"Friesner, Esther M - ss - A Beltaine and Suspenders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

remarked with rather a nasty insinuating tone. What it was specifically intended
to insinuate remained a mystery, but it was unarguably nasty.

"I think you ought to come with us, Miss Drummond," Telemachus put in, none too
boldly. "Certainly after all you've contributed to the interpretation of the
mural. There is a connection to be discovered, I feel it."

"Perhaps," said Olivia, pushing off from the pew and lunging back for the wall
where the mural waited. It was just such a land-devouring stride that had
brought her afoot down from London to Staddle-upon-Truss, solely on the casual
comment of a friend who was, like Olivia, a spinster of independent means who
filled her life with the holy mission of seeking out and salvaging her nation's
fading native traditions.

"Oh, look, a letter from Tilly," Rowena had said, holding the onionskin inches
from her nose. "His pa and mine used to go up to Scotland together to do horrid
things to salmon. You'd probably like him, Livvie. Tolerate him, anyway. He's
clear mad on the old musty-rustles, too, and he writes that he's found something
worth nosing into in the old church at Staddle. Won't say what, the mean
creature."

That had been enough for Olivia, and she had set off. The something proved to be
the wall painting which she found Telemachus Battle-Purfitt in the throes of
restoring to its original brilliance. Father John Herrick was in splendid
attendance, digging up a wealth of documents and making frequent researching
forays to Oxford, Cambridge, and London while his milk-blooded curate tended to
the spiritual health of the Staddlefolk.

Olivia was immediately fascinated by what she saw. Being Olivia, she immediately
presented her credentials as an amateur student of old folkways and
preservationist of endangered cultural treasures. Her privately printed
collection, Neglected Stirpicultural Carols of Yorkshire, so impressed the
Ladies' Altar Guild that there was no need for her to follow it up by
flourishing Evoe, Aristaeus!: An Inquiry into Certain Chthonic Rites in Somerset
Apiculture. Mrs. Threadneedle, the chairwoman, made haste to admit her to the
work site and even went so far as to mention her interest to the vicar.

They formed an unlikely triptych, those three-- the aging bluestocking, the
dapper vicar, and the skittish aesthete-- but at heart they were all cut from
the same clay. The ancient folkways of England called to them, albeit the call
came ever more and more faintly since the war, as the plowlands grew depleted of
their young blood and the new generation swarmed over the cities instead. From
village to village Olivia Drummond traveled, grim as death with a hangnail,
ruthlessly hunting down the sui generis ram-gelding song, the rare swan-upping
work-chant, the dotty Oldest Inhabitant who, for a pint or two (or seven), might
be persuaded to relate a venerable cradle tale that began, "Arrrh, them wunt go
far enoo tha' wheels, but th' piskies did frummish 'um t'be 'is gawthmodder's
cat an' britches."

Olivia had to admit, helping out on this church mural project was rather more