"Mercedes Lackey - EM 4 - Phoenix and Ashes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Jimmy Grimsley. The boys' schoolmaster, Michael Stone, had had to tutor her especially. She had
passed her interview with the principal of Somerville College. She'd been accepted. All that had been
needed was to pay the fees and go.

Well, go meant making all sorts of arrangements, but the important part had been done! Why hadn't he
made the arrangements before he'd volunteered? Why hadn't he done so after?

Hadn't she had known from the time she could read, almost, that she all she really wanted was to go to
Oxford to study literature? Hadn't she told Papa that, over and over, until he finally agreed? Never mind
that they didn't award degrees to women now, it was the going there that was the important
part—there, where you would spend all day learning amazing things, and half the night talking
about them! And it wasn't as if this was a new thing. There was more than one women's college now, and
someday they would give degrees, and on that day, Eleanor meant to be right there to receive hers. It
wasn't as if she would be going for nothing. . . .

And it wouldn't be here. Not this closed-in place, where nothing mattered except that you somehow
managed to marry a man of a higher station than yours. Or, indeed (past a certain age) married any man
at all.

"Oxford? Well, it's—it's another world . . . maybe a better one."

Reggie Fenyx's eyes had shone when he'd said that. She'd seen the reflection of that world in his eyes,
and she wanted it, she wanted it. ...

Even this beastly weather wouldn't be so bad if she was looking at it from inside her study in Somerville
... or perhaps going to listen to a distinguished speaker at the debating society, as Reggie Fenyx had
described.

But her tired mind drifted away from the imagined delights of rooms at Somerville College or the
stimulation of an erudite speaker, and obstinately towards Reggie Fenyx. Not that she should call him
Reggie, or at least, not outside the walls of Oxford, where learning made all men (and women!) equals.
Not that she had ever called him Reggie, except in her own mind. But there, in her mind and her memory,
he was Reggie, hero-worshipped by all the boys in Broom, and probably half the grown men as well,
whenever the drone of his aeroplane drew eyes involuntarily upward.

And off her mind flitted, to halcyon skies of June above a green, green field. She could still hear his
drawling, cheerful voice above the howl and clatter of his aeroplane engine, out there in the fallow field
he'd claimed for his own, where he "stabled" his "bird" in an old hay-barn and used to land and take off.
He'd looked down at her from his superior height with a smile, but it wasn't a patronizing smile. She'd
seen the aeroplane land, known that in this weather he was only going to refuel before taking off again,
and pelted off to Longacre like a tomboy. She found him pouring a can of petrol into the plane, and
breathlessly asked him about Oxford. He was the only person she knew who was a student there, or
ever had been a student there—well, hardly a surprise that he was a student there, since he was
the son of Sir Devlin Fenyx, and the field, the aeroplane, and everything as far as she could see where
she stood belonged to Lord Devlin and Longacre Park. Where else but Oxford was good enough for
Reggie Fenyx? Perhaps Cambridge, but—no. Not for someone from Warwickshire and
Shakespeare country. "I want to go to university," she had told him, when he'd asked her why she
wanted to know, as she stood looking up at him, breathless at her own daring. "I want to go to Oxford!"

"Oxford! Well, I don't know why not," he'd said, the first person to sound encouraging about her dream