"Patricia A. McKillip - The House on Parchment Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

the sunlight. "It's a nice day. Maybe I'll go for a walk." The drilling started up suddenly behind the gate,
screaming into the silence, and she winced. "It sounds
like a dentist's drill."
"Mm. Go across the field, and you can get out of town to the farms."
"Maybe I'll do that."
She opened the gate. Two men with drills and a truck stood between her and Emily Raison's house. She
went toward the field to get around them, and when she got to the fieldтАФa great circle of green grass
sloping gently toward a far roadтАФthe wind nudged her in the direction of other fields flowing on and on
toward a flat horizon. The drilling grew faint behind her as she walked, until she could barely hear it.
She swung the pan aimlessly in circles and smelled the grass, uncut, between her toes. She crossed the
road and turned down a quiet highway with blackberry hedges enclosing fields. A fence took the place
of the hedges farther down, and she stood on the bottom rail and watched a pair of thick-hooved farm
horses cropping beneath the endless sky. In the next field a huge bull stuck his head through the fence
and eyed her inscrutably. She circled gingerly around him. She picked a thick handful of buttercup,
white Queen Anne's Lace, blue morning glory streaked with white. The flat midlands ran serene and
changeless to the end of the world, and the occasional car that whisked by seemed alien and transitory.
She came back an hour later and went through the gate before she remembered Emily Raison's pan. She
stood a moment, looking at the hedge, puzzled. The
clippers lay on the clippings in the wheelbarrow, and only about five feet of the hedge was trimmed. She
looked around, but she did not see Bruce. She went into the street. Uncle Harold's car was gone. She
scratched her head absently a moment, then went over to Emily Raison's house and saw her in the
graveyard weeding graves.
She opened the gate and went into the graveyard. Miss Emily smiled vaguely at her. "Hello, my dear.
What lovely buttercups." "How many graves are you going to clean?" "Oh, I'm just doing a bit of
weeding over Mr. Chapman. He was a good friend of the family when I was a little girl."
Carol knelt down beside her. "Homer Chapman. 1861-1920. He's next door to Elizabeth Greyson." She
picked a straggling piece of moss off Elizabeth Greyson's stone.
"Is he, then?" Miss Emily said comfortably. "It's so old тАж 1599-1643тАж . She was buried here over three
hundred years ago тАж three hundred years, and her gravestone is still standing up straight, and the church
she was buried beside is still standingтАж . They made things to last in those days." She stepped across
Elizabeth's grave. "And here's her husband, Jonathon." "Is he, then?"
"And they had a child, buried here." She knelt down again and coaxed a snail off one of the letters.
Slugs had left silver trails like glistening tears across the stone. "Thomas, son of Elizabeth and Jonathon
Grey-son." She brushed apart the grass and weed in front of the stone. "It says somethingтАж . 'You
areтАж . You are a priest forever, according to the order of MelтАФMelтАФsomething. Melchisedech. Who is
Melchisedech?"

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"I don't know, my dear. Some of the people here were before my time."
"He was 1616 to 1644. 1642 was the Civil War. He was a priest in the middle of the Civil War. I wonder
if that's what killed him. I wonder if he got captured by the Puritans."
"Then he should have gone through the priest tunnel," Miss Emily said. "He would have been safe."
"What's a priest tunnel?"
"Oh, my dear, they had a nice tunnel between the church and the house so priests could move from one
place to another without being caught." She flung a handful of weed into the wind. Carol stared at her,
hugging her knees. She could feel her heart thumping against her knees.
"Who did? Who had a tunnel?"
"The people who lived in the house then." She sat back on her heels and brushed her hands off. "Bless