"Robin McKinley - Rose Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

At first, when she cried out for her mamma, the nurses were sympathetic, but as the months mounted
up to a year since the funeral, and no more than a week ever passed before another midnight waking,
another sobbing cry of тАЬMamma! Mamma!тАЭ the nurses grew short-tempered. The little girl learnt not to
cry out. but she still had the dream.
And she eluded her protectresses more often than ever and crept out into the garden, where the old
gardener (keeping a wary eye out for the descent of a shrieking harpy from the nursery) taught her how
better to plant things, and which things to plant, and what to do to make them happy after they were
planted.
She grew old enough to try to flee, and so discover that this did her no good in the dream; it was the
same dark, silent, sinister corridor, without windows or doors, the same unknown, expectant monster,
whichever way she turned. And then she discovered she had never really tried to nm away at all, that she
was determined to follow the corridor to its end, to face the monster. And that was the most terrifying
thing of all.
She wondered, as they all three grew up, if it was the dream itself that made her so different from her
sisters. They were all beautiful; all three took after their mother. But the eldest one was as brave as she
had been, and her name was Lionheart; the second one was as clever as she had been, and her name
was Jeweltongue. The youngest was called Beauty.
Beauty adopted the nerve-shattered horses, the dumbly confused and despairing dogs that Lionheart
left in her wake. She found homes for them with quiet, timid, dull peopleтАФas well as homes for barn-loft
kittens, canaries which wouldnтАЩt sing, parrots which wouldnтАЩt talk, and sphinxes which curled up into
miserable little balls in the backs of their cages and refused to be goaded into fighting.
She brought cups of tea with her own hands lo wounded swains bleeding from cries of тАЬCoward!тАЭ
and тАЬLackwit!тАЭ and offered her own handkerchiefs to maidservants and costumiers found weeping in
corners after run-ins with Jeweltongue. She found tactful things to say to urgent young playwrights who
wished to be invited to JeweltongueтАЩs salons, and got rid of philanthropists who wished Jeweltongue to
apply her notorious acutenessтАФand perhaps some of the familyтАЩs moneyтАФto schemes towards the
improvement of the general human lot.
She also kept an eye on the household accounts, to make sure that the calfbound set of modern
philosophy Jeweltongue had ordered contained all the twenty volumes she was charged for, that all
twenty sets of horseshoes the farrier included in his bill had indeed been nailed to the feet of LionheartтАЩs
carriage teams and hunters, and that the twenty brace of pheasant delivered for a dinner-party were all
served to their guests.
On some days, when it seemed to her that everyone she met was either angry or unhappy, she would
go out into the garden and hide. She had learned to avoid the army of gardeners, run by an ambitious
head gardener who was as forceful and dominating as any generalтАФor rather, she had never outgrown
her childтАЩs instinct to drop quietly out of sight when a grown-up moving a little too purposefully was
nearby. As soon as she stepped out onto the lawn, she felt tranquillity drift down over her like a veil; and
almost as though it were a veil, or as if she had suddenly become a plant herself (a tidy, well-shaped,
well-placed plant of a desirable colour and habit, for anything else would have drawn attention at once),
she was rarely noticed by the gardeners, hurrying this way and that with military precision, even when
they passed quite close to her.
The old gardener who had been kind to her when she was small had been pensioned off and lived in
a cottage at some distance from their great house, on the outskirts of the city, where the farmlands began
and where he had his own small garden for the first time in his long life. A few times a year she found half
a day to go visit himтАФonce with a convalescent puppy who had been stepped on by a carriage
horseтАФbut she missed having him in the garden.
 Once she arranged the flowers for one of her sistersтАЩ bails. This was ordinarily the housekeeperтАЩs
job. Her sisters felt that flower arranging was a pastime for servants or stupid people; Beauty felt that
flowers belonged in the garden where they grew. But on the morning of this party the housekeeper had
fallen downstairs and sprained her ankle, and was in too much pain to do anything but lie in a darkened