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

still depend.
In the summer his students had commented, when they’d gone punting up the
Cherwell, on the double chain of heavy silver links he wore on either wrist;
he’d said they were a present from a superstitious aunt. No one had commented on
or seemed to connect the chains with the trail of ragged red scars that tracked
his throat from ear to collarbone and followed the veins up his arms.
The porter returned and casually slipped a piece of paper into his hand. Asher
gave him another half-crown, which he could ill spare with his fare back from
Paris to be thought of, but there were proprieties. He didn’t glance at the
paper, only pocketed it as he strolled along the platform to the final shouts of
“All aboard!”
Nor did he look for the smaller man, though he knew that Ernchester, like
himself, would be getting on at the last moment.
He knew it would not be possible to see him.
Eight years ago, toward the end of the South African war, James Asher had stayed
with a Boer family on the outskirts of Pretoria. Though they were, like many
Boers, sending information to the Germans, they were good people at heart,
believing that what they did helped their country’s cause—they had welcomed him
into their home under the impression he was a harmless professor of linguistics
at Heidelberg, in Africa to study Bantu pidgins.“We are not savages,” Mrs. van
der Platz had said. “Just because a man cannot produce documents for this thing
and that thing does not mean he is a spy.”
Of course, Asher had been a spy. And when Jan van der Platz—sixteen and Asher’s

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loyal shadow for weeks—had learned that Asher was not German but English and had
confronted him in tears, Asher had shot him to protect his contacts in the town,
the Kaffirs who slipped him information and would be horribly killed in
retaliation, and the British troops in the field who would have been massacred
by the commandos had he been forced to talk. Asher had returned to London,
resigned his position with the Foreign Office, and married, to her family’s
utter horror, the eighteen-year-old girl whose heart he never thought he had the
smallest hope of winning.
At the time, he thought he would never exert himself for King and Country again.
And here he was, bound for Paris with the rain pounding hollowly on the roof of
the second-class carriage and only a few pounds in his pocket, because he had
seen Ignace Karolyi, of the Austrian Kundschafts Stelle, talking to a man who
could not be permitted to take Austrian pay.
It was a possibility Asher had lived with, and feared, for a year, since first
he had learned who and what Charles Farren and those like him were.
Making his way down the corridor from car to car, Asher glimpsed Karolyi through
a window in first class, reading a newspaper in an otherwise empty compartment.
The Dorian Gray beauty of his features hadn’t changed in the thirteen years
since Asher had last seen him. Though Karolyi must be nearly forty now, not a
trace of silver showed in the smooth black hair or the pen trace of mustache on
the short upper lip; not a line marred the corners of those childishly wide-set
dark eyes.
“My blood leaps at the thought of obeying whatever command the Emperor may give