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

opened on one of the camellia avenues which led downhill towards the lily pools where frogs croaked
and splashed all night. By the end of April the camellias are just about over, the browned blossoms
swept away, almost as they drop, by the immaculate Portuguese gardeners; but the Judas trees are in
flower, and the angel's-trumpets, and the wisteria, all fighting their way up through a dreamer's mixture of
cloudy blossom where every season's flowers flourish (it seems) all year. And the roses are out. Not
roses such as we have at home; roses need their cold winter's rest, and here, forced as they are into
perpetual flower by the climate, they grow pale and slack-petalled, on thin, over-supple stems. There
were roses on the wall of the garden house, moonbursts of some white, loose-globed flower which
showered half across my bedroom window. The breeze that blew the rain clouds from time to
time across the moonlight tossed the shadows of the roses over wall and ceiling again and again, each
time the same and yet each time different, as the roses moved and the petals loosened to the
breeze.

I was still awake when he came. He had not been to me for so long that at first I hardly recognized
what was happening. It was just my name, softly, moving and fading through the empty room
as the rose shadows moved and faded.

Bryony. Bryony. Bryony Ashley.

"Yes?" I found I had said it aloud, as if words were needed. Then I came fully awake, and knew
where I was and who was talking to me. I turned over on my back, staring up at the high ceiling of that
empty room where the moonlit shadows, in a still pause, hung motionless and insubstantial. As
insubstantial as the lover who filled the nighttime room with his presence, and my mind with his
voice.

Bryony. At last. Listen. . . . Are you listening?

This is not how it came through, of course. That is hard to describe, if not downright impossible. It
comes through neither in words nor in pictures, butтАФI can't put it any betterтАФin sudden blocks of
intelligence that are thrust into one's mind and slotted and locked there, the way a printer locks
the lines into place, and there is the page with all its meanings for you to read. With these
thought-patterns the whole page comes through at once; I suppose it may be like
block-reading, though I have never tried that. They say it comes with practice. Well, he
and I had had all our lives to practice; I had known him all my twenty-two years, and he
(this much I could tell about him) was not much older.

I suppose that when we were children we must both have stumbled and made mistakes, as
normal children do with reading, but I cannot remember a time when we couldn't confront each
other, mind to mind, with ease. To begin with it seemed like sharing dreams, or having (as I believe is
common among children) an imaginary companion who shared everything with me, and who was more
real even than the cousins who lived near us, or than my friends at school. But, unlike most children, I
never spoke about him. I don't think this was through fear of ridicule or disbelief; the experience was
something I took very much for granted; but somehow, imposed over those thought-patterns,
there was a censor which wouldn't allow me to share him with anyone else, even my parents. And the
same censor must have worked with him. Never by the smallest sign or faltering of the patterns did he let
me know who he was, though, from the shared memories that we had, I knew he must be someone close
to me, and it was a safe bet that he was one of my Ashley cousins, who had played with me at
Ashley Court daily when I was a child, and who had later on shared almost every holiday. It's a
gift that goes in families, and there were records that it ran in ours: ever since the Elizabeth Ashley
who was burned at the stake in 1623, there had been a record, necessarily secret, of strange