"Freda Warrington - The Raven Bound" - читать интересную книгу автора (Warrington Freda)

"Why don't you leave?" I speak softly and I am paying more attention to the
movement of his tender throat than to his words. "Go to Montmartre, be an artist.
Prove the old man wrong."
"It's not that easy. There's this girl, MegтАж"
"Take her with you."
"That's just it. I can't. She's the gardener's daughter. My father employs her as a
maid. D'you see? Not content with being a failure at everything else, I go and fall in
love with a common servant. So now the old man tells me that if I don't give her up
and toe the line, he'll disinherit me! And Meg's refusing to see me. Says she's afraid
of my father. Damn him!"
I have not been a vampire so very long. I still recall how hopeless such dilemmas
seem to humans. "That's terrible."
"Vindictive old swine! I'll lose her and I'll be penniless! He can't do this to me!"
"What will you do about it, Rupert?"
He glares down into his whisky. How alluring he looks in his wretchedness. "I
wish the old bastard would die tomorrow. That would solve all my problems. I'd like
to kill him!"
"Will you?"
He sighs. "If only I had the guts! But I haven't."
So I smile. I rest my hand on his, and he is too numb with whisky to feel the
coldness of my fingertips. I have thought of something more interesting to do than
just take him outside and drain him.
"I'll do it for you."
"What?" His eyes grow huge.
I should explain, I am poor. It seems so cheap to go through the pockets of my
victims like a petty thief. I do it anyway, but it yields little reward. The wealth I crave,
in order to live in the style a vampire deserves, is harder to come by.
 "Give me a share of your inheritance and I'll kill him for you. No one will ever link
the crime to you. Natural causes, they'll say."
His breathing quickens. His hands shake. Does he know what I am? Yes and no.
Look into our eyes and a veil lifts in your mind and you step into a dream where
anything is possible. "My God," he says, over and over. "My God." And at last,
with a wild light in his eyes, "Yes. Quickly, Antoine, before he has a chance to
change his will. Do it!"


I am standing in the garden, looking up at the house.
It's an impressive pile, but ugly. Grey-brown stone, stained and pitted by the
weather, squatting in a large, bleak estate. A sweep of gravel leads to a crumbling
portico. No flowerbeds to soften the walls, only prickly shrubs. It's tidy enough but
no love, no imagination and no money have been lavished upon it for many a cold
year.
In the autumn twilight I traverse the lawns to the rear of the house. The gardens,
too, are austere and formal, with clipped hedges standing like soldiers on flat
stretches of grass. But there are chestnut and elm and beech trees to add sombre
grandeur to the landscape. Brown leaves are scattered on the ground. The gardener
has raked them into piles and I smell that English autumn scent of bonfires and wet
grass.
Somewhere behind the windows of the house sits the father, the rat in his lair,
Daniel Wyndham-Hayes.