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

"Flourishing."
"Are you painting?"
"I have a subject in mind. I'm prowling about for a face."
"What subject?"
"It's a secret," he said lightly. "I'm not sure I can pull it off. I don't want to embarrass myself among you artists."
Her smile touched her eyes finally. "You're a sweet man, Harry. I'm still such a novice myself."
"John praises your work to the skies. He thinks very highlyтАФ"
"I know." Her face was suddenly angled away. "I know. I only wish he still thought so highly of me."
"He does!" Harry said, shocked. "He's loved you for years.You live together, you work together, you are twin
soulsтАФ"
"Yes." She looked at him again, her expression a polite mask. "Yes."
He was silent, wondering what was troubling her. His eyes strayed to the group beside the rose vines. Children ran
out of the cottage door; he recognized Andrew Peel's gray-eyed little beauty, and her baby brother trundling unsteadily
after. Nan sighed absently, her eyes on the children. Harry's own eyes strayed. Across the garden, the statue came to
life; the dark, unfathomable eyes seemed to gaze straight at him.
He started, his cup clattering, feeling that regard like a bolt from the blue, striking silently, deeply. He became
aware of Nan's eyes on him, too, in wide, unblinking scrutiny. Then she set her cup down on a table; it, too, rattled
sharply in its saucer.
"She's pregnant, you know," Nan said. Harry felt as though he had missed a step, plunged into sudden space. He
started again, this time not so noisily. Nan added, "So am I."
He stared at her. "That's wonderful," he exclaimed finally, leaning to put his cup on the grass. He caught her
hands. That's all it was then: her inner turmoil, her natural uncertainties. "Wonderful," he repeated.
"Is it?"
"Of course! You'll marry now, won't you?"
She gave him an incredulous stare. Then she loosed her hands, answered tonelessly, "Yes, quite soon. Next week,
perhaps, and then we'll go away for a bit to the southern coasts to paint."
"I couldn't be happier," Harry told her earnestly. "We've all been expecting this forтАФ"
 "For years," she finished. "Yes." She hesitated; he waited, puzzled without knowing why. Something about the
event, he supposed, made women anxious, prone to fear disasters, or imagine things that were not true.
Grainger's voice, sonorous and vibrant, spilled over the group. He appeared tramping up the knoll, his hat gone,
his canvas in one hand, easel in the other, paints in the pockets of his voluminous, stained jacket. He blew a kiss to
Nan, leaving a daub of blue on his bushy, autumn-gold mustaches. Then he turned to see how McAlister's sleeve was
coming. Above his broad back, Harry saw the statue's eyes come alive again; her cheeks had flushed, in the wayward
wind, a delicate shade of rose. Ever the consummate professional, she did not move, while Grainger, lingering in the
group, expounded with witty astonishment how like a wing that sleeve seemed, straining for its freedom on the wind.
Harry turned back to Nan, breath indrawn for some pleasantry.
Her chair was empty. He looked around bewilderedly. She had flown herself, it seemed, but why and on what
wayward wind, he could not imagine.


JO walked the darkening streets, fingering the broken cobble in her pocket. The day had been dryer than the
previous one; that was as much as she could say for it. Sun seemed to linger forever as she trudged through the noisy,
stinking streets. She asked everyone for work, even the butcher who had driven her out from under his awning, a
shapeless, faceless, unrecognizable bundle he didn't remember in the light. But he only laughed and offered the usual,
smacking with the flat of his hand the quivering haunch of meat he was slicing into steaks.
"Come back when you get desperate," he called after her, to the amusement of his customers. "Show me how fine
you can grind it."
She got much the same at inns and alehouses. When she stopped at crossings to rest her feet and beg for a coin or
two, she got threats from sweepers' brooms, screeches from ancient heaps of rags whose territory she had invaded,
shoves from lean, hollow-cheeked, cat-eyed girls with missing teeth who told her they'd cut off her hair with a rusty