"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Claire Moffatt 02 - The Inheritor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
TOR
ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright й 1984 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 8-10 West 36 Street, New York, N.Y.
First TOR printing: May
ISBN: 51600-1 Can. Ed.: 51601-X
Printed in the United States of America
Prologue
Thin wisps of grey fog played in the street; cloud seemed to sit atop Twin Peaks, and the great striding giant of the TV tower, emerging like Orion knee deep in mist, stood above the hills of San Francisco. Stray tendrils stole into the garden, the tiny square of lawn edged with the spiky green and grey leaves of herbs. A lemon tree, its white sharp-scented flowers and yellow fruit nestled side by side in the dark gloss of leaves, sprawled against a wall, and the mingled sweet and medicinal smells of flowers and herbs drifted through the window open to the fog.
Even inside, thin fog wisps drifted against the paneled walls of the room called the studio. The woman kneeling at the potter's wheel by the fireplace raised her eyes to the creeping fog and clenched her teeth against panic. The last weeks had frayed her nerves, but she was not a coward and was not ready to give in. She loved the house; she loved the garden and the paneled studio.
It was like an old Basil Rathbone movie; gaslamps shining through the London pea-soup fog, Sherlock Holmes standing by the open fire. Fog was simply a part of living in San Francisco, sweeping in through the Golden Gate every evening, out to sea again in midmorning.
She turned her attention again to the pot taking shape on the wheel; a flat dish, shaped like a Greek kylix. Blue glaze, she thought, Wedgwood blue; or dark glaze, cobalt, and an overlay of dark red, flowed on to give a shot-silk effect.
The wheel turned, a soft hypnotic sound.
The fire began to die. It sank lower, hissing, as if struggling with the fog. The woman at the wheel let it come to a stop, rising to mend the fire. Resinous kindling-sticks; a crackle of the dried juniper branches she had gathered in the Berkeley hills, which slowly took flame and shot up with a cheery roar, driving back the dank mist. She stood with her hands stretched to the kindly warmth; but outside, the windows were so white she could not see the garden. She felt the chill from the open window and went to close it. Fog was beautiful.
When it stayed outside where it belonged.
She went back to the wheel, her fingers caressing the moist clay. Tenderly she shaped the delicate flare of the rim.
The fire was sinking again.
Something must have been wrong with that last load of firewood. Why should she have this sense of the fog as a hostile entity, lurking in corners to watch her work?
She hates me. She doesn't want me here.
But that was idiotic. Before she knew it, she would be like her sister, seeing ghosts in every corner, bringing messages from the departed. She had heard the rumors and, after all, the families before her had been unlucky. A sudden death; a suicide. The stuff of which hauntings were made.
But everyone who had known the woman who had lived here in peace to the ripe age of eighty-four, and died at her piano, told the same story. She had been the gentlest, kindest soul alive. If her presence should cling hereЧnot that the woman at the wheel believed such rubbishЧwhy should that remaining presence be anything but benevolent, especially to a fellow artist?
She mended the fire again, for some reason reluctant to turn her back on the flickering shadows. If there should be a ghostly presence, would it not linger in the elegant music room, where the woman had died? It was not even a story of violence; the police had carefully checked it out. A kindly old lady, who had collapsed and died peacefully at her own piano, among her collection of antique harpsichords. Such a ghost, if indeed there were ghosts, could leave only the peaceful whisper of a more kindly age.
It was dark outside. Four in the afternoon; tea-time. No doubt the British, in that fog-haunted country, had invented their ritual of afternoon tea to chase away the blue devils of sea-fog and lowering darkness. She snapped on the studio lights, banishing the darkness, and went across the mist-shrouded yard along the little brick walk to the kitchen door. The white cat sat on the back wall, washing its face. She had tried to coax it with fish and liver, but it remained stubbornly aloof.
The cheery lights reflecting from copper pots, the homey smells of plants in hanging baskets, soothed her as she put on the kettle. She would not allow nerves, fog and her own morbid imagination to drive her out of the studio and ruin the best day's work she had done in weeks. The clay had reached that perfectly moist, malleable stage, and the emerging lovely shape was still a kinesthetic memory, almost an itch in her fingers. If she left it now she would never get it back again.
