"Patricia A. McKillip - The Gorgon in the Cupboard" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

Another voice came to life, a man's this time. "To what?" he asked heavily. "Nothing ever changes. City, country,
it's all the same. You're in the mill or on the streets from dark to dark, just to get your pittance to survive one more day.
And some days you can't even get that." He paused; Jo felt his racking cough shudder through them all, piled on top of
one another as they were. The old woman patted his arm, whispered something. Then she turned to Jo, when he had
quieted.
"He lost his wife, not long ago. Twenty-two years together and not a voice raised. Some have that."
"Twenty-two years," the man echoed. "She had her corner at the foot of the Barrow Bridge. She sang like she
didn't know any better. She made you believe it, tooтАФthat you didn't know anything better than her singing, you'd
never know anything better. She stopped boats with her voice; fish jumped out of the water to hear. But then she left
me alone with my old fiddle and my old bones, both of us creaking and groaning without her." He patted the lump
under his threadbare cloak as though it were a child. "Especially in this rain."
"Well, I know what I'm going to do when it quits," the girl said briskly. "I'm going to get myself arrested. He'll
never get his hands on me in there. And it's dry and they feed you, at least for a few days before they let you out
again."
"I got in for three months once," a young voice interposed from the far edge of the awning.
"Three months!" the girl exclaimed, her bruised eye trying to flutter open. "What do you have to do for that?"
"I couldn't get myself arrested for walking the streets, no matter how I tried, and I was losing my teeth and my
looks to a great lout who drank all my money away by day and flung me around at night. I was so sick and tired of my
life that one morning when I saw the Lord Mayor of the city in a parade of fine horses and soldiers and dressed-up
lords and ladies, I took off my shoe and threw it at his head." The old woman crowed richly at the thought. "I let them
catch me, and for three months I had a bed every night, clean clothes, and food every day. By the time I got out, my
lout had moved on to some other girl and I was free."
"They don't make jails nowadays the way they used to," the fiddler said. "They never used to spoil you with food
or a bed."
Jo felt the girl sigh noiselessly. "I'd do three months," she murmured, "if I knew where to find a Lord Mayor."
Jo's eyes slid to her vivid, wistful face. "What will you do," she asked slowly, "for your few days?"
"I've heard they take you off the streets if you break something. A window, or a street lamp. I thought I'd try that."
Jo was silent, pulling a tattered shawl around her. Jo had made it for her mother, years earlier, when her father had
been alive to tend to his sheep and his cows, make cheese, shear wool for them to spin into thread. When she'd gone
back, her mother had given the shawl to her to wrap the baby in. The sheep and cows were long gone to pay debts after
her father died. Her mother's hands had grown huge and red from taking in laundry. Alf, they called the baby, after her
father. Alfred Fletcher Byrd. Poor poppet, she thought dispassionately. Not strong enough for any one of those names,
let alone three.
The man who was its father showed his face in her thoughts. She shoved him out again, ruthlessly, barred that
entry. She'd lost a good place in the city because of him, in a rich, quiet, well-run house. A guest, a friend of the
family, who had a family of his own somewhere. He'd found her early one morning making up a fire in the empty
libraryтАж The only time she'd ever seen him, and it was enough to change her life. So she'd run out of the city, all the
way back home to her mother. And all she had left of any of that time was an old purple shawl.
That was then, she thought coldly. This is now.
Now, the rain was letting up a little. The young girl shifted, leaning out to test it with her hand. Jo moved, too, felt
the coin or two she had left sliding around in her shoe. Enough for a loaf and a bed in some crowded, noisy, dangerous
lodging house run by thieves. Might as well spend it there, before they found a way to steal it.
Or she could break a window, if she got desperate enough.
A door banged. There was the butcher, a great florid man with blood on his hands and a voice like a bulldog,
growling at them to take their carcasses elsewhere or he'd grind them into sausages.
The girl wrapped her face close again, hiding her telltale eye. The fiddler coughed himself back into the rain, his
instrument carefully cradled beneath his cloak. The old woman, wheezing dreadfully, pulled herself up with Jo's help.
Jo picked up her covered basket for her. Flowers, she thought at first, then caught a pungent whiff of it. Whatever it
was she sold, it wasn't violets. The woman winked at her and slid the basket over her arm. She trailed off after the rest
of the bedraggled flock scattering into the rain.