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

Jo saw a lump of masonry, or maybe a broken cobblestone, half the size of her fist near the wall where the old
woman had been sitting. She picked it up, slipped it into her pocket in case she needed it later.
You never knew.


HARRY stood in the enchanted garden of the McAlister's cottage in the country. Only a few miles from the city, it
might have existed in a different time and world: the realm of poetry, where the fall of light and a rosebud heavy with
rain from a passing storm symbolized something else entirely. The rain had stopped in the early afternoon. Bright sun
had warmed the garden quickly, filled its humid, sparkling air with the smells of grass and wild thyme, the crushed-
strawberry scent of the rambling roses climbing up either side of the cottage door. The cottage, an oddly shaped affair
with no symmetry whatsoever, had all its scattered, mismatched windows open to the air. There was no garden fence,
only a distant, rambling stone wall marking the property. The cottage stood on a grassy knoll; in nearby fields the long
grass was lush with wildflowers. Farther away, brindled cows and fluffy clouds of sheep pastured within rambling
field walls. Farther yet, in a fold of green, the ancient village, a bucolic garden of stone, grew along the river. On the
next knoll over, John Grainger was battling the winds trying to paint the scene. Occasionally, as a puff of exuberant air
tried to make off with Grainger's canvas, Harry could hear his energetic swearing.
Harry had come up for the day to look for a face for his Medusa among the McAlisters' visitors. Painters, their
wives and families, models, friends who encouraged and bought, and brought friends who bought, wandered around
the gardens, chatting, drinking wine and tea, sketching, painting, or watching McAlister paint.
McAlister was painting his wife. Or rather, he was painting her windblown sleeve. She stood patiently against the
backdrop of climbing red roses, all of which, Harry noticed, were the exact shade of her mouth. He tried not to think of
that. Thinking of her mouth made him think of the monstrous creation in his cupboard. In the sweet light of day, there
in the country, he was willing to attribute his Gorgon to the morbid churning of his frustrated romantic urges. But she
had inspired him, no doubt about that. Here he was in McAlister's garden, looking at every passing female, even the
young girl from the kitchen who kept the teapot filled, for his Medusa.
McAlister was unusually reticent about his own subject matter. Whatever figure from myth or romance he was
portraying, he needed her windblown. He had captured the graceful curves of his wife's wrist bone, her long, pliant
fingers. The flow of her silky sleeve in the contrary wind proved challenging, but he persevered, carrying on three
discussions at once with his onlookers as he painted. Aurora, her brooding eyes fixed on some distant horizon, scarcely
seemed to breathe; she might have been a piece of garden statuary.
Harry drifted, trying not to watch.
 He sat down finally next to John Grainger's mistress, Nan Stewart. She had modeled many times for John's
drawings and paintings, as well as for other artists who needed her frail, ethereal beauty for their visions. Grainger had
discovered her sitting in the cheaper seats of a theater one evening. A well-brought-up young girl despite her class, she
refused to speak to an artist. Undaunted, he found out who she was and implored her mother's permission to let her
model for him. Her mother, a fussy lump of a bed mattress, as Grainger described her, accompanied Nan a few times,
until she realized that the girl could make as much in an hour modeling for artists as she could sewing for a week in a
dressmaker's shop. Eventually Nan came to live with the brilliant, volatile Grainger, which explained, Harry thought,
her pallor and her melancholy eyes.
She had fine red-gold hair and arresting green eyes. With marriage in view at one point in their relationship,
Grainger had hired someone to teach her to move and speak properly. She smiled at Harry dutifully as he filled the
empty chair beside her.
"More tea?" he asked.
A vigorous, incoherent shouting from the knoll beyond made them both glance up. Grainger, hands on his easel,
seemed to be wrestling with the wind.
Nan shook her head. She had a bound sketchbook on her lap, as well as a pencil or two. Grainger encouraged her
to draw. She had talent, he declared to the world, and he was right, from what Harry had seen. But that day her
sketchbook was shut.
"Not inspired?" he ventured.
"Not today." She turned her attention from the painter on the knoll finally. "How are you, Harry?"