"Brown,.Mary.-.Unicorn's.Ring.2.-.1994.-.Pigs.Don't.Fly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Mary)

were scorched fingers and a fall of soot, but at last on the left-hand side my
scrabblings found a ledge, and on the ledge a bag of sorts, which I snatched out
to drop on the floor with a clink and chink of coin.
I fell to my knees on the hearth and gazed with excitement at the pile of coins
that had burst from the split leather pouch that had contained them. I had never
seen so much money in my life! And all the coins looked like either silver or
gold.... All in all, a fortune. Hastily wiping my sooty fingers I began to
examine them, one by one. All but two were strange to me, the inscriptions and
symbols utterly alien. A scrap of singed paper fluttered to the floor. It was so
brittle with age and neat it crumbled to pieces in my fingers even as I read it:
"Thomas Fletcher, Mercernairy, his monnaies." There followed a list I could not
follow, then "Ayti coyns in all."
So my father had been named, and could write, after a fashion! That surely was
where I had got my learning skills. But eighty coins? There were less than half,
surely, for even witn the confirmation of my tally sticks there were forty-seven
missing. I glanced over to the bed where my mother lay in all her finery, extra
dresses and shifts spread around her, and my eyes filled with tears, remembering
the silver coins and a couple of gold that had purchased them. At the time I had
wondered where they nad come from, and now I knew. But how was I to
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Mary Brown
know that my father hadn't wished it so? After all, she had been his beloved,
and I shouldn't grudge a single coin. Before me lay enough still for a fair
dowry, even if the coins would have to be weighed for their metal content only,
as they were foreign. But there still a couple of our own coinage: I could
manage for a while on those.
Before my eyes the piece of paper crumbled into ash, the pouch also, as if tney
had been just waiting for me to find them and were now dead like my mother.
Carefully I packed the coins inside my waistband purse, determined as soon as
possible to make them a separate hiding place.
As I tucked them away I noticed for the first time the ring upon my finger. I
couldn't remember putting it there, and absent-mindedly tried to pull it off to
tie round my neck, as I had originally intended. But it wouldn't come. There it
was, settled snug on my finger as if it was part of the very skin. ... Suddenly
I tingjed all over and everything became brighter and sharper, as if a veil had
been pulled away.
As if a stranger I saw all the cracks in the wall, the shabbiness of the room; I
heard the crackle of the fire, the creak of furniture as if were talking to me;
for the first time smelled the sweetish-sickly odor of decay coming from the bed
so strongly I had to pinch my nostrils and swallow hard. There was a taste of
soot and ashes in my mouth where I had licked my fingers and the hearth beneath
my hands was rough with grit and dust.
But there was something else as well. Not exactly hope, that was too strong a
word, but a sort of energy I had not known I possessed. Something enforced the
knowledge that I was alone for the first time in my life, but also that I would
manage somehow or other, that I wasn't a complete idiot, that life held more
than I had expected.
I rose to my feet. There were things to be done and as my inside time clock told
it was near midnight, the sooner the better. Outside, when I went to check that
the goat and chickens would be safe, the moon was riding