"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

kept from being dropped upon in foreign parts: "I mean, when the balloon goes up and they find the
Secret Plans are gone or whatever, there you are."

He'd laughed and said, "Well, for one thing, no plans are evergoneтАФ merely accurately copied. And as
for the rest, my best defense is always simply being the sort of person who wouldn't do that sort of thing."

"You do that here." Those enormous, pansy-brown eyes had studied him from behind her steel-rimmed
spectacles. Her thin, almost aggres-sive bookishness was at that time just beginning to melt into fragile
sensuality. With the young men who were even then beginning to take an interest in
her, she didn't wear the spectaclesтАФshe was an expert at blind croquet and guessing what was on
menus. But with him, it seemed, it was different. In her sensible cotton shirtwaist and blue-and-red school
tie, the changeable wind tangling her long red hair, she'd looked like a leggy marsh-fey unsuccessfully
trying to pass itself off as an English schoolgirl. "Is it difficult to go from being one to being the other?"

He'd thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. "It's a bit like wearing your Sunday best," he'd
said, knowing even then that she'd understand what he meant. And she'd laughed, the sound bright with
delight as the April sunlight. He'd kept that laughтАФas he'd kept the damp lift of morning fog from the
Cherwell meadows or the other-world sweetness of May morning voices drifting down from Magdalen
Tower like the far-off singing of angelsтАФin the corner of his heart where he stored precious things as if
they were a boy's shoe-box hoard, to be taken out and looked at in China or the veldt when things were
bad. It had been some years before he'd realized that her laugh and the still sunlight shining like carnelian
on her hair were precious to him, not as symbols of the peaceful life of study and teaching, where one
played croquet with one's Dean's innocent niece, but because he was desper-ately in love with this girl.
The knowledge had nearly broken his heart.

Now the years of scholarship, of rest, and of happiness fell off him like a shed University gown, and he
moved down the narrow street, circling the row of its flat-fronted brick houses toward the labyrinthine
tangle of the back lanes.

If anything had happened to her . . .

From the lane behind the houses he could see the gas burning in the window of his study, though
between the mists and the curtain lace he could distinguish nothing within. A carriage passed along
Holywell Street behind him, the strike of hooves and jingle of harness brasses loud in that narrow
corridor of cobbles and brick. From the weeping grayness of the garden, Asher could see the whole
broad kitchen, lit like a stage set. Only the jet over the stove was burningтАФeven after dusk was well
settled, the wide windows let in a good deal of light. That put it no later than seven . . .

Put what? In spite of his chill and businesslike concentration, Asher grinned a little at the mental image of
himself storming his own home, like Roberts relieving Mafeking, to find a note saying, "Father ill, gone to
visit him, have given servants night offтАФLydia."

Only, of course, his wifeтАФand it still startled him to think that after everything, he had in fact succeeded
in winning Lydia as his wifeтАФhad as great an abhorrence as he did of confusion. She would never have
let Mrs. Grimes and the two maids, not to speak of Mick in the stables, leave for the night without
making some provision for his supper. Nor would she have done that or anything else without dispatching
a note to his study at the College, informing him of changed plans.

But Asher needed none of this train of logic, which flickered through his mind in fragments of a second,
to know all was not well. The years had taught him the smell of peril, and the house stank of it