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

that someone in third class was going to die tonight.
He touched a passing porter on the arm. “Would you be so kind as to check the
baggage car and tell me if there’s a box or trunk, five feet long or over? Could
be a coffin, but it’s probably trunk.”
The man squinted at the half-crown in Asher’s hand, then sharp brown eyes went
to Asher’s face. “C’n tell you that right low, sir.” Asher automatically
identified the cropped ou and glottal stop i of the Liverpool Irish, and
wondered at his own capacity for pursuing philological points when his life was
in danger. The man touched his cap. “Near killed old Joe ‘eavin’ the thing in,
awkward an‘ all.”
“Heavy?” If it was heavy, it was the wrong trunk.
“ ‘Eavy enough, I say, but not loaded like some. No more’n seventy pound all
told.”
“Could you get me the address from the label? A matter of information,” he added
as the brown eyes narrowed suspiciously, “to the man’s wife.”
“Runnin‘ out on ’er, is ‘e? Bleedin’ sod.”
Asher made a business of checking his watch against the station clock at the end
of the platform, conscious all the while of the men and women getting on the
train, of the thinning of the crowd that made him every second more visible,
every second closer to a knife-blade death. Steam chuffed from the engine and a
fat man in countrified tweeds, coat flapping like a cloak in his wake, hared
along the platform and scrambled into first class, pursued by a thin and harried
valet heavily laden with hatboxes and train cases.
He’d have to telegraph Lydia from Paris, thought Asher. It brought a stab of
regret—she’d sit up tonight waiting for him until she fell asleep surrounded by
tea things, lace and medical journals, in front of the bedroom fire, beautiful

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as a scholarly sylph. For two nights he had looked forward to lying again at her
side. Foul as the weather had been, she’d probably simply assume that the train
had been held up. Not a worrier, Lydia.
Still the porter hadn’t come back.
He tried to remember who the head of the Pans section was these days.
And, dear God, what was he going to tell them about Charles Farren, onetime Earl
of Ernchester?
His hand moved, almost unconsciously, to his collar, to feel the reassuring
thickness of the silver chain he wore beneath. It was not a usual ornament, for
a man and a Protestant. He hadn’t thought about it much, except that for a year
now he had not dared remove it. It had slipped into place like those other
habits he’d acquired “abroad,” as they said in the Department; habits like
memorizing the layout of any place he stayed so that he could move through it in
the dark, or noting faces in case he saw them again in another context, or
carrying a knife in his right boot. The other dons at New College, immersed in
their specialties and their academic bunfights, never noticed that the
self-effacing Lecturer in Etymology, Philology, and Folklore could identify even
their servants and knew every back way out of every college in that green and
misty town.
These were matters upon which his life had depended at one time—and might now