"Spirits Of The Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'I'm sorry?'

'Has the way been discovered to restore the human heartbeat through electrical shock?'

'Well, yes.'

'Then where is he? I was assured that he would be here.'

Michael said, 'I think we'd better find somebody to help you.'

'I don't require help,' she said, in obvious distress. 'I just want him.'

'If I knew who you were talking about-' Michael began.

She stepped through the five-inch gap in the doors without opening them any wider. Even outside, her face was white and indistinct. 'I... was assured,' she said. 'I was assured that by the end of the twentieth century, all diseases would have been cured, and that the deceased could be cured of those diseases from which they had expired, and brought back to life.'

Michael tried to take hold of her elbow, but his hand seemed to pass through it like a velvet curtain. He was beginning to feel seriously alarmed now; and the fog didn't help; nor the utter silence. Even the foghorns seemed to have stopped.

'Listen, why don't you come back to the house? Perhaps we can call somebody for you? A daughter, maybe? Do you have any daughters?'

'I have to stay here. I can't go anywhere until I find him. He must be here. I was assured.'

'Who assured you?'

'Abdul Karim, my Munshi. He said that he could foretell everything that would happen in the future. He said that people would be able to send their spirits flying around the world while their bodies remained in bed. He said that we would all be able to cure our loved ones, and bring them back to life, just the way they were. Living, breathing, laughing! The way that Albert used to laugh!'

'Albert?' said Michael. 'You've come here, expecting to find Albert? Albert died 139 years ago.'

She looked up at him, and he could feel the cold electricity of disapproval. 'The Prince Consort built this house. His heart was here; and this is where Abdul Karim promised me that he and I would one day be reunited.'

'Reunited?' said Michael, shaking his head. 'You and Albert are going to be reunited?'

'Don't you understand who I am?' she demanded. 'Has a hundred years erased my memory so completely?'

'I know who you are,' said Michael, reassuringly. 'You're Queen Victoria, that's who you are. Now, why don't you let me walk you back to the main gate and you and me can talk on the bus up to Cowes.'

The small woman said nothing. But then she lowered her head and uttered a single sob of anguish, and turned around. She passed back through the doors of the summerhouse, and into the darkness of the summerhouse itself.

Michael followed her, flinging the doors open wider. The summerнhouse was empty. He went all the way around it, feeling the walls, looking for any way in which the woman could have escaped. In the end he stood in the middle of it, his hand clamped over his mouth, wondering if he were starting to go mad.


Abdul Karim had come to Osborne in 1887 - first as a servant, and then as Queen Victoria's personal Indian Secretary. There was a fine painting of him in the Durbar Corridor. He was suave, handsome, with hooded eyes and a neatly-trimmed beard and moustache. Michael stared at him for a long time; but Abdul Karim had his eyes averted, and always would.

That evening, back in his room at the top of the Household Wing, Michael combed the Internet for all the information that he could find about Queen Victoria and her Indian servants. There was very little about Abdul Karim, even though he had been a minor celebrity famous in his time. But there was one book: Queen Victoria's Mystic, by Charles Lutterworth, brought out in a limited edition in 1987 by the Vectis Press - a small specialist publisher with an address in West Cowes.

Michael didn't sleep well that night. He kept seeing the summerнhouse doors opening, and a pale lamp-like face watching from the darkness within. At 3:20 in the morning, his bedroom door opened, and he sat bolt upright in bed, his heart clamped with alarm. He went cautiously over to the door and opened it wider, and looked out, and he thought he saw a small dark shadow disappearing down the end of the corridor.

He closed his door and locked it. He lay back in his cold sweat-tangled bed but he couldn't sleep any more. Dawn found him sitting by the window, looking out across the woods and the first gray haze of light across the Solent.