"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 2 - Traveling With the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

the absurd impression that by night, lanterns or no lanterns, streetlamps or no
street lamps, it would not be visible at all.
There was a smell about it, too, distinct and terrifying, but impossible to
place.
She stood for a long time at the foot of its steps.
He can’t hurt me, she told herself again, and wondered if that were true.
Her heart was beating hard, and she noted clinically the cold in her
extremities, in spite of fur lined leather gloves and two pairs of silk
stockings under her dainty, high heeled boots. Stouter shoes would have somewhat
alleviated the situation, always supposing stout shoes existed that did not make
their wearer look like a washerwoman—if they did, Lydia had never seen them—but
the panicky scald of adrenaline in her bloodstream informed her that the cold
she felt was probably shock.
It was one thing to speculate about the physiology of the house’s owner in the
safety of her own study at Oxford, or with James close by and armed.
It was evidently quite another to go up and knock on Don Simon Ysidro’s front
door.
Muffled by the fog, she heard the tock of hooves, the jingle of harness from
Upper Thames Street, and the groaning hoot of the motorbuses. Another hoot,
deeper, came from some ship on the river. The click of her heels on the dirty
steps was the strike of a hammer, and her petticoat’s rustle the rasp of a saw.
For all the house’s age, the lock on the door was relatively new, a heavy
American pin lock oddly masked behind what must have been the original lock
plate of Elizabeth’s time. It yielded readily enough to the skeleton keys she’d
found at the back of her husband’s handkerchief drawer. Her hands shook a little
as she then operated the picklocks in the fashion he’d taught her, partly from
the sheer fear of what she was doing, and partly because, law abiding and
essentially orderly, she expected a member of the Metropolitan Police to appear
behind her crying, ‘Ere, now, wotcher at?
Absurd on the face of it, she thought. It was patently obvious that no
representative of the law had set foot in this square in years.
She pushed her thick lensed spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her
nose—Not only breakin‘ the law, roared the imaginary policeman, but ugly and
four-eyed to boot!—slipped the picklocks and skeleton keys back into her
handbag, and stepped through the door.
It wouldn’t be full dark until five. She was perfectly safe.
The hall itself was much darker than she had expected, with the wide oak doors
on either side closed. Trimmed with a carved balustrade, generous steps ascended
carpetless to blindness above. The passage beside them to the rear of the house
was an open grave.
There was, of course, no lamp.
Mildly berating herself for not having foreseen that contingency—of course there
wouldn’t be a lamp!—Lydia pushed open one of the side doors to admit a rinsed

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and cindery light. It showed her a key on the hall table, and turning, she
closed the front door. For a time she stood undecided, debating whether to lock