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

Uncle Harold looked at them bewilderedly a moment. Then his hand hit the table with a little smack.
"Not Carol, tooЧ"
"He wasn't with them."
"It doesn't matter that I wasn't," Bruce said. "I probably would have done it, if I didn't know who you
were."
"That's a marvelous welcome to give to guests in your own country," Aunt Catherine said tartly. "It's a
wonder she didn't turn around and go home." "She wanted to." "I was going to." "Well, what stopped you?" "Bruce!"
"I'm not being rude, I'm being curious. I would have gone."
"Well, I don't like running away from things. Or people."
Uncle Harold said distinctly, "Will you please apologize to her."
"I'm sorry," Bruce said tightly. He looked at Uncle Harold. "If you see that circle again, there won't be me in it. Ever."
He turned and left. Uncle Harold dropped his head into one hand. Aunt Catherine washed dishes with a harsh, rhythmic clatter. Then she slowed and turned to Carol, sitting mute in her chair with her hair hiding her face. Aunt Catherine wiped her hands on her apron. She sat down beside Carol. "I'm glad you didn't go," she said softly. Carol's shoulders moved in a little shrug. "I'm used to being teased. I'm skinny, and I'm taller than half the boys in my class, and my hair looks like a haystack on fire, and I can't walk up to the blackboard at school without stepping on somebody's lunch. But most of the time, I don't let people bother me. I can't fight all of them." "Well, you're wiser than I was at your age. I
couldn't go down the aisle either without tripping over my big bony feet."
Uncle Harold dropped his hand. "Your feet aren't big and bony." His voice was tired.
"They were then," Aunt Catherine said. "I don't know what's troubling Bruce these days. He rarely talks to us, and we can't read his mind. The only thing I can do is leave his fish and chips in the oven for him and remember that once he had a very sweet smile."
Uncle Harold's mouth relaxed. He looked at Carol. "Well," he said gently, "are you still in the mood for a guided tour?"
Carol sighed. "Yes. If I wake up hungry in the middle of the night, I don't want to get lost."
There were four large rooms on the ground floor: the kitchen; a room across from it that Uncle Harold said had been the morning room where the vicars had once eaten their breakfast, but which was now Aunt Catherine's laundry room; the living room connected to the kitchen, with a great, fat-legged round table, and a fireplace built of huge squares of grey stone and dark, heavy, smoke-blackened beams; and the room across from it, Uncle Harold's study, with his desk and papers and endless shelves of books. Upstairs were four bedrooms.
"It's a bit big for us," Uncle Harold said, "but I like old things. Most of the furniture belongs to Mrs. Brewster. She was born in the house. Her father bought it when the church across the way turned Catholic
again after four hundred years, and the new priests decided they didn't want to support a large, rather chilly historical monument. Mrs. Brewster lived here until her husband died, and then she began to rent the house. I've had my eye on this house for several years, but it wasn't until last winter that we were able to rent it from her."
"Why did the church turn Catholic? I didn't know churches did that."
"The old Protestant parishioners died or moved away until there weren't enough people to support the church. Sometimes, when that happens, the church is destroyed to make room for something else. But the Catholic population in the town had grown out of its own little modern church, so they bought this one instead of building a new one. It was Catholic, of course, when it was built first, because it is nearly eight hundred years old."
Carol drew a slow breath. They were climbing the last part of the stairway, that led to the rooms beneath the roof. "My father gave me a silver dollar once that was made in 1887. That was old, to me."
Uncle Harold smiled. "You live in a young country." They reached the landing. There were two small rooms, one on each side of the hall. "This is where the maid and the cook would sleep, if we had them. Now they're Mrs. Brewster's storage rooms."
Carol went into one. She knelt down on the window-seat between the thick walls, and looked out. Uncle
Harold unlatched the window and opened it. The scent of cool grass mingled with his sweet pipe smoke. A single star hung beyond the high dark tower of the church.
"It's so quietЕ ."
"Mm."
"At home, there's a freeway running near our house. I can hear trucks on it even late at night." She looked down. "I wonder how Emily Raison can stand living in a graveyard."
"It doesn't seem to bother her. She doesn't like dogs, or cows in fields when she goes blackberry picking, but she's not afraid of graves. There's no reason to be. The people in them lived in the same world you and I live in, and often their thoughts about it were not very different from ours. Well. You've seen everything except the cellar and the gardener's shed andЧ" Carol turned. "There's a cellar? I've never been in one."
"Good heavens. Come along, then. I should go
down anyway and get coal to feed the stove tonight."
"Do you leave it on all night?"
"Oh, yes. It would take hours to heat it up properly
every morning." He switched on the hall light as they
went downstairs, and said meditatively, "I can't decide
which Catherine hates most: the stove or the stone
floor in the hall. It is dreadfully cold during winter."
He stopped in the kitchen to get the coal bucket,
then led her to a little door behind the main staircase.
She smelted cold stones and damp earth as he opened it. He switched on the light, and she saw narrow, worn stone steps leading to a great black mountain of coal at the bottom. She followed him down and looked around as he cracked coal bricks with the edge of the can. There were two rooms beyond the coal room; in the first one she found a freezer and a water tank and a cat licking itself on a pile of rags.
Its eyes caught light from the coal room and blazed at her like cut amber. Then they vanished as the cat turned and slipped silently into the third room. Carol followed it.
"I didn't know you had a cat." She crouched at the doorway and called it softly. "We don't."
"There's one down here."
"Is there? They slip in, sometimes, through the broken windows. Emily Raison's cat Geraldine had a litter of six down here once. Is it calico?"
"No. It's black. It's male." She called it again, her voice high, coaxing, and it moved across a table of old china and fragile figurines so smoothly it seemed only a shadow. It faded imperceptibly into the shadows, and she blinked, suddenly finding nothing to call. She moved into the room, looking behind stacks of boxes of books, old picture frames, more china. The grey cellar stones in the twilight were thick and old as the stones of the outer wall of the house. She saw a movement out of the comer of her eye, and turned toward the window. She saw beneath it the slow fading of a man walking into the wall.
The touch of Uncle Harold's hand on her shoulder jolted her. She shivered.
"I called you," he said gently. "You didn't hear me."
She looked up at him. His face was calm, familiar behind his pipe. The full coal bucket was in his hand.
"You're frightened. What's the matter?"