"Stephen Lawhead - Celtic Crusades 03 - The Mystic Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lawhead Stephen)

PART I


August 24, 1916: Edinburgh, Scotland

A young woman of my acquaintance saw a ghost. Ordinarily, I would not
have given such a melodramatic triviality even passing notice, save for
two pertinent facts. One: the ghost appeared in broad daylight at the same
country house where my wife and I had been staying that very weekend,
and two: the ghost was Pemberton.
What made this eerie curiosity more peculiar still was the fact that the
spectre materialized in the room we would have occupied if my wife had
not come down with a cold earlier that day, thus necessitating our
premature departure. We returned to the city so she might rest more
comfortably in her own bed that night. Otherwise, we would surely have
witnessed the apparition ourselves, and spared Miss Euphemia Gillespie, a
young lady of twenty, and the daughter of one of the other guests who was
staying that weekend, with whom my wife and I were reasonably well
acquainted.
Rumour had it that Miss Gillespie was woken from her nap by a strange
sound to find a tall, gaunt figure standing at the foot of her bed. Dressed in

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with news of the loss of RMS Lusitania in the early afternoon of 7th May
1915, roughly the time when his ghost was seen by Miss Gillespie.
This ghostly manifestation might have made a greater stir if it had not
been so completely overshadowed by the sinking of the Lusitania. The
daily broadsheets were fall of venomous outrage at this latest atrocity: a
luxury liner torpedoed without warning by a German U-boat, taking
almost twelve hundred civilian souls to a watery grave; The Edinburgh
Evening Herald published a list of the missing drawn from the ship's
manifest. Among those who had embarked on the trip to Liverpool from
New York were a few score Americans; the rest were Europeans of
several nationalities. Pemberton's name was on the list. Thus, while the
rest of the world contemplated the fact that the war had taken a sinister
turn, I mourned the death of a very dear and close friend.
I pondered the meaning of the spectral portent and, no doubt, would have
given the matter its due consideration, but I was very soon distracted by
the precipitous and worrying decline in my wife's health. The chill which
she contracted that day in the country had grown steadily worse, and by
the time the doctor diagnosed influenza, it was too late. My dearest,
beloved helpmate and partner of forty-four years passed away two days
later.
Within the space of a week, I had lost the two most important people in
my life. I was bereft and broken. Where I might have expected to rely
upon one to help me through the death of the other, I had neither. Both
were gone, and I was left behind to struggle on as best I could. The
children were some comfort, it is true; but they had busy lives of their