"Mary Stewart - Thorny Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

in a lilac grove, and a tennis-court carefully kept by my father, where
occasionally neighbours would come to play. The parish consisted
mainly of farmland, farms scattered through a few square miles, with
only one 'main' road through it. Cars were rare; one walked, or went
by pony-trap. There were no buses, and the railway station was two
miles away.

Only seven years. But even now, after a lifetime ten times as long,
some memories are printed, still vivid and exact through the overall
smudging of times gone by and best forgotten.
The village green with its grazing goats and donkeys, and :, wiury
sivwan the grey church at its centre. Huge trees everywhere, on the
green, in the cottage gardens, studding the circling meadows, shading
the dusty road. The road itself, with the deep triple ruts made by
wheels and hoofs, winding between its thick borders of hedgerow
flowers.

Sunshine hot on the paving-stones of our back-yard, where hens strutted
and the cat lay dozing. The ringing of the smith's hammer from the
forge next door, and the sharp smell of singeing hoofs as he shod the
farmers' horses.

The vicarage garden with its paeonies and violas and the columbines
like doves roosting. The clouds of lilac, the hops climbing over the
door of the schoolhouse at the foot of the garden, and the double
yellow roses by the steps that led to the tennis-lawn.

But no people. Those golden memories, I suppose significantly, hold no
single person. Except one. There is no smudging of the picture on the
day when I first met my mother's cousin Geillis.

She was my godmother, so presumably I had encountered her at the font,
but the first time that I recall talking with her was on a summer's day
when I was six years old.

It cannot have been my birthday, because that is in September, but it
was some sort of special day, an occasion to which I had looked forward
with all the starved longing of a lonely childhood, and which, when it
came, was just like any other day. Which meant that I spent it alone,
because my father was out on his parish visits, my mother was too busy
to bother with me, and of course I was not allowed to play with the
village children.

I doubt if I was allowed to leave the garden, either, but I had done
so. At the bottom of our vegetable garden, behind the schoolhouse, was
my own private gap in the fence. Beyond it stretched a long slope of
meadow-land, studded like a park with groups of great trees, and at the
foot of the slope, backed by a little wood, lay a pond. For no reason,
except that its bright mirror made a point to aim for, I wandered
downhill to the water's edge, and sat down in the grass.