"Mary Stewart - Touch Not The Cat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation
where Life has but one dark end.

from "The Riddlers," by Walter de la Mare




One
It is my soul that calls upon my name.

тАФShakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Sc. ii)

My lover came to me on the last night in April, with a message and a warning that sent me home to
him.

Put like that, it sounds strange, though it is exactly what happened. When I try to explain it will no
doubt sound stranger still. Let me put it all down in order.

I was working in Funchal, Madeira. Funchal is the main town of that lovely Atlantic island, and, in
spite of its having been a port of call for almost every ship that has crossed the ocean since sometime in
the fourteenth century, the town is still small and charming, its steep alleys tumbling down the lava slopes
of the island's mountain spine, its streets full of flowers and trees, its very pavements made of patterned
mosaic which glistens in the sun. I was working as receptionist and tourist guide at one of the new hotels
east of the town. This sounds an easy job, but isn't; in tourist time, which in Madeira is almost the whole
year, it is hard indeed; but what had led me to apply for the job was that very few qualifications seemed
to be needed by a "Young lady of good appearance, willing to work long hours." Both these
qualifications were mine; appearance was just about all I'd got, and I would have worked any hours to
make some money. Whether I was the best for the job I don't know, but it happened that the people
who owned the hotel had known my father, so I was hired. The old-boy network they call it. Well, it
works, as often as not. You may not get the brightest and the best, but you do get someone who talks
your own language, and who is usually someone you can get back at the way it will hurt, if they let you
down.
 It's barely a year since the things happened that I am writing about, but I find that I am already
thinking of my father as if he were long gone, part of the past. As he is now; but on that warm April night
in Madeira when my love told me to go and see him, Daddy was alive, just.

I didn't sleep in the hotel. The friends who owned it had a quinta, a country estate a few kilometers
out of Funchal, where the pine woods slope down the mountains towards the sea. You reached the place
by a lane which led off the Machico road, a steep grey ribbon of lava setts, bordered in summer with
blue and white agapanthus standing cool against the pine woods, their stems vibrating in the draft of the
running water in the levada at the road's edge. The house was big and rather ornate in the Portuguese
style, standing in wide grounds full of flowers and carefully watered grass and every imaginable exotic
shrub and flowering tree, dramatically set against the cool background of mountain pines. The owners
lived there all winter, but at the beginning of April, most years, went back to England to their house in
Herefordshire which lay just across the Malvern Hills from ours. They were in England now, and the
quinta was shuttered, but I lived in what they called the garden house. This was a plain, single-story
building at the foot of the garden. Its walls were pink-washed like those of the big house, and inside it
was simple and bareтАФscrubbed floors and big echoing grey-walled rooms slatted all day against the sun,
beautifully quiet and airy, and smelling of sunburned pines and lemon blossom. My bedroom window