"Theodora Goss - The Rose in Twelve Petals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goss Theodora)

Only twelve months ago (fourteen, actually, but she is bad
at numbers), she was Princess Elizabeth of Hibernia, dressed
in pink satin, gossiping about the riding master with her
friends, dancing with her brothers through the ruined arches
of Westminster Cathedral, and eating too much cake at her
6 The Rose in Twelve Petals
by Theodora Goss
seventeenth birthday party. Now, and she does not want to
think about this so it remains at the edges of her mind, where
unpleasant things, frogs and slugs, reside, she is a cavern
with something growing inside her, something repugnant,
something that is not hers, not the lily maid of Astolat's.
She reaches for a rose, an overblown Gloire de Dijon that,
in a fit of temper, pierces her finger with its thorns. She cries
out, sucks the blood from her finger, and flops down on the
bank like a miserable child. The hem of her diaphanous dress
begins to absorb the mud at the edge of the water.
7 The Rose in Twelve Petals
by Theodora Goss
III. The Magician
Wolfgang Magus places the rose he picked that morning in
his buttonhole and looks at his reflection in the glass. He
frowns, as his master Herr Doktor Ambrosius would have
frowned, at the scarecrow in faded wool with a drooping gray
mustache. A sad figure for a court magician.
тАЬGott in Himmel,тАЭ he says to himself, a childhood habit he
has kept from nostalgia, for Wolfgang Magus is a reluctant
atheist. He knows it is not God's fault but the King's, who
pays him so little. If the King were to pay him, say, another
shilling per weekтАФbut no, that too he would send to his
sister, dying of consumption at a spa in Berne. His mind
turns, painfully, from the memory of her face, white and
drained, which already haunts him like a ghost.
He picks up a volume of Goethe's poems that he has
carefully tied with a bit of pink ribbon and sighs. What sort of
present is this, for the PrincessтАЩ christening?
He enters the chapel with shy, stooping movements. It is
full, and noisy with court gossip. As he proceeds up the aisle,
he is swept by a DuchessтАЩ train of peau de soie, poked by a
ViscountessтАЩ aigrette. The sword of a Marquis smelling of
Napoleon-water tangles in his legs, and he almost falls on a
Baroness, who stares at him through her lorgnette. He sidles
through the crush until he comes to a corner of the chapel
wall, where he takes refuge.
The christening has begun, he supposes, for he can hear
the Archbishop droning in bad Latin, although he can see
8 The Rose in Twelve Petals
by Theodora Goss
nothing from his corner but taxidermed birds and heads slick
with macassar oil. Ah, if the Archbishop could have learned