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

railway a little past the ruins. That's the old Oxford-to-Birmingham line,
and it was about a hundred years ago that the tragedy happened."
"A hundred and six," Gerald Beaumont said.
His wife ignored him. "There was a passenger train on its way to
Birmingham, and a goods train going towards Oxford. Well, one of the
wagons of the goods train jumped the tracks and pulled others across the
line just as the passenger train was about to pass it. They used to say
that you could hear the shriek of brakes in Oxford, that the sparks from
its wheels set fire to a quarter mile of the embankment. Well, the
passenger train couldn't stop in time, and hit the goods train. The first
major railway accident that was, it killed over forty people. But not so
many would have died if the people of Steeple Heyston had been allowed to
help them. The squire there wouldn't let them, you see. He had been
against the railway from the start, because it came so close to his house.
When the other passengers carried the injured away from the wreck, the
squire told his tenants that they were not to go near. 'Let them use their
blasted railway to save themselves,' he's supposed to have said. Well, it
was more than two hours before a relief train arrived, and by that time
many had died who might otherwise have lived. You can see where they're
buried, in the churchyard. The squire tried to prevent that, too, but the
diocese overruled him. Two graves under the old yew hold bodies that never
were identified, a man and a woman. They say you can see them on the
anniversary of the accident, searching the track."
Tolley smiled. "And have you seen them?"
"I wouldn't go near there on that night, or any other. It's a sad place at
the best of times. I have a feeling of something in need, not at rest."
Gerald Beaumont said, "I'm not given to believing in ghosts and such
myself, but it's true that Marjory fainted there once, won't go there
again."
"It's the woman, I expect," Marjory Beaumont said softly, as if to
herself. "It usually is."
Her husband said, "You didn't know about this, Professor Tolley?"
"Not a thing. My grandfather never said a word about what happened to the
manor house. That he came from Steeple Heyston, I know only because my
father saved his naturalisation papers. That's about all he left the
family."
There had been money, but most of it had been squandered before Tolley had
been born, the rest lost in the Wall Street Crash. All Tolley had
inherited was an appetite for luxury and a careless attitude towards
money; his ex-wife's accusations of profligate spending had stung when her
other charges had not because Tolley knew that it was true. He had always
wanted more than he could afford.
"Do you know what happened after the accident? No? It seems," Gerald
Beaumont said, "that ten years after, there was a great fire in the manor
house, and at the same time the mill burned down, too. That was the only
reason the village existed, the manor house and the mill, and the people
drifted away afterwards."
"I guess that was when my family came to the States. My grandfather was
about eighteen then. Don't know anything about his father: he would be
your squire, right?"