"Robin Hobb - The Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

The Inheritance
Robin Hobb




IT WAS IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S jewel box. I found it after she died.
Perhaps jewel box is too fine a name to give to the plain wooden cask
that held so little. There was a silver ring with the stone long prised
from the setting, sold to pay family debts no doubt. I wondered why she
had not sold it whole. There were two necklaces, one of garnets and
another of polished jasper. At the bottom, wrapped in layer upon layer
of linen, was the pendant.
It was a lovely carving of a woman’s face. She looked aristocratic,
yet merry, and I recognized in her features some of my own. I wondered
which of my female ancestors she was, and why someone had taken
such care to make so delicate a carving from such an ugly piece of
wood. It was grey and checked with age, and weighed unnaturally heavy
in my hand as I examined it. The chain it was fixed to was fine silver,
however. I thought it might be worn alone if the pendant could be
removed. I heard a footstep in the hall outside her bedroom, and hastily
slipped the chain about my neck. The cameo hung heavy between my
breasts, concealed by my blouse.
My cousin Tetlia stood suddenly in the doorway. ‘What do you
have there?’ she demanded.




1
 ‘Nothing,’ I told her, and hastily set the box back on
Grandmother’s chest.
She swept into the room and snatched it up, opened it and
dumped the necklaces into her hand. ‘Nice,’ she said, holding up the
jasper one. My heart sank, for I had liked it best of the three. ‘I’m eldest
of the grand-daughters,’ she pointed out smugly, and slipped it over her
head. She weighed the garnets in her hand. ‘And my sister Coreth
comes next. This is for her.’ Her lips twisted in a smile as she tossed me
the despoiled ring. ‘For you, Cerise. Not much of an inheritance, but
she did feed and clothe you for the last two years, and kept you in a
house that long ago should have come to my father. That is more than
she ever did for my sister and me.’
‘I lived here with her. I looked after her. When her hands twisted
so that she couldn’t use them anymore, I bathed her and dressed her
and fed her...’ My hidden anger pushed the words stiffly out.
Tetlia waved my words away contemptuously. ‘And we all warned
you that you’d get nothing for it. She burned through her own family
fortune when she was a girl, Cerise. Everyone knows that if my
grandfather had not married her, she’d have starved in the streets. And
my father has been good enough to let her live out her life in a house