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

He reached into his coat pocket. "Here," he said, handing her a thick, cream-colored envelope.
"Read this for yourself."
Obeying, she opened the envelope and set aside the thick railway ticket, and read the single sheet
of thick vellum contained therein with growing perplexity. "This-this is certainly strange," she
said, after a moment, folding the sheet and returning it to its paper prison. "Very strange." She
slipped the railway ticket to San Francisco in beside it.
Cathcart nodded. "I've had the man looked into, and from what I can find out, he's genuine enough.
He's something of a rail baron on the West Coast and lives outside of San Francisco. The ticket is
genuine; I telegraphed to his office to be sure that the letter had truly come from him, and the
offer is genuine also. He's said to be as rich as Croesus and as reclusive as a stylite, and
that's all anyone knows of him. Other than the fact that he has phenomenal luck."
"He might have been describing me, precisely," Rose said aloud, feeling again that little thrill
of apprehension, as if she was about to cross a threshold into something from which there would be
no escape and no return.
"That is what was so peculiar, that and the offer itself." Cathcart flushed. "I thought of all
manner of other possibilities; one does, after all-"
"Of course," she said vaguely. "White slavery, opium dens-" She noticed then that Cathcart's color
had deepened to a dark scarlet with embarrassment, and giggled; she could not help herself.
"Really, Professor! Did you think I was that sheltered? After all, it was you who let me read the
unexpurgated Ovid, and Sappho's poems, and-"
She stopped, for fear that the Professor would have a stroke there and then. It never failed to
amaze her that the scholars about her could discuss the hetairai of the Greeks, Tristan and
Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, and the loves of the girls on the Isle of Lesbos, and then blush with
shame when one even mentioned the existence of certain establishments not more than a dozen blocks
from the University.
"Don't decide at once," he urged her, swiftly changing the subject. "I'll take you to Mrs.
Abernathy's boarding house; rest and think for a few days. This should not be an act of impulse."
"Of course not," she replied-
But she already felt the heavy, cold hand of Fate upon her sleeve. She would go to this man, this
Jason Cameron. She would take his job.
After all, she had no choice.
----------
Rose woke with a shock, startled out of disturbing dreams by sounds she did not recognize. For a
moment, as she glanced around, she panicked with disorientation, her heart racing with fear as she
groped for her glasses. This was not her room! Nothing was where it should be-why was that
rectangle of fight at the foot of her bed, and not off to the side-and why was there only one, not
two? Why were the walls white, and what was that huge, looming object at her left?
And why weren't her glasses on the stand beside the bed, where they should be?
Then, as the bed beneath her creaked in a way that her bed never had, the steadying knowledge of
where she was and why she was here came flooding back.
Nothing was where it should be, because she was not at home, and never would see her room again.
She was in a narrow, iron-framed bed in Mrs. Abernathy's boarding house for respectable young
ladies.
Rose had met a few of them last night, and had immediately been reassured as to the solidity of
this establishment. Several of the ladies were nurses; one worked at the Hull House with the


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