"Hambly,.Barbara.-.James.Asher.2.-.Traveling.With.The.Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

If she lived, she thought, and panic heated in her veins again. If she lived.
What if she were doing this wrong?
She found another floor of high-ceilinged rooms, plus attics, all of them filled
with either books or journals. Her own experience with the proliferative
propensities of back issues of Lancet and its competitorsЧBritish, European, and
AmericanЧgave her a lively sense of sympathy, and an envious appreciation for so
much shelf space almost, for the moment, eased her fear. Lancet went back to
1823, and she had little doubt the first issue could be found here somewhere.
One small chamber upstairs contained clothing, expensive and relatively new.
From the first, all her instincts told her she must look down, not up, for what
she sought.
The kitchen and scullery were on the ground floor, at the back of the house,
down that caliginous throat of passageway. Stairs corkscrewed farther down. The
scullery contained a modern icebox. Lydia opened it and found a cake of ice
about two days old, a bottle of cream, and a small quantity of knackerТs meat
done up in paper. Four or five dishesЧincluding a Louis XV Sevres saucerЧlay on
the floor in a corner. For the first time, Lydia smiled.
Boothole, wine cellar, vegetable pantry belowstairs, and many smaller rooms,
low-ceilinged and smelling of earth and great age. The lamp flung her shadow
waveringly over cruck-work beams, discolored plaster, stonework that spoke of
some older building on this site. As in searching for the house itselfЧwhich had
fallen out of all mention in the Public Records Office after the Fire of
1666ЧLydia passed three or four times through the room that contained the trap
to the subcellar. It was only when, failing to see any such ingress as she knew
must exist, she studied the composition of the walls themselves that she
narrowed the possibilities to the little storeroom whose damp stone wall bore
signs of having once supported a stairway.
Outside, the day must be slowly losing its grip on life. Trying to keep her
hands from shaking, with cold now as well as fear, she pulled off her gloves and
ran her fingers under the chair rail and around the heavy molding of the roomТs
two doors. Near the base of the door into the wine cellar she felt a lever click
unwillingly under her fingers and saw, in the dirty brazen light, the wider gap
between two panels.
There was a latch on the inside of the movable panel so it could be opened from
below, and a worn ladder going down.
As Lydia had guessed, the low room beneath looked as if it had been the subcrypt
of a church, either the one that backed the houseЧin a square named, oddly
enough, SpaniardТs CourtЧor some forgotten predecessor. Barely visible in black
paint on the ceiling groins were the words Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam
intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.
Lydia had not been raised a CatholicЧher aunts considered even the inclusion of
candles on the parish altar grounds for complaint to the bishopЧbut recognized,
from her residency at St. BartholomewТs, the words from the Mass for Deliverance
from Death.
A granite sarcophagus filled the far end of the chamber like a somber altar, all
but concealing a low, locked door. Lydia stood before it for some time, holding
the lamp high and gauging the probable weight of the stone lid. Then she knelt
and studied the floor.
Dustless.
A laborious investigation of the cracks in the gray stone floor showed her the