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

thought despairingly, despite her twenty-six years. And despite everything she
could do with rice powder, kohl, and the tiny amount of rouge that were all a
properly brought up lady could wear, her face was still all nose and spectacles.
Four-eyes, they’d called her, all her childhood and adolescence—when it wasn’t
skinnybones or bookworm—and if her life didn’t, quite literally, depend on how
quickly she could see danger in this place, she’d never have worn her eyeglasses
outside her rented Bloomsbury rooms.
Her life, and James’ as well.
She let the lace fall, touched again the silver around her neck and the fat,
doubled and trebled links of it that circled her wrists under cuffs and gloves.
Why a mirror? Something one wouldn’t expect to find here. Did that mean the
stories were wrong?
She picked up the lamp again, hoping the information she’d learned on the
subject was even partially correct. It was a disgrace, really, that over the
years more scientific data had not been collected. She would definitely have to
write an article for the Journal of Medical Pathology—or perhaps for one of
James’ folkloric publications.
If she lived, she thought, and panic heated in her veins again. If she lived.
What if she were doing this wrong?
She found another floor of high-ceilinged rooms, plus attics, all of them filled
with either books or journals. Her own experience with the proliferative
propensities of back issues of Lancet and its competitors—British, European, and
American—gave her a lively sense of sympathy, and an envious appreciation for so
much shelf space almost, for the moment, eased her fear. Lancet went back to
1823, and she had little doubt the first issue could be found here somewhere.
One small chamber upstairs contained clothing, expensive and relatively new.
From the first, all her instincts told her she must look down, not up, for what
she sought.
The kitchen and scullery were on the ground floor, at the back of the house,
down that caliginous throat of passageway. Stairs corkscrewed farther down. The
scullery contained a modern icebox. Lydia opened it and found a cake of ice
about two days old, a bottle of cream, and a small quantity of knacker’s meat
done up in paper. Four or five dishes—including a Louis XV Sevres saucer—lay on
the floor in a corner. For the first time, Lydia smiled.
Boothole, wine cellar, vegetable pantry belowstairs, and many smaller rooms,
low-ceilinged and smelling of earth and great age. The lamp flung her shadow
waveringly over cruck-work beams, discolored plaster, stonework that spoke of
some older building on this site. As in searching for the house itself—which had

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fallen out of all mention in the Public Records Office after the Fire of
1666—Lydia passed three or four times through the room that contained the trap
to the subcellar. It was only when, failing to see any such ingress as she knew
must exist, she studied the composition of the walls themselves that she
narrowed the possibilities to the little storeroom whose damp stone wall bore
signs of having once supported a stairway.
Outside, the day must be slowly losing its grip on life. Trying to keep her
hands from shaking, with cold now as well as fear, she pulled off her gloves and