"Clayton Emery - Joseph Fisher - If Serpents Envious" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

If Serpents Envious
a Joseph Fisher Colonial America Mystery
by Clayton Emery

Seagulls flapped and pecked around an iron cage
hanging from a post. The gray-white birds were
frustrated by something black that fouled their
beaks. Joseph Fisher stopped and the birds flapped
away. The cage was a gibbet. Propped inside was a
dead man, neck elongated by hanging, body coated
with tar. Joseph reached with a bony finger, touched
a black foot. Tar pulled loose in a string.
"Hurl'd headlong... to bottomless perdition, there to
dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst
defy th' Omnipotent to arms,'" murmured the
student. Wiping his finger, he trudged into Newport.
What the Narragansett Indians had called
Aquidneck, "Isle of Peace".
The road was dusty and deeply rutted, almost
impassible even dry, and wandered between stone
walls and pastures and maple trees that nodded
great green heads uneasily. Seeking food and
escape from the blistering sun, Joseph aimed for the
first store.
On a narrow porch of warped unpainted boards
blackened by salt hunched an Indian, face slack and
cracked from drinking, in a filthy shirt with
breechclout and leggins. At the feel of footsteps he
extended a shaking hand, begging for anything but
mostly rum. The stuporous Indian blinked when the
young white man addressed him in Algonquin tangy
as pine sap. "Seek you the woods, brother, and
drink the water that flows from the headlands."
The shop had two ends. The front, anchored to the
road, bore farm implements -- singletrees, harness,
grain buckets, feedbags, horse liniments. The rear
hung over the harbor on pilings with a dock below,
contained chandler's supplies: boathooks, cordage,
buckets of tar and oakum, fishhooks, oars. The
store was hot, any loafers dispersed. The lonely
proprietor in a cocked hat and flour-dusty apron of
green baize braided something from rope and
codline. From a back pantry came the squawling of
a baby.
The storekeeper ran his eye over Joseph, peered
into his pockets. The student was not tall and thin,
shabby in a brown waistcoat and breeches with
small pewter buttons, tattered hose and broken
shoes. A blanket roll and and chunky satchel marked
him as a traveller, yet he wore no hat and let his