"Factotum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornish D M)

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THE HOUSE OF THE BRANDEN ROSE

cabinet pictures among those of disposable means and dark tastes there is a fashion for depictions of the foulest violence and horror, showing the spoiling of monsters by despicable acts. There is a vigorous clandestine trade in such images, and those who produce them are greatly esteemed by graphnolagnian connoisseurs and make good money from the trade. Many struggling fabulists have been forced by poverty to try their hand at such depravity, and though never signing such pieces, some who have gone on to more legitimate fame have an anonymous catalog of cabinet pictures ready to bring them to ruin. THE residence of Europe, the Branden Rose, fulgar teratologist and the Duchess-in-waiting of Naimes, was situated in the very midst of the great city of Brandenbrass. Cloche Arde it was called, its address-as Rossamund heard given to the takeny driver-Footling Inch, the Harrow Road, in the suburb of Ilex Mile. A pilot boat had brought the four travelers to the pier at the Fine Lady's Steps, where they had disembarked and passed, as they must by law, through the crowded files of the Arrivals and Admissions House. Europe's fame and station affording them a smoother passage among the long lines of newcomers and the frenzy of clerical rigor, they were soon in a hired takeny-coach progressing down long streets alive with a bustling mass Rossamund could scarce comprehend. It was a fair trot before they entered quiet, opulent suburbs where, set in their parklike gardens, each residence seemed like a thin vertical palace.

"Home once more…," Europe declared softly, peering from the carriage's window as they crossed carefully now over a steep bridge that leaped the gap of a broad drain known as the Midwetter to a small artificial island.

Craning to see, leaning out from the glassless carriage window, Rossamund beheld the grandest house yet towering from behind an iron-spined wall of darkened stone. Founded on the very rock of an island, it stood isolated amid the graceful terraces and their well-groomed gardens, rising as high as all the noble roofs about. Six lofty stories of grim, dusken granite and stately staring windows; a solitary spire set against the flat, late-morning gray. However grand a structure it might be, Rossamund thought it somehow strange to consider the great adventuring Branden Rose as possessing something so domestic as a home.

The lentum turned abruptly through high wrought gates already opened in answer to the message Europe had sent ahead by scopp-a fast-running messenger child-of her arrival. In the gaunt space beyond lined with scant trees, the carriageway of white gravel quickly terminated in a large oval turnabout with a single thin cypress in its midst, a pivot about which carriages could circle. Arranged in near-martial order upon the front steps of the house like lighters and auxiliaries at a pageant-of-arms, a small quarto of senior staff was already waiting, turned out in black frock coats and stomacher-skirts with flashes or facings of red and magenta. One slender person was conspicuous among them in kitchen-white. Rossamund sat back bashfully, suddenly nervous.