She carried the steaming cup into the studio and set it down near the wheel. Her hands went out to seek the unfinished shape, and recoiled. Under her fingers the graceful kylix was a formless and slimy blob, unpleasantly gelatinous like dead flesh.
The last time this had happened she had believed, against the evidence of her own senses, that the white cat had gotten in here and crushed the work on the wheel. But window and doors were shut, and where in the bare walls of this studio could a cat be hiding?
Then she saw it, lying across the wheel, blood mingled with the clay, four limp paws still twitching. She drew a shocked breath; how had it come here, and who had mauled the animal? Was he still hiding somewhere in the garden, violence still unspent, to be completed against her? She knelt to examine the body, and as she stretched a reluctant hand, it was gone; only the slime and the ruined clay. No invader, no violence, but the evil, the thing in this house, destroying the finest work she had done this year. Tears of rage stood in her eyes.
The fire was dying again and this time she had no heart to rebuild it. This time she was beaten. She stood up, and the boiling tea overturned, scalding her ankle, flooding the potter's wheel and the ruined kylix. She screamed with frustration and pain.
"All right! All right! You've won! I'll go! But why? Why? Why?" With a sob of inarticulate rage and defeat she ran out, banging the studio door shut behind her. She would never enter it again.
CHAPTER ONE
"It's a beautiful house." Leslie Barnes turned regretfully from the panorama before her. The early lights of winter dusk twinkled below her, and on a clear day, she knew, the entire bay would spread out here, where now the lights of the Golden Gate made a ribbon of jewels above the fog.
Perhaps for this view she could make minor adjustments, remodel the small room off the foyerЧno, there was no time or energy to spare for that. Her work must come first.
"It's truly a lovely place, the nicest I've seen. But, as I told the agent when I first called, I must have a separate room or two to see my clients."
"Clients? You're a lawyer, Miss?"
"A psychotherapist."
' The rooms on the ground floorЧ''
"I'm sorry," Leslie repeated. Why was she apologizing? This was her business. "My sister is a student at the Conservatory, and we need room for a grand piano and a harp."
The agent shrugged and sighed. "This place will go fast, you know. I have three people waiting to see it, and I couldn't even guarantee I could hold it till Monday."
"It simply isn't large enough," Leslie repeated. But she looked again with regret at the view she would have loved to live with.
The agent saw her regretful look and pressed on. "Look, one of the people considering this house is a family with three teenage kids; that little room we showed you, they're going to put two girls in there and let the boy have the attic room. You take the little downstairs room off the garage for your patients, and the piano can go in the living roomЧ" He was sounding like a reasonable man beset by a silly woman who didn't know what she wanted, and when Leslie shook her head he said, "Well, lady, I think you're making a big mistake, I really don't have anything else to show you. That place on Geary, maybeЧ"
"No parking; besides, I can't live in a place where neither Emily nor I will dare step outside after dark."
He shrugged. "Well, if we get anything, I'll call you. But you're not going to find anything bigger than this, unless you're talking about half a million dollars." 't The unspoken part of that, you're too fussy, stayed with her as she went to her car and watched the agent drive off in his. But she had a right to be fussy; it was the house she would live in, perhaps forever. She could not afford to move again within ten years. And she was not sure marriage was for her, in spite of JoelЧ
Her thoughts ran a familiar track. If he could get it through his head that her work was important to her, as important as his law career, not just a stopgap until Mister Right came along. She stopped herself.
She was always telling her clients not to enter any serious relationship with the idea of changing the other party. She could accept Joel as he was, marry him and live with him that way, or she could refuse him. But he wasn't going to change, or if he did it would be for his own reasons which had nothing to do with her.
In any case she must build her home with the assumption that she would live in it for years. San Francisco was necessary; she could no longer live in the East Bay, with Emily at the Conservatory. The long commute every day by public transit was expensive and took up precious time as well as draining energy Emily needed for practice.