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

The family goes back further even than the oldest bits of the house. There was an
AshleyтАФtradition says he was called Almeric of the Spears, which in Anglo-Saxon is pronounced
something like "Asher"тАФwho fled in front of the Danes when they came raiding up the Severn in
the tenth century, and established his family in the densely forested land near the foot of the Malvern
Hills. There had been settlers there before; it was said that when the British, earlier still, had fled in
front of the Saxons, they had lived on like ghosts in the fragments of a Roman house built where a
curve of the river let the sunlight in. Of this early settlement there was no trace except the remains
of some tile kilns half a mile from the house. The Saxons dug a moat and led the river into it, and
holed up safely until the Conquest. The Saxon Ashley was killed in the fighting, and the
incoming Norman took his widow and the land, built a stone keep on the island and a drawbridge to
serve it, then took the name as well, and settled down to rear Ashley children who were all,
probably to his fury, fair and pale-skinned and tall, and Saxon to the bone. The Ashleys
have always had a talent for retaining just what they wanted to retain, while adapting immediately
and without effort to the winning side. The Vicar of Bray must have been a close relation. We were
Catholics right up to Henry VIII, then when the Great Whore got him we built a priest's hole and
kept it tenanted until we saw which side the wafer was buttered, and then somehow there
we were under Elizabeth, staunch Protestants and bricking up the priest's hole, and learning
the Thirty-nine Articles off by heart, probably aloud. None of us got chopped, right through
Bloody Mary, but that's the Ashleys for you. Opportunists. Rotten turncoats. We bend with the wind of
changeтАФand we stay at Ashley. Even in the nineteen-seventies, with no coat left to turn, and
with everything loaded against us, we stayed. The only difference was, we lived in the
cottage instead of the Court.

Nothing is left now of the formal gardens, which had once been beautiful, but which I had
never known as other than neglected, with the wild, tanglewood charm of a Sleeping Beauty
backdrop. The lovely, crumbling old house on its moated island, and the wilderness surrounding,
were all that was left of an estate which had once been half a county wide, but which by my father's
time had shrunk to a strip of land along the river, the gardens themselves, the buildings of what had
once been a prosperous home farm, and a churchyard. I think the church officially belonged as
well, but Jonathan AshleyтАФmy fatherтАФdidn't insist on this. The church stood in its green graveyard
just beside our main drive gates, and when I was a little girl I used to believe that the bells were
ringing right in the tops of our lime trees. To this day the scent of lime blossom brings back to me the
church bells ringing, and the sight of the rooks going up into the air like smuts blown from a bonfire.

This was all that was left of the grounds laid out by the Cavalier Ashley. He, incidentally, must have
been the only Cavalier throughout England who did not melt the family silver down for Charles I. He
wouldn't, of course. I suspect that the only reason his family didn't officially turn Roundhead was because
of the clothes and the haircut. Anyway, they saved the Court twice over, because my father sent most of
the silver to Christie's in 1950, and we lived on it, and kept the place up after a fashion until I was seven
or eight years old. Then we moved into one wing of the house, and opened the rest up to the public. A
few years later, after my mother died, Daddy and I moved out altogether, to live in the gardener's
cottage, a pretty little place at the edge of the apple orchard, with a tiny garden fronting on the lake that
drained the moat. Our wing of the Court was put in the hands of our lawyer to let if he could. We had
been lucky in this, and our most recent lessee was an American businessman who, with his family, had
been in residence for the past half year. We had not met the Underhills ourselves, because, eight months
before the April night when my story starts, my father, who had a rheumatic heart, contracted a bad
bronchitis, and after he recovered from this, his doctor urged him to go away for a spell in a drier
climate. I was working in an antique shop in Ashbury at the time. We sold a bit more of the
silver, shut the cottage up, and went to Bad Tolz, a little spa town in Bavaria, pleasantly situated on the
River Isar. My father had often been there as a young man, visiting a friend of his, one Walther Gothard,