"Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci 5 - Conrad's Fate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

2004042462
First Edition Greenwillow Books


For Stella




One

When I was small, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some
kind of fairy-tale castle. I could see it from my bedroom window,
high in the mountains above Stallchester, flashing with glass and
gold when the sun struck it. When I got to the place at last, it
wasn’t exactly like a fairy tale.
Stallchester, where we had our shop, is quite high in the
mountains, too. There are a lot of mountains here in Series Seven,
and Stallchester is in the English Alps. Most people thought this
was the reason why you could only receive television at one end of
the town, but my uncle told me it was Stallery doing it.
“It’s the protections they put round the place to stop anyone
investigating them,” he said. “The magic blanks out the signal.”
My Uncle Alfred was a magician in his spare time, so he knew
this sort of thing. Most of the time he made a living for us all by
keeping the bookshop at the cathedral end of town. He was a
skinny, worrity little man with a bald patch under his curls, and he
was my mother’s half brother. It always seemed a great burden to
him, having to look after me and my mother and my sister, Anthea.
He rushed about muttering, “And how do I find the money , Conrad,
with the book trade so slow!”
The bookshop was in our name, too—it said grant and tesdinic in
faded gold letters over the bow windows and the dark green
door—but Uncle Alfred explained that it belonged to him now. He
and my father had started the shop together. Then, just after I was
born and a little before he died, my father had needed a lot of
money suddenly, Uncle Alfred told me, and he sold his half of the
bookshop to Uncle Alfred. Then my father died, and Uncle Alfred
had to support us.
“And so he should do,” my mother said in her vague way. “We’re
the only family he’s got.”
My sister, Anthea, said she wanted to know what my father had
needed the money for, but she never could find out. Uncle Alfred
said he didn’t know.
“And you never get any sense out of Mother,” Anthea said to me.
“She just says things like ‘Life is always a lottery’ and ‘Your father
was usually hard up’—so all I can think is that it must have been
gambling debts. The casino’s only just up the road, after all.”
I rather liked the idea of my father gambling half a bookshop
away. I used to like taking risks myself. When I was eight, I