"Pat Murphy - Menagerie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

brighter than English sparrows, their brilliant colors fading to shades of gray
in the dim light. The macaws stirred as he strolled past, and one bird called
after him -- "You're a bounder, you are!"

By the hyena enclosure, he found Selina's sketch pad abandoned on the wooden
bench. The three hyenas were awake and alert. The largest of the three, the one
that Selina had been drawing that morning, was pacing the length of the iron
fence that confined them, whining in her throat and staring past him, down the
path that led to the downs. The other two answered her whines with strange yaps
and growls.

George Paxton took up the sketchpad, gazing about him. "Miss Selina?" he called.
"Where are you?." The garden was quiet. In the moonlight, he opened the
sketchpad and studied the pencil drawings within. A sketch of the tiger, her
eyes glaring through the bars of the cage. A sketch of the hyena lounging in the
sun, perhaps the one that Selina had been drawing when he encountered her that
morning. Another sketch of the hyena enclosure -- the same iron grillwork, the
same drooping tree, the same boulder. But the hyena was gone. In place of the
beast, in the center of the enclosure, an elderly woman with an air of
dissipation and sloth, reclined on a high-backed sofa.

Something about the lady-- perhaps her toothy smile or the intensity of her gaze
-- reminded George Paxton of the beast. The woman wore a shabby fur collar that
had markings similar to those on the hyena's coat. In the carefully penciled
shadows behind her, Mr. Paxton could make out another face-- a coarse,
ill-tempered young man, the old woman's son, he would guess. He did not like the
look of the man, lurking in the shadows and waiting for an opportunity to do
ill. A drunkard and a coward, he thought, ready to pick a man's pocket or slit
his throat.

George frowned, wondering at Selina's fancy. Why had she drawn two people in the
hyena enclosure and why such unattractive subjects?

Uneasy, George closed the sketchbook and looked around him for other signs of
Selina. The hyenas were staring toward the downs. Following their gaze, he saw
something white, fluttering on the fence. He stepped closer and found a woman's
dress -- Selina's dress -- hanging from the wrought iron. Beside the dress, a
delicate chemise, carefully worked with delicate white embroidery, blew in the
evening breeze. On the ground, a pair of stockings, neatly tucked into the toes
of a pair of lady's shoes. To convince himself he was not imagining things,
George touched the chemise, feeling its silky fabric against his hand.

What could be happening? Selina was naked, somewhere in the garden. The thought
of it warmed his blood -- and chilled him in that same moment. He imagined her
graceful limbs, bare and pale in the moonlight.
And William Gordon was somewhere nearby. Could William dare take advantage of a
young woman of Selina's station? Could Selina be so lost to her family, to all
propriety, that she would throw herself into the power of a scoundrel? Surely
she could see that William Gordon was not a man to be trusted.