"Gardner Dozois - Fairy Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

and Casimir, still being a boy in many ways, would have indignantly refused, and
they would have been caught and maybe killed. She considered it a small enough
price to pay for getting a chance at a new life in a new world, and rarely thought
about it thereafter. She figured that Casimir had nothing to complain about, as when
she did come to his bed, after they had been safely married in the New World, she
came to it as a virgin, and they had the bloody sheet to prove it (just as well,
tooтАФCasimir was a good man, and a sweet-natured one, but he was a man of his
time, after all, and couldnтАЩt be expected to be too liberal about things).
They made their way eventually to Chicago, where work for seamstresses and
glaziers could be had, and where they had forty-five tumultuous years together,
sometimes happy, sometimes not, until one bitter winter afternoon, carrying a pane
of glass through the sooty city snow, CasimirтАЩs heart broke in his chest.
Eleanor lived another twenty years, and died on a cot in the kitchen near the
stove (in the last few days, sheтАЩd refused to be taken upstairs to the bedroom),
surrounded by children and grandchildren, and by the homey smells of cooked
food, wood smoke, and the sharper smells of potash and lye, all of which she now
found oddly comforting, although sheтАЩd hated them when she was young. She
regretted nothing that sheтАЩd ever done in her life, and, except for a few moments at
the very end when her body took over and struggled uselessly to breathe, her
passing was as easy as any human beingтАЩs has ever been.
After the Old King died, the Prince only got to reign for a few years before the
monarchy was overthrown by civil war. The Prince and the rest of the royal family
and most of the nobility were executed, kind or cruel, innocent or corrupt. The
winning side fell in its turn, some decades later, and eventually a military junta, run by
a local Strongman, took over.
Years later, EleanorтАЩs grandson was in command of a column of tanks that
entered and conquered the town, since one of the StrongmanтАЩs successors had allied
himself with the Axis.
Later that night, EleanorтАЩs grandson climbed up to the ruins of the royal
castle, mostly destroyed in an earlier battle, and looked out over the remains of the
floor of the Grand Ballroom, open now to the night sky, weeds growing up through
cracks in the once brilliantly polished marble that still gleamed dully in the moonlight,
and wondered why he felt a moment of drifting melancholy, a twinge of sorrow that
quickly dissipated, like waking from a sad dream that fades even as you try to
remember it, and is gone.