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

He took the floating bridge across the River Medina to West Cowes - him and a motley collection of cars and vans and cyclists and women with baby buggies. The morning was sharp as a needle but bitterly cold. His breath smoked and he regretted that he hadn't worn his woolly hat.

He found Vectis Press down a sharply-sloping side-turning next to a fish-and-chips shop. It had the name Vectis Press Publishers & Stationers written in gold on the door, and a dusty front window display filled with curled-up sheets of headed notepaper, faded calendars and dead flies. He opened the door and a bell jangled.

Inside, there was a cramped office with stacks of books and files and boxes of envelopes. Through the back door he could see an old-fashioned printing press, as well as a new Canon copier. He shuffled his feet and coughed for a while, and after a while a red-faced, white-haired man appeared, wearing a ski sweater with reindeers running across it and a baggy pair of jeans.

The man cocked his head on one side and looked at Michael and didn't say a word.

'I'm - ah - looking for a book you published. I don't know whether you have any copies left. Or perhaps you can tell me where I can find the author.'

The man waited, still saying nothing.

'It's Queen Victoria's Mystic, by somebody called Charles Lutterworth. Published 1987.'

The man nodded, and kept on nodding. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes. I think I can help you there. Yes.'

Michael waited for him to say something else, but he didn't.

'I - ah - do you have a copy here? Could I - buy one?'

The man nodded. 'I've got eighty-six copies left. You can have them all if you like. Didn't sell very well, see.'

'Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear that.'

'So am I, considering I wrote it.'

'You're Charles Lutterworth?'

'Roger Frost, actually. Charles Lutterworth's my nom-da-ploom.'

He went over to an old oak-veneered cabinet and opened it up. It was crammed with books of all sizes. 'Let me see now...' he said, and at last managed to tug out a copy of a thin volume bound in blue.

'There you are. Six quid for cash. What's your interest in it?'

'I was doing some research. I came across some reference to Abdul Karim's belief in the resurrection of the dead. I sort of got the idea that Queen Victoria might have found it ... well, you know, that Queen Victoria might have been very interested in it, considering the loss she felt for Albert.'

Roger Frost tapped the cover of his book with an ink-stained finger. 'It's all in here. All meticulously documented. Chapter and verse. The trouble was, most of the first-hand information came from other Indian servants, and nobody believed what they said. Unthinkable, you know, that our own dear Queen was dabbling in Hindu mysticism.'

'Did she really think that she could bring Albert back to life?'

'That's what Abdul Karim led her to believe. He was more than her Munshi, her teacher - he was a highly respected holy man and mystic. It seems he told the Queen that by the end of the second millennium, all disease would have been wiped out, and your dead loved ones could be dug up, cured of what had killed them, and brought back to life.'

'And she believed him.'

'Well, why shouldn't she?' said Roger Frost. He hadn't realized that it wasn't a question. 'You've got to remember that Victoria's reign saw unbelievable strides in science and technology, and enormous advances in medicine, so it must have seemed like quite a reasonable prediction. She knew the story of Frankenstein, too - that was republished in 1831 - and if it could happen in a story, why not for real? After all, a lot of people still believe that resurrection is just around the corner - otherwise they wouldn't have their bodies frozen, would they? Idiots.

'It was partly Albert's fault. He was so enthusiastic about science that he convinced Victoria that, with science, absolutely anything was possible. And if you combine that idea with the terrible grief she felt at losing him - it wasn't surprising that she accepted what Abdul Karim told her.'

'And what did he tell her?'