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

"seeings" and thought-transference between members of the family. By the same token my lover knew
me, since I was the only Ashley girl, and for the last year or so had addressed me flatly as "Bryony."
There again, I only use the name for convenience; you might almost say he called me "You," but in
a manner which identified me fully. In return I called him "Ashley," in an attempt to make him identify
himself. He never did, but accepted the name as he had accepted "Boy" and sometimes, in
unwary moments, "Love," with the same guarded and gentle amusement with which he parried
every attempt I had lately made to force him to identify himself. All I could get from him was the
assurance that when the time was right we would know each other openly; but until that time we must be
close only in thought.

I know I haven't explained this well, but then it is a thing I have known all my life, and that I
gather very few people know at all. When I was old enough to see the gift as something unique and
secret, I tried to read about it, but all that could be found under headings like "Telepathy" or
"Thought-transference" never seemed quite to tally with this easy private line of communication that we
owned. In the end I gave up trying to analyze the experience, and went back to accepting it as I had
done when a child. Though I gathered from my reading that gifts like this could be uncomfortable, and
had been in times past downright dangerous, it had never worried me to possess it. Indeed, I could
hardly imagine life without it. I don't even know when he became a lover as well as a companion; a
change in the thought-patterns, I suppose, as unmistakable as the changes in one's body. And if it seems
absurd that one should need and offer love without knowing the body one offers it to, I suppose that
unconsciously the body dictates a need which the mind supplies. With us the minds translated our need
into vivid and holding patterns which were exchanged and accepted without question, andтАФsince
bodily responses were not involvedтАФrather comfortably.

It was probable that when we met and knew one another physically it would be less
simple, but at the moment there seemed to be no prospect of this. You can't, out of the blue, ask a
second cousin who has given no hint of it: "Are you the Ashley who talks to me privately?" I did once try
to probe. I asked Francis, the youngest of my three cousins, if he ever had dreams of people so vivid that
he confused them with reality. He shook his head, apparently without interest, and changed the
subject. So I summoned up my courage to ask the twins, who were my seniors by almost four
years. When I spoke to James, the younger of the two, he gave me a strange look, but said no, and he
must have told Emory, his twin, because Emory started probing at me in his turn. Full of questions he
was, and rather excited, but somehow in the wrong way, the way the psychical research people
were when Rob Granger, the farmer's son at home, said he'd seen a ghostly priest walking
through the walls of Ashley church, and everyone thought it might be Cardinal Wolsey who was there as
a young man; but it turned out to be the Vicar going down in his dressing gown to pick up the spectacles
he'd left behind in the vestry.

My lover saysтАФand he said it in clear only yesterdayтАФ that I have got so used to
communicating in thoughtblocks that I am not good with words any more. I never get to
the point, he tells me, and if I did I couldn't stick there. But I shall have to try, if I am to write down the
full story of the strange things that happened at Ashley Court a year ago. Write it I must, for
reasons which will be made plain later, and to do that I suppose I ought to start by saying
something about the family. What I have written so far makes us sound like something from a dubious old
melodramaтАФwhich would not be far wrong, because the family is as old as Noah, and I suppose you
could say it's as rotten as a waterlogged Ark. Not a bad simile, because Ashley Court, our home, is a
moated manor that was built piecemeal by a series of owners from the Saxons on, none of whom had
heard of damp courses; but it is very beautiful, and brings in something over two thousand a year, not
counting outgoings, from the twenty-five-penny tourists, God bless them.