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

chemistry texts, Carlyle, Gibbon, de Sade, Balzac, cheap modern reprints of
Aeschylus and Plato, Galsworthy, Wilde, Shaw. In front of the bone clean
fireplace, a massive oak chest, strapped with leather and the only furniture in
the room, held a cheap American oil lamp of clear glass and steel, the trimmed
wick in about half a reservoir of oil. Lydia produced a match from her pocket,
lit the lamp, and by its uncertain light read the titles of the several new
volumes, half unwrapped from their parcel paper, which lay beside it.
A French mathematics text. A German physics book by a man named Einstein. The
Wind in the Willows.
How much time left?
With a certain amount of difficulty Lydia produced from beneath her coat a
curious device—a simple brass bug sprayer of the pump variety, its nozzle
carefully capped with a pinch of sticking plaster—and a shoulder sling
manufactured from a couple of scarves in last year’s colors. She removed the
cap, reslung the sprayer on the outside of her coat and, picking up the lamp,
moved off through the house.
The first-floor room contained more books. The rear chamber, book lined also,
held furniture as well. A heavy table, strewn with mathematics texts, abaci,
astrolabes, armillary spheres, a German Brunsviga tabulation machine, and what
Lydia recognized dimly as an old set of ivory calculating bones. At the far end
of the room loomed a machine the size of an upright piano, sinister with glass,
metal, and ranks of what looked like clock faces, whose use Lydia could not
begin to guess. Near it stood a blackwood cabinet desk, German and ruinously
old, carved thick with gods and trees, among which peeped the tarnished brass
locks to concealed recesses and drawers.
A wing chair of purple velvet, very worn and rubbed, stood before a fireplace
whose blue and yellow tiles were smoked almost to obscurity, its arms covered
with cat hair, an American newspaper lying on its seat. Movement caught her eye
and made her gasp, but it was only her own reflection in a yellowed mirror, the
glass nearly covered by a great shawl of eighteenth-century black point lace
that hung over its divided pane.
Lydia set the lamp down and lifted the shawl aside. Thin and rather fragile
looking, her reflection gazed back at her: flat-chested and schoolgirlish, she
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.