third husband.

I don't remember that, need to look!

“May I?” I said, and at Ulysses’s nod I poured him a respectable dram, and the same for Jamie. And for me. I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what “Captain Stevens” was doing here. I took my glass and sat down on a stool, a little behind Jamie.

All of that was mostly true. On the other hand, we did know a bit more than that, as Jocasta now and then wrote to her old friend, Farquard Campbell, who lived in Cross Creek. But I could see why Jamie didn’t mean to set Captain Ulysses Stevens on a dangerous path toward an unwarned and literally unarmed—the poor man had only one—Duncan Innes.

It was true. Not that Jamie had misrepresented himself to Governor Tryon; the governor had known all about Jamie’s Catholicism but had turned a deliberately blind eye to it for the sake of getting Jamie’s help in settling—in more ways than one—the tumultuous North Carolina backcountry during the War of the Regulation. But it was undeniably true that Catholics were by law not allowed to receive land grants. And so…

He ignored me.

Too many people are ignoring Claire in this book, it's actually getting annoying.

Jamie made a quick movement and Ulysses flinched, much to my pleasure.

“I imagine a good many folk know about it…but I doubt most of them have anything against me, and even fewer would be able to get the secretary’s attention for such a wee matter.”

The British government was in fact in the habit of confiscating rebel property and bestowing it on their own lackeys—they’d done it all over the Highlands, after Culloden, and Jamie had saved Lallybroch only by deeding it to his ten-year-old nephew before Culloden.

So.... Willie? Roger, to go with his acres??

and since the bear, he had resumed carrying a musket.

I twitched back the curtain—maybe he’ll be home long enough to build me a proper door one of these days—and

“And a good officer would never leave his men.” The big room was silent save for the murmur of the fire and the bumping of the kettle, about to boil. I closed my eyes, thinking, Beauchamp, you idiot…Because he’d done that. Abandoned his men at Monmouth, in order to save my life. It didn’t matter that the battle was over, the enemy in retreat, that there was no danger to the men at that point, that nearly all of them were militia on temporary enlistment, whose service would be legally up by the next day’s dawn. Many had left already. But it didn’t matter. He’d left his men.