"Mercedes Lackey - EM 1 - The Fire Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

they had always led.
One born to slavery finds nothing amiss with chains ....
She curled up into a ball, forming herself around the pillow, as she cried uncontrollably. She had
never believed that a heart could be "broken," but hers certainly felt that way now.
Oh Papa-why did you have to die and leave me like this?
Then came guilt for thinking such a terrible thing, which only made her weep the harder as she
realized she would now face the rest of her life without his dear, if absent-minded, presence.
Finally, she could weep no more; she huddled around the soaked pillow, muscles and head aching,
eyes swollen and burning, throat sore with holding back her sobs, nose irritated and raw. Her
physical discomfort did nothing to distract her from her sorrow.
While she had cried out her grief, the noises to either side of her disappeared, leaving only the


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sounds of activity below-stairs. She did not feel that she could face anyone, and as for breakfast-
the very notion made her ill.
Evidently either no one had missed her or Professor Cathcart had indicated that she was to be
alone, for no one came to disturb her. Despair held her in that hard, narrow bed in invisible
bonds; she could not even muster the strength to reach for her glasses. Once again, the presence
of the laudanum in her valise beckoned temptingly. She need only drink down the entire bottle, and
all her troubles would end in a sleep with no waking.
Would that be so bad? True Christian doctrine told her that suicide was a sin, but the ancients
had held it no more a sin than healing a wound was. When the soul was wounded past bearing-when
life became intolerable-why tolerate it?
Why, indeed? Why spend the remaining years of her life in an existence that was less than life?
Why must she smother her very soul to see her body fed? Surely that was no less a sin than simple
suicide!
How many grim, gray spinsters had she seen in her schools, withered creatures who had ruthlessly
rooted out every vestige of intellectual curiosity in themselves and now sought to do the same to
the pupils beneath them? Life as one such as they would be less than life.
Better to end it all now.
She spent a moment in fantasy, imagining what the news of her death would mean to those around
her. The Ivorssons, of course, would cluck and shake their heads, and say that they had expected
nothing else from her-she knew better than to anticipate remorse from any of them. She could leave
a note, blaming her despair on Neville Tree-a subtle sort of revenge, since the stigma of having
caused a girl's death would ruin him, especially if she did not say precisely why he had driven
her to this. People would assume the worst; they always did.
She uncurled herself from her pillow; felt for her glasses and put them on, since she could not
write a suicide note if she could not see. But her hand fell upon something else as well; Jason
Cameron's letter. Almost against her will, she found herself drawing the letter from the envelope
and reading it again.
But this time, reading it carefully rather than skimming it, she got a much different sense of the
writer's personality than she had in the restaurant. There, she had been startled by the strangely
accurate description of someone with precisely the same accomplishments as her own. Now she was
drawn to the paragraph about the children.
In particular, her eyes were drawn to the statements about the daughter.
". . . the victim of prejudice that holds her sex as inferior to the male . . ."
Surely the man who wrote such words was not the uncouth tyrant she had imagined! And surely he