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

Keeping to the tangle of vine that overgrew the garden wall, con-scious of those darkened windows
overlooking him from above, he edged toward the kitchen door.

Most of the young men whom Asher tutored in philology, etymology, and comparative folklore at New
CollegeтАФwhich had not, in fact, been new since the latter half of the fourteenth centuryтАФregarded their
men-tor with the affectionate respect they would have accorded a slightly eccentric uncle. Asher played
to this image sheerly from force of habit тАФit had stood him in good stead abroad. He was a reasonably
unobtru-sive man, taller than he seemed at first glance and, as Lydia generally expressed it, brown:
brown hair, brown eyes, brown mustache, brown clothes, and brown mien. Without his University gown,
he looked, in fact, like a clerk, except for the sharpness of his eyes and the silence with which he moved.
It would have been coincidence, the undergradu-ates would have said, that he found the deepest shadow
in the dark and dew-soaked garden in which to stow his gown and mortarboard cap, the antique uniform
of Oxford scholarship which covered his anonymous tweeds. Certainly they would not have said that he
was the sort of man who could jemmy open a window with a knife, nor that he was the sort of man who
would carry such a weapon concealed in his boot.

The kitchen was utterly deserted, chilly, and smelling of the old-fashioned stone floor and of ashes long
grown cold. No steam floated above the hot-water reservoir of the stoveтАФa new American thing of
black rococo iron which had cost nearly twenty-five dollars from a catalogue. The bland brightness of the
gaslight, winking on the stove's nickel-plated knobs, and the silver of toast racks, made the stillness in the
kitchen seem all the more ominous, like a smiling maniac with an ax behind his back.

Few of the dons at Oxford were familiar with the kitchen quarters of their own homesтАФmany of them
had never penetrated past the swing-ing doors that separated the servants' portions of the house from
those in which the owners lived. Asher had made it his business to know not only the precise layout of
the placeтАФhe could have passed through it blindfolded without touching a single piece of furniture, as he
could indeed have passed through any room in the house or in his CollegeтАФ but to know exactly where
everything was kept. Knowing such things was hardly a conscious effort anymore, merely one of the
things he had picked up over the years and had never quite dared to put down. He found the drawer in
which Mrs. Grimes kept her carving knivesтАФthe hideout he kept in his boot was a small one, for
emergenciesтАФthen moved on to the archway just past the stove which separated kitchen from pantry, all
the while aware that someone, somewhere in the house, listened for his slightest footfall.

Mrs. Grimes, Ellen, and the girl Sylvie were all there. They sat around the table, a slumped tableau like
something from the Chamber of Horrors at Mme. Tussaud's, somehow shocking in the even, vaguely
flickering light from the steel fishtail burner by the stove. All they needed was a poison bottle on the table
between them, Asher thought with wry grimness, and a placard:

THE MAD POISONER STRIKES.

Only there was no bottle, no used teacups, no evidence in fact of anything eaten or drunk. The only thing
on the table at all was a bowl of half-shelled peas.

Studying the cook's thin form, the parlor maid's plump one, and the huddled shape of the tweeny, Asher
felt again that chill sensation of being listened for and known. All three women were alive, but he didn't
like the way they slept, like broken dolls, heedless of muscle cramp or balance.

He had been right, then.
 The only other light on in the house was in his study, and that was where he kept his revolver, an