"Peg Kerr - The Wild Swans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Peg)

a lofty mind I beare a,


I think myself as good as those


That gay aparell weare a,


My coate is made of comely Gray,
 Yet is my skin as soft a,


As those that with the chiefest Wines


do bathe their bodies oft a.




тАФ17TH CENTURY BALLAD




On a certain clear May morning in 1689, in the first year of the reign of King William III and Queen
Mary II, Eliza walked barefoot along a country lane in Somerset, carrying a basket heaped with freshly
dug roots of the little flower the French call dent-de-lion. The basket weighed heavily on her arm, and
she shifted it from one side to the other as she picked her way around patches of mud and puddles left
from the previous nightтАЩs rain. All around her, the newly baptized morning gleamed. Water droplets,
transformed by sunlight into iridescent pearls, clung to the slender stems of violets and cowslips lining the
pathway. In the fields ewes called to their lambs, and the sound mingled with the shrill squabbles of
sparrows in the hedgerows. The air, sweet with the scent of wet meadow grasses, barely rippled the
surface of the water pooling in the lane. Eliza sometimes lifted her gaze from the images of birds flying in a
cerulean sky reflected beneath her feet, to watch the real birds passing overhead.
She was tall for a girl of fifteen and slender as a young linden tree. Her reddish blond hair hung
halfway to her waist, tightened by the spring dampness into a mist of undisciplined tendrils. They lifted
from her shoulders with a feathery lightness as her steps quickened to climb the hill. At the top, she
turned down a track passing through a gap in a stone fence, leading away from the lane. She shifted her
basket again as she rounded a copse of budding apple treesтАФ and then stopped dead in her tracks in
surprise at her first clear sight of the cottage beyond.
A carriage stood, incongruously, in the clearing in front of the kitchen garden. Chickens warily stalked
around its wheels, suspicious of this strange addition to their territory. Besides the four horses hitched to
the carriage itself, a saddle horse tied to one side stood browsing through the gardenтАЩs herb border; it
raised its head, ears pricked forward, and snorted at her.
Cautiously, Eliza took a few steps forward and opened her mouth to call. The words died upon her
lips, however, as her eyes suddenly fell upon the coat of arms emblazoned on the carriageтАЩs door. The