"Mcauley, Paul J - Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Inheritance
a novelette by Paul J McAuley

There was no doubt about it: he was lost.
Robert Tolley crumpled the map with an abrupt motion and levered himself
out of the rented Volkswagen -- no easy task, for he was a tall man
running to fat, and the seat low-slung -- to get a better look at his
surroundings. He had parked the car in an embayment before a gate in the
hedgerow, so that he wouldn't block the narrow, unmarked road. Now, he lit
a cigarette and leaned against the old-fashioned stile, looked across the
rough meadow, and wondered if he shouldn't simply abandon the search and
turn back to Oxford.
A fine rain hung in the air, the kind, slightly too heavy to be a mist,
that the English called a mizzle. Quaint, like calling an elevator a lift,
or fall autumn, or the way the peppy red Volkswagen was called a Golf
rather than a Rabbit. Like, but not like. The way the fields, vividly
green even at the beginning of December, were subtly different from the
New Hampshire pastures of his childhood.
Tolley was about to climb back in the car when he saw two figures leave
the cover of trees in the far corner of the field and start across it. A
dog's bark lifted across the grass, flat-sounding in the damp air, and the
animal, a black-and-white collie, reached him before its owners, wriggling
under the gate and dancing about, barking. Tolley shifted back uneasily
and murmured, "Good boy, good boy," afraid that it would jump up against
his new Burberry, or worse.
One of the walkers, a man, climbed the stile and called to the dog. "Don't
fret," he told Tolley. His voice was thick with some northern accent. "He
doesn't bite."
"Maybe you can help me," Tolley said. "I guess I'm a little lost."
"Ask away." He was a wiry man of about sixty, a chequered cap pulled low
over springy white hair, an expensive camera slung over the shoulder of
his Norfolk jacket. He turned and held his wife's hand as she clambered
over the stile -- at least, Tolley guessed that she was his wife, a small
woman a few years younger than her husband, around Tolley's age. Her
glossy black hair was bound back in a girlish ponytail, and a silk scarf
peeking about the top button of her fur-collared coat lent her an exotic,
gypsyish air. She raised her hand to her throat, and said, "You're
American, aren't you? We have a son over there, in Boston."
"Harvard University," her husband added.
Tolley said, "I was looking for a place called Steeple Heyston. You know
it?"
Clearly they did, for they exchanged a look. The man said, "You must have
missed the turn. It's about a mile back, only a rough track and not
signposted. Nothing there anymore."
"I understood there were ruins. An old manor house. That's what I've come
to see; my family on my father's side lived there. Tolley. The name mean
anything to you?"
Again that exchanged glance. The man said, "There's still a bit of the old
manor house. Visiting on your own?"
Tolley explained that he was divorced, and had no children. "I guess you