"Mary Stewart - The Little Broomstick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

to risk having Mary, quite apart from all the extra
work she herself was having to do ...

So there it was. And once more the twins had got
the best of it. Mary didn't grudge them the
harvesting, the tractors, even the share they would
have in the two elderly farm ponies; but she did think
that at the very worst she might have been allowed to
go and catch the flu. At least she would have been
having it in company.

To Mary, sitting alone by the window on that grey
autumn afternoon, flu seemed a very desirable thing
indeed. She forgot about temperatures, aching bones,
bed; she even forgot how tiresome Timothy, aged four, could be - and indeed
was, most of the time.
She only saw in her mind's eye the lovely time they
would all have had together getting better, with


2
Poor Mary sat a-weeping


books and games and plenty of talk and fun. She
brooded over the picture, and for the fiftieth time
wished to goodness she had managed to get to Aunt
Sue's and catch the flu before the letter came that had
sent her mother frantically to the telephone, and
resulted in Mary's being bundled off - rather apologetically
- to stay with Great-Aunt Charlotte in the
quiet old house in the country.

Nothing, thought Mary, nothing could ever happen
here. If only it had been time to go to school - even
school would have been better than this ...

And she scowled out of the window at the garden
where the falling leaves were rustling into a pattern
on the lawn.

Great-Aunt Charlotte, who was old, kind, and very
deaf, lived in a rambling red-brick house deep in
Shropshire, where a mile or so of woods and cherry
orchards stretched between the garden and the main
road. The orchards had once belonged to the house,
but now were worked by a local firm of market
gardeners, who kept the gates locked, and one wasn't
supposed to go into the orchards at all. Half of the
house had been let, too; the people who lived there