"House On Parchment Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

It faced Parchment Street. Across the rows of gravestones half-hidden in the trees, she saw a great grey church, its spire drifting in the moving clouds. As she opened the window, bells played a familiar four-tone melody, then tolled the hour.
"Four o'clock. Does it bother you, living across the street from a graveyard?"
He did not answer. She turned and found him standing behind her, his hands in his pockets, staring down at the graves with narrowed eyes. The color had come into his face again.
"I hate it," he said softly. "Dad likes it. He likes old things. I do, too, when they'reЧwhen they're beautiful. Like the church. But I hate this house."
He turned abruptly, restlessly. Then he turned back, leaning out the window, and shouted back at a chorus of staccato shouts and whistles that broke the mellow silence on Parchment Street.
"Hoy! I'm coming! I'm coming!"
A chain of bicycle riders poured through the gate, began to rotate around the fishpond. Carol stepped back from the window. Bruce jerked himself back in. Somewhere below a phone rang.
"That'll be Mum and Dad, I expect. Phone's in the kitchen." He vanished. She stood a moment, listening to the pound of his feet on the stairs, to the slam of the back door. She went down slowly, following the sound of the phone down the dim hall, into a big cheerful kitchen.
A woman's voice said before she could speak, "Bruce? I tried to call earlier, but you weren't there. Is Carol there? We can't find her anywhere; we think she might have gotten mislaid between here and California. Your father is checking on that, and I'm trying to think how to tell Anne that her daughter is somewhere on earth but we're not sure whereЧ"
The smile began somewhere inside Carol before it touched her face. "Hello, Aunt Catherine," she said.
She opened the door for them two hours later, and Aunt Catherine hugged her. Then she held Carol at arm's length to look at her, and Carol, who was taller
than her mother, only came up to Aunt Catherine's eyes.
"Look at that, Harold," Aunt Catherine said. "She's got my hair. Her mother's is black as a stovepipe. And such lovely green eyes. I wonder where those came from. Have you eaten yet? We stopped for fish and chips. This is your Uncle Harold."
Carol turned. A tall man with Bruce's dark hair, and smiling eyes, took the pipe out of his mouth and held out his hand.
"How do you do. Where is Bruce? Have you met him yet?"
Carol nodded. "Yes." She cleared her throat. "I pushed him in the clock."
Uncle Harold's face smoothed. He looked down at her quizzically, the pipe smoke curling upward from his fingers. "He wasn't rude to you, I hope."
"OhЧIt wasn't because of that. He couldn't get the door open and I pushed. And he fell in the clock and it started banging and it wouldn't stop. But it's all right now, I think."
"Well," Aunt Catherine said briskly. "I'm sure that clock has survived worse than Bruce climbing in and out of it. Where is he?"
Carol's hand crept upward to the top of her head. "Bike riding, I thinkЕ . I'm sorry that you had to go to London for nothing. My mother told me you were picking me up, but I forgot. Some daysЧsome days are like that. I forget to do what I'm supposed to,
and I push people into clocks instead. I can't get coordinated. I usually end up breaking something. So now you know what you're getting for a month."
They were silent a moment. Uncle Harold said gravely, "I should think it required a definite amount of coordination to travel halfway across the world by yourself, and still manage to catch the proper train out of London. What do you think of the house?"
"Bruce said it's three hundred years old. I thought it would be more like a castle."
"It's as cold as one," Aunt Catherine said,
"Houses," Uncle Harold said, "are generally built with some degree of practicality. This used to be a vicarage, a place where the parish priests lived, and they had neither the need nor the money for a castle. Parts of it have been rebuilt from time to time, but other parts, like this stone floor and the great broad beam above the fireplace, suggest that the house was not built three hundred years ago, but rather rebuilt from an even older foundation."
Carol looked down at her feet. The worn grey stone swept unbroken toward the kitchen. She curled her toes. "No wonder it's so cold."
Uncle Harold smiled. "There. I didn't mean to begin a lecture on architecture." He turned to Aunt Catherine. "Where's the chips?"
"Here," Aunt Catherine said, "under my elbow." She shifted a roll of newspaper that smelled of hot fish into one hand, and dropped the other hand lightly on
Carol's shoulder. "Come and eat, and tell me how the American side of my family is doing."
They ate fish and chips out of warm greasy newspapers on the kitchen table as they talked. When Aunt Catherine finished asking about the relatives she had not seen in fifteen years, Uncle Harold poured himself a cup of tea and settled back for a discussion of American politics and education. Carol interrupted him before he got too far.
"What kind of stove is that?"
"It's a trial," Aunt Catherine said. Uncle Harold blinked, as though his thoughts were reordering themselves. Aunt Catherine stood up and lifted the two large smooth domes that covered the burners. "It's Mrs. Brewster's stove. Mrs. Brewster is the woman we rent the house from. She probably has a nice gas stove. This one runs on coal, and it has two speeds: hot and very hot. Which reminds meЧI should put Bruce's dinner in to warm." She got the newspapers full of Bruce's fish and chips and opened one of the heavy oven doors. Uncle Harold looked at his watch.
"He should have been home an hour ago."
"I know."
"I wonder sometimes if he doesn't think he is living in a hotel. Is basic courtesy too much to ask of a boy his age, or is communication totally impossible?"
"Perhaps he forgot," Aunt Catherine said gently. "Why don't you show Carol the house while I do the breakfast dishes."
Uncle Harold looked at Carol. "Would you like that?" he asked, and she nodded, smiling. Then they heard the click of bicycle wheels and the slam of the porch door.
"Bruce!" Uncle Harold shouted.
He opened the kitchen door and stuck his head in. "I've got to wash upЧI'm all over grease."
"Come here, please."
Bruce's hand dropped from the doorknob. He came in slowly. His eyes moved once to Carol's face in a stranger's impersonal glance. Then they dropped. "Yes, sir?"
Uncle Harold sighed. "Your mother is not a hired cook. She cooks because she loves us, and it would pain her to see us starve. I've had to tell you that too many times before."
Bruce's shoulders twitched. "Yes, sir. I'm sorry I'm late. Is that all?"
"No. Look at me."
Bruce's eyes rose slowly. They looked at each other, their eyes alike, dark and aloof. Uncle Harold said, "Mrs. Brewster disturbed me this morning with a phone call. She said she thought I should know that you spent yesterday evening sitting in a tree in the square smoking. I am not sure whether she was concerned with your health or the possibility that you and your friends might have set the town square on fire."
Bruce's mouth dropped slightly. "Was that her with the flashlight? We couldn't think who it was. She
didn't say anything. She usually does."
"I imagine she does," Uncle Harold said. "I don't enjoy being bothered with phone calls like that before I am properly awake, and I wish you would refrain from troubling Mrs. Brewster. I am not going to lecture you on smoking, because you are old enough to make your own decision about that. But what has been troubling me is something different. I saw a ring of boys on bicycles tormenting Mrs. Simmons' boy on his way to his cello lesson, and I was disturbed to realize that they formed a perfect, orderly circle as they rode, as though they had practiced it many times before. I was never so ashamed of you in my life."
He was quiet. Aunt Catherine's hands had stilled among the dishes. Bruce stared down at the table. Then his head lifted abruptly, his eyes going to Carol's face.
She sat startled a moment by what she read in them, and then her face blazed. "I didn't tell," she snapped. "I can fight for myself."