"Suzette Haden Elgin - Ozark 1 - Twelve Fair Kingdoms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

Twelve Fair Kingdoms - [Ozark 01] - Suzette Haden Elgin


it doesn’t happen but once every five hundred years—you tend to
pay it considerable attention. One of our freighters had had engine
trouble off the coast of Oklahomah, and that was interfering with
our supply deliveries. I was trying to run a sizable Castle with a
staff that bordered, that spring, on the mediocre, and trying to find
fit replacements before the big to-do. And there were three Grannys
taken to their beds in my kingdom, afflicted with what they claimed
was epizootics and what I knew was congenital cantankerousness,
and that was disrupting the regular conduct of everyday affairs more
than was convenient.
So… faced with a lot of little crises and one on the way to being a
big one, what did I do?
Well, I went to some meetings. I went to half a dozen. I fussed at
the Castle staff, and I managed to get me in an Economist who
showed some promise of being able to make the rest of them shape
up. I hired a new Fiddler, and I bought a whole team of speckledy
Mules that I’d had my eye on for a while. I visited the “ailing”
Grannys, with a box of hard candy for each, and paid them
elaborate compliments that they saw right through but enjoyed just
the same. And I went to church.
I was in church the morning that Terrence Merryweather McDaniels
the 6th, firstborn son of Vine of Motley and Halliday Joseph
McDaniels the 14th, was kidnapped, right in broad daylight… when
the man came through the churchdoor on a scruffy rented Mule,
right in the middle of a Solemn Service—right in the middle, mind
you, of a prayer!—and rode that Mule straight down the aisle. He
snatched Terrence Merryweather in his sleeping basket from

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Twelve Fair Kingdoms - [Ozark 01] - Suzette Haden Elgin


between his parents, and he flew right up over the Reverend’s head
and out through the only stained glass window he could count on to
iris—Mule, basket, blankets, baby, and all, before any of us could
do more than gape. February the 21st, that was; I was there, and it
was that humiliating, I’m not likely to forget it. The McDaniels
were guests of Castle Brightwater, and under our protection, and for
sure should of been safe in our church. And now here was their
baby kidnapped!
Although it is possible that kidnapping may not be precisely the
word in this particular instance. You have a kidnapping, generally
there’s somebody missing, and a ransom note, and whatnot. In this
case, the Reverend shouted an AAAAmen! and we all rushed out
the churchdoor; and there, hanging from the highest of the three
cedar trees in the churchyard in a life-support bubble, was Terrence
Merryweather McDaniels the 6th, sucking on his toe to show how