"Duncan,.Lois.-.A.Gift.Of.Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Lois)

Lois Duncan: A Gift of Magic


Prologue

Once upon a time in a house by the sea, lay an old woman, a special old woman who had the gift of magic.
She said to her daughter, who sat near her bed, "I leave you this house, my dear. You do not need it now, but there will come a time when you will. And I want to leave something to each of my grandchildren. To the boy, I leave the gift of musicЧ"
"But Mother," her daughter said gently, "there is no boy. There are just the two little girls." She thought her mother's illness had made her forget.
"There is no boy now," agreed the old woman. "Soon, though, there will be. To him, the gift of music, although it may not do him much good, being as how he resembles his father. To one of my granddaughters I leave the gift of dance, and to the otherЧthe one who looks like meЧ"
Her voice was fading and she named the gift very softly, but her daughter, who loved her greatly, was weeping and did not hear.


1

Nancy had been dreaming all night, and when she woke in the morning it was with the strange sensation that she had come back from a long journey, leaving part of herself behind. She lay very still with her eyes closed, letting herself awaken slowly.
On the back of her eyelids she could see her older sister Kirby in pink striped pajamas doing exercises at the foot of her bed. Brendon, in his room at the end of the hall, still slept, breathing through his mouth with a little snorting sound which meant that he was soon to waken. Downstairs their mother sat on the screened porch and stared at the sea.
Nancy pulled herself awake and sat up in bed.
"Mother's crying," she said.
"She is?" Startled, Kirby stopped in the middle of a pliщ, her knees bent out to both sides. "Are you sure?" She continued, not awaiting an answer. "Should we go down, do you think?"
"I don't know," Nancy said. "Maybe she wants to cry by herself. It's awful to have people walk in on you when you're crying. They always want to know all the reasons for it and tell you why they aren't important."
To Nancy, everything was important. She was the one their mother called "our straight and serious child." She was made in all planes and angles. Her wheat-colored hair hung straight down her back, and her brows and mouth were straight lines across her face with her nose a straight line down its center. She was twelve years old, but her body was still as thin as an arrow.
"I don't want to see Mother crying," she said.
"We won't," Kirby said. "We'll thud on the stairs so that she knows we're coming and has time to mop herself up. Come on."
She came back up to a normal standing position and straightened her pajamas and went out into the hall.
Nancy got out of bed and followed her. The thought of Kirby thudding any place was incredible, Kirby, whose feet were as cushioned as a cat's. It was worth following to watch Kirby thud, even though Nancy did not at all want to see her mother weeping.
She need not have worried, however. Their mother turned to greet them as they came onto the porch. Her eyes were very bright, but other than that there was no sign of tears.
"You sounded like a herd of elephants," she said. "I was sure it was Brendon."
"I don't think he's awake yet." Kirby dropped into a canvas chair opposite her mother and stretched her long legs out in front of her. "What got you up so early? You're all dressed and everything. I thought you'd want to sleep in this morning after that long plane trip."
"I guess I was too excited to sleep." Elizabeth Garrett was a soft, pretty woman with a quiet kind of gentleness about her. "I wanted to see if it still looked the same in the morning light. It seems so strange to be back again in the same house I lived in as a little girlЧto be sitting here on the same porch, looking out at the same sea."
"It's a bit like the Riviera," Nancy said, drawing in a deep breath of the salt air. "Not as crowded, of course, and the sand looks whiter." She seated herself on the end of the chaise at her mother's feet. "Is it still the way you remembered it?"
"It has grown up a lot," Elizabeth said. "Those pines along the driveway were only about ten feet tall when I went away. The flame vine by the doorЧI remember it as just a scrubby little thing when my father planted it. Now it covers the whole wall! Other than that, though, it's the same dear place. The tenants took fine care of it. I hardly dared hope to find everything in such good condition after so many years."
"I'm surprised you didn't sell the house after Grandmother died," Kirby said. "It must have been hard trying to keep it rented all the time we were away."
"Your grandmother didn't want me to sell it," their mother said. "She told me there would come a day when I would be glad to have a place to come to." There was a tenderness in her voice, a remembering. "Strange how she could have known that. She was a very special woman, my mother. There should be some pictures and scrapbooks and things of hers stored in the attic. We'll have to look through them someday."
"That would be fun," Kirby said. She liked to claim that she could remember her grandmother, though Nancy was sure that she did so for effect. Nobody could remember someone she had seen last when she was three years old. "I'm glad that we did come here. It'll be fun to stay in a private house for a change."
"You won't think so when you have to do housework," Nancy said. "There won't be maid service or anything. We'll have to change our own beds and dust and clean the bathroom." She wrinkled her nose. "Just like people you read about in books. Still, it'll be a good experience, I guess, for a while."
"GirlsЧ" Elizabeth drew a long breath. "I'm afraid I have to tell you something. This isn't to beЧ"
The stairs thumped again, drowning out her voice. It was not fake thumping this time, but the sound Brendon always made on stairs, even when he was barefoot.
He clumped through the living room and came out onto the porch, walking on his heels. His knees were bare and knobby under the edges of his plaid swimming shorts.
"What's for breakfast?" he asked.
Elizabeth's face brightened as it always did when she looked at her son. Brendon was a handsome little boy with his father's tilted green eyes, as clear and as deep as the sea. He had soft, light hair and a dimple in one cheek like an angel. It was ironic, Nancy often thought, that he should look so darling and be, in reality, so perfectly dreadful.
"My hotel-raised child," Elizabeth said fondly. "There's no restaurant service here, I'm afraid. We'll have to get a bus into town and pick up some breakfast there."
"Let's swim first." Brendon rocked back and forth from his heels to his toes. "What are you girls sitting around for? Don't you want to go down to the beach?"
"We haven't had a chance to unpack our suits yet," Kirby said. "I don't see how you can have found yours so fast. It was down at the bottom of the suitcase. I bet your stuff is all over the room."
"I'm going now," Brendon announced calmly, ignoring the accusation as though he had not heard it. "Okay, Mom?"
"Not okay," Elizabeth said. "I don't want any of you swimming alone. I don't know what the tides are like now. It looks to me as though we've lost some beach to storms, and that can mean strong currents."
"Oh, for rats' sake," Brendon said. "I've been swimming all my life."
"Yes, in hotel pools. An open beach without a lifeguard is something else again. Besides, we have things to do this morning. We need to stock up on groceries, and I want to look into buying a car."
"A car!" All three children turned to stare at her in astonishment. Even Brendon, whose mouth had been open for a roar of protest, let it close again without a sound.
Nancy found her voice first.
"Why?" she asked for all of them. "Why a car? You can't even drive."