"Dan Simmons - Carrion Comfort (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

"No, of course not," I lied. "But children should not play with such things . . ." I trailed off
lamely. Nina nodded but did not bother to conceal the condescension in her smile. She went to look
out the south window into the garden.
Damn her. It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.
On the day he was killed, Charles Edgar Larchmont had been my beau for precisely five months and
two days. There had been no formal announcement, but we were to be married. Those five months had
been a microcosm of the era itself-naive, flirtatious, formal to the point of preciosity, and
romantic. Most of all, romantic. Romantic in
the worst sense of the word; dedicated to saccharine or insipid ideals that only an adolescent-or
an adolescent society-would strive to maintain. We were children playing with loaded weapons.
Nina, she was Nina Hawkins then, had her own beau -a tall, awkward, but well-meaning Englishman
named Roger Harrison. Mr. Harrison had met Nina in London a year earlier, during the first stages
of the Hawkinses' Grand Tour. Declaring himself smitten-another absurdity of those times-the tall


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Englishman had followed her from one European capital to another until, after being firmly
reprimanded by Nina's father (an unimaginative little milliner who was constantly on the defensive
about his doubtful social status), Harrison returned to London to "settle his affairs." Some
months later he showed up in New York just as Nina was being packed off to her aunt's home in
Charleston in order to terminate yet another flirtation. Still undaunted, the clumsy Englishman
followed her south, ever mindful of the protocols and restrictions of the day.
We were a gay group. The day after I met Nina at Cousin Celia's June ball, the four of us were
taking a hired boat up the Cooper River for a picnic on Daniel Island. Roger Harrison, serious and
solemn on every topic, was a perfect foil for Charles's irreverent sense of humor. Nor did Roger
seem to mind the good-natured jesting, since he was soon joining in the laughter with his peculiar
haw-haw-haw.
Nina loved it all. Both gentlemen showered attention on her, and although Charles never failed to
show the primacy of his affection for me, it was understood by all that Nina Hawkins was one of
those young women who invariably becomes the center of male gallantry and attention in any
gathering. Nor were the social strata of Charleston blind to the combined charm of our foursome.
For two months of that now-distant summer, no party was complete, no excur-
sion adequately planned, and no occasion considered a success unless we four were invited and had
chosen to attend. Our happy dominance of the youthful social scene was so pronounced that Cousins
Celia and Loraine wheedled their parents into leaving two weeks early for their annual August
sojourn in Maine.
I am not sure when Nina and I came up with the idea of the duel. Perhaps it was during one of the
long, hot nights when the other "slept over"-creeping into the other's bed, whispering and
giggling, stifling our laughter when the rustling of starched uniforms betrayed the presence of
our colored maids moving through the darkened halls. In any case, the idea was the natural
outgrowth of the romantic pretensions of the time. The picture of Charles and Roger actually
dueling over some abstract point of honor relating to us thrilled both of us in a physical way
that I recognize now as a simple form of sexual titillation.
It would have been harmless except for the Ability. We had been so successful in our manipulation
of male behavior-a manipulation that was both expected and encouraged in those days-that neither
of us had yet suspected that there was anything beyond the ordinary in the way we could translate
our whims into other people's actions. The field of parapsychology did not exist then; or rather,
it existed only in the rappings and knockings of parlor-game seances. At any rate, we amused