"Edward Whittemore - The Jerusalem Quartet 01 - Sinai Tapestry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Whittemore Edward)

Duke of Dorset.

For it seemed that destiny had found a resting place among the Strongbows. At one time, thought to be
about 1170, one of their line had helped subdue eastern Ireland and been given a title because of it. Since
then the family had lapsed into patterns. Confusion had been lost or forgotten. Instead there was
repetition and order.

The oldest son in each generation always married on the day he assumed his majority and became the
new lord. His wife matched him in wealth and shared his concern for flowers. Children appeared at
regular intervals until five or six had been born, more or less equally divided between males and females.
By that time the duke and his duchess were thirty, or nearly thirty, and both abruptly died by accident.

The accidents were routinely silly. After drinking an excess of mead late at night they might fall asleep and
fall into the fireplace. Or they might doze off in a trout stream and drown in a foot of water.

Following the flight of a butterfly after breakfast, they would wander off a parapet. Or they would
absentmindedly swallow a mutton joint whole, causing suffocation. Or a mild sexual diversion such as
dressing up in medieval armor would lead to fatal hemorrhaging in the pelvic region.

In any case both husband and wife died at the same time, at about the age of thirty, and it was then the
duty of the deceased lord's younger brothers and sisters to return to the manor to rear their five or six
nieces and nephews.

It was a family custom that these younger brothers and sisters never married, but being close in age they
had no difficulty resettling in the manor of their childhood and enjoying one another's company. At the
beginning of the Christmas season they gathered together in the large banquet hall for twelve days of
festivities that had come to be called the family game, a traditional sport in which the hall was cleared of
furniture and opposing teams were formed with the goal of running a satin pillow from one end of the hall
to the other.

During the first hour of play each day intensive grappling was permitted. But thereafter a firm grip on the
genitals of an opposing player was sufficient to stop the advance of the pillow and bring on a new
scrimmage for its possession.

Under these conditions, despite their wealth and genuine concern for flowers, it was unlikely the Dukes of
Dorset would ever have distinguished themselves in the world even if they had lived beyond the age of
thirty, and in fact none ever did.

From the end of the twelfth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, successive Plantagenet
Strongbows grew up with a sound knowledge of roses and a vague memory of their parents, learned the
family game by watching their aunts and uncles, passed into manhood and sired an heir and a new brood
of aunts and uncles before succumbing to another silly accident, thereby perpetuating a random family
scheme which was their sole contribution to God and man and England.

Until in 1819, the year of Queen Victoria's birth, a different sort of infant was born in the Dorset manor,
different either because of a mutation in genes or because of the terrible disease he suffered at the age of
eleven. In any case this slight boy would one day end six hundred and fifty years of placid Strongbow
routine by becoming the most awesome explorer his country ever produced.

And coincidently the most scandalous scholar of his era. For whereas other famous theoreticians of the