"Dark Rising 4 - The Grey King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

A clatter and a shadow came in the doorway; it was Rhys, dishevelled, pulling off a sweater. 'Morning, Will. Have you left us some breakfast?'

'You're late,' Will said cheekily.

'Late, is it?' Rhys glared at him in mock fury. 'Just hear him - and us out since six with only an old cup of tea inside. Tomorrow morning, John, we will pull this young monkey out of bed and take him with us.'

Behind him a deep voice chuckled. Will's attention was caught by a face he had not seen before.

'Will, this is John Rowlands. The best man with sheep in Wales.'

'And with the harp, too,' Aunt Jen said.

It was a lean face, with cheekbones carved high in it, and many lines everywhere, creased upward now round the eyes by smiling. Dark eyes, brown as coffee; thinning dark hair, streaked with grey at the sides; the well-shaped, modelled mouth of the Celt. For a moment Will stared, fascinated; there was a curious indefinable strength in this John Rowlands, even though he was not at all a big man.

'Croeso, Will,' said John Rowlands. 'Welcome to Clwyd. I heard about you from your sister, last spring.'

'Good heavens,' said Will in unthinking astonishment, and everyone laughed.

'Nothing bad,' Rowlands said, smiling. 'How is Mary?'

'She's fine,' Will said. 'She said she had a marvellous time here, last Easter. I was away too, then. In Cornwall.'

He fell silent for a moment, his face suddenly abstracted and blank; John Rowlands looked at him swiftly, then sat down at the table where Rhys was already poised over bacon and eggs. Will's uncle came in, carrying a batch of papers.

'Cwpanaid o de, cariad?' said Aunt Jen, when she saw him.

'Diolch yn fawr,' said David Evans, taking the cup of tea she held out to him. 'And then I must be off to Tywyn. You want to come, Will?'

'Yes, please.'

'We may be a couple of hours.' The sound of his words was very precise always; he was a small, neatly-made man, sharp-featured, but with an unexpectedly vague, reflective look sometimes in his dark eyes. 'I have to go to the bank, and to see Llew Thomas, and there will be the new tyre for the Land-Rover. The car that jumped up in the air and got itself a puncture.'

Rhys, with his mouth full, made a strangled noise of protest. 'Now, Da,' he said, swallowing. 'I know how it sounded, but really I am not mad, there was nothing that could have made her swerve over to the side like that and hit the rock. Unless the steering rod is going.'

'There is nothing wrong with the steering of that car,' David Evans said.

'Well, then!' Rhys was all elbows and indignation. 'I tell you she just lurched over for no reason at all. Ask Will.'

'It's true,' Will said. "The car did just sort of jump sideways and hit that rock. I don't see what could have made it jump, unless it had run over a loose stone in the road- but that would have had to be a pretty big stone. And there was no sign of one anywhere.'

'Great allies, you two, already, I can see,' said his uncle. He drained his teacup, gazing at them over the top; Will was not sure whether or not he was laughing at them. 'Well, well, I will have the steering checked anyway. John, Rhys, now that extra fencing for the fridd -'

They slid into Welsh, unthinking. It did not bother Will. He was occupied in trying to scorn away a small voice at the back of his mind, an irrational small voice with an irrational suggestion. 'If they want to know what made the car jump,' this part of his mind was whispering at him, 'why don't they ask Caradog Prichard?'

David Evans dropped Will at a small newsagent's shop, where he could buy postcards, and chugged off to leave the Land-Rover at a garage. Will bought a card showing a sinister dark lake surrounded by very Welsh-looking mountains, wrote on it 'I GOT HERE! Everyone sends their love,' and sent it off to his mother from the Post Office, a solemn and unmistakable red brick building on a comer of Tywyn High Street. Then he looked about him, wondering where to go next.

Choosing at random, hoping to see the sea, he turned right up. the narrow curving High Street, Before long he found that there would be no sea this way: nor anything but shops, houses, a cinema with an imposing Victorian front grandly labelled ASSEMBLY ROOMS, and the slate-roofed lychgate of a church.

Will liked investigating churches; before his illness had overtaken him, he and two friends from school had been cycling all round the Thames Valley to make brass rubbings. He turned into the little churchyard, to see if there might be any brasses here.