"Cooper, Susan - Dark is Rising 01 - Over Sea, Under Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

Father reached out imperturbably to pull up another chair. 'What's it like out this morning, Merry ? Doesn't look so good to me.'

Great-Uncle Merry sat down and helped himself to toast, holding the slice in one large palm while he spread butter on it with Father's knife. 'Cloud. Thick, coming in from the sea. We're going to have rain.'

Barney was fidgeting with unbearable curiosity. Suddenly, forgetting the family rule that they should never ask their mysterious great-uncle questions about himself, he burst out: 'Gumerry, where have you been?' In the heat of the moment he used the pet name which he had invented when he was very small. They all used it sometimes still, but not for everyday. Jane hissed quietly between her teeth, and Simon glared at him across the table. But Great-Uncle Merry seemed not to have heard. 'It may not last,' he went on conversationally to Father, through a mouthful of toast. 'But I think we shall have it for most of the day.'

'Will there be thunder ? ' Jane said.

Simon added hopefully, 'Shall we have a storm at sea?' Barney sat silent while their voices eddied round the table. The weather, he said to himself in exasperation, all of them talking about the weather, when Great-Uncle Merry's just come back from his quest.

Then over their voices there came a low rumble of thunder, and the first spattering sounds of rain. As everyone rushed to the window to look out at the heavy grey sky, Barney crossed unnoticed to his great-uncle and slipped his hand into his for a moment.

'Gumerry,' he said softly, 'did you find it, what you were looking for?'

He expected Great-Uncle Merry to look past him with the familiar amiable obstinate expression that greeted any question. But the big man looked down at him almost absently. The eye-brows were drawn forbiddingly together on the craggy, secret face, and there was the old fierceness in the dark hollows and lines. He said gently, 'No, Barnabas, I didn't find it this time.' Then it was as if a blanket came down again over his face. 'I must go and put the car away,' he called to Father, and went out.

The thunder rolled quietly, far out over the sea, but the rain fell with grey insistence, blurring the windows as it washed down outside. The children wandered aimlessly about the house. Before lunch they tried going for a walk in the rain, but came back damp and depressed.

Half-way through the afternoon Mother put her head round the door. 'I'm going upstairs to work until supper. Now look, you three - you can go where you like in the house but you must promise not to touch anything that's obviously been put away. Everything valuable is all locked up, but I don't want you poking at anyone's private papers or belongings. All right?'

'We promise,' Jane said, and Simon nodded.

In a little while Father muffled himself in a big black oilskin and went of through the rain to see the harbour-master. Jane wandered round the bookshelves, but all the books within reach seemed to have titles like Round the Horn, or Log-Book of the Virtue, 1886, and she thought them very dull. Simon, who had been sitting making darts out of the morning paper, suddenly crumpled them all up irritably. 'I'm fed up with this. What shall we do?'

Barney stared gloomily out of the window. It's raining like anything. The water in the harbour's all flat. And on our first proper day. Oh I hate the rain, I hate it, I hate it, I hate the rain ...' He began to chant morosely.

Simon prowled restlessly around the room, looking at the pictures on the dark wallpaper. 'It's a very dreary house when you're shut up inside. He doesn't seem to think about anything but the sea, does he, the captain?'

'This time last year you were going to be a sailor too.'

'Well, I changed my mind. Oh well, I don't know. Anyway, I should go on a destroyer, not a potty little sailing-ship like that one. What is it?' He peered up at the inscription under an engraving. 'The Golden Hind.'

That was Drake's ship. When he sailed to America and discovered potatoes.'

'That was Raleigh.'

'Oh well,' said Barney, who didn't really care.

'What useless things they discovered,' Simon said critically. 'I shouldn't have bothered about vegetables, I should have come back loaded with doubloons and diamonds and pearls.'

'And apes and peacocks,' said Jane, harking vaguely back to a poetry lesson at school.

'And I should have gone exploring into the interior and the rude natives would have turned me into a god and tried to offer me their wives.'

'Why would the natives be rude ?' said Barney.

'Not that sort of rude, you idiot, it means - it means - well, it's the sort of things natives are. It's what all the explorers call them.'

'Let's be explorers,' Jane said. 'We can explore the house. We haven't yet, not properly. It's like a strange land. We can work from the bottom all the way up to the top.'