"Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

cart was out of sight, Lettie crammed all her possessions into a pillow case and paid the neighbor's
bootboy sixpence to wheel it in a wheelbarrow to Cesari's in Market Square. Lettie marched behind the
wheelbarrow looking much more cheerful than Sophie expected. Indeed. She had the air of shaking the
dust of the hat shop off her feet.
The bootboy brought back a scribbled note from Lettie, saying she had put her things in the
girls' dormitory and Cesari's seemed great fun. A week later the carrier brought a letter from Martha to
say that Martha had arrived safely and that Mrs. Fairfax was "a great dear and used honey with
everything. She keeps bees." That was all Sophie heard of her sisters for quite a while because she
started her own apprenticeship the day Martha and Lettie left.
Sophie of course knew the hat trade quite well already. Since she was a tiny child she had
run in and out of the big workshed across the yard where the hats were damped and molded on blocks,
and flowers and fruit and other trimmings were made from wax and silk. She knew the people who
worked there. Most of them had been there when her father was a boy. She knew Bessie, the only
remaining shop assistant. She knew the customers who bought the hats and the man who drove the cart
which fetched raw straw hats in from the country to be shaped on the blocks in the shed. She knew the
other suppliers and how you made felt for winter hats. There was not really much that Fanny could
teach her, except perhaps the best way to get a customer to buy a hat.
"You lead up to the right hat, love," Fanny said. "Show them the ones that won't quite do
first, so they know the difference as soon as they put the right one on."
In fact, Sophie did not sell hats very much. After a day or so observing in the workshed, and
another day going round the clothier and the silk merchant's with Fanny, Fanny set her to trimming
hats. Sophie sat in a small alcove at the back of the shop, sewing roses to bonnets and veiling to
velours, lining all of them with silk and arranging wax fruit and ribbons stylishly on the outsides. She
was good at it. She quite liked doing it. But she felt so isolated and a little dull. The workshop people
were too old to be much fun and, besides, they treated her as someone apart who was going to inherit
the business someday. Bessie treated her the same way. Bessie's only talk anyway was about the farmer
she was going to marry the week after May Day. Sophie rather envied Fanny, who could bustle off to
bargain with the silk merchant whenever she wanted.
The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers. Nobody can buy a hat without
gossiping. Sophie sat in her alcove and stitched and heard that the Mayor never would eat green
vegetables, and that Wizard Howl's castle had moved round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper,
whisper, whisper.... The voices always dropped low when they talked of Wizard Howl, but Sophie
gathered that he had caught a girl down the valley last month. "Bluebeard!" said the whispers, and then
became voices again to say that Jane Farrier was a perfect disgrace the way she did her hair. That was
one who would never attract even Wizard Howl, let alone a respectable man. Then there would be a
fleeting, fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste. Sophie began to feel that Wizard Howl and the
Witch of the Waste should get together.
"They seem to be made for one another. Someone ought to arrange a match," she remarked
to the hat she was trimming at that moment.
But by the end of the month the gossip in the shop was suddenly all about Lettie. Cesari's, it
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seemed, was packed with gentlemen from morning to night, each one buying quantities of cakes and
demanding to be served by Lettie. She had ten proposals of marriage, ranging in quality from the
Mayor's son to the lad who swept the streets, and she had refused them all, saying she was too young to
make up her mind yet.
"I call that sensible of her," Sophie said to the bonnet she was pleating silk into.
Fanny was pleased with this news. "I knew she'd be all right!" she said happily. It occurred
to Sophie that Fanny was glad Lettie was no longer around.
"Lettie's bad for custom," she told the bonnet, pleating away at the mushroom-colored silk.