"Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

Howl laughed. "No. Just simple spiders," he said and went dreamily away upstairs.
Michael sighed. He went into the broom cupboard and hunted until he found an old folding bed, a straw
mattress, and some rugs, which he put into the arched space under the stairs. "You'd better sleep here
tonight," he told Sophie.
"Does that mean Howl's going to let me stay?" Sophie asked.
"I don't know!" Michael said irritably. "Howl never commits himself to anything. I was here six months
before he seemed to notice I was living here and made me his apprentice. I just thought I bed would be
better than the chair."
"Then thank you very much," Sophie said gratefully. The bed was indeed more comfortable than a chair
and when Calcifer complained he was hungry in the night, it was an easy matter for Sophie to creak her
way out and give him another log.
In the days that followed, Sophie cleaned her way remorselessly through the castle. She really enjoyed
herself. Telling herself she was looking for clues, she washed the window, she cleaned out the oozing
sink, and she made Michael clear everything off the workbench and the shelves so that she could scrub
them. She had everything out of the cupboards and down from the beams and cleaned those too. The
human skull, she fancied, began to look as long suffering as Michael. It had been moved so often. Then
she tacked an old sheet to the beams nearest the fireplace and forced Calcifer to bend his head down
while she swept the chimney. Calcifer hated that. He crackled with mean laughter when Sophie
discovered that soot had got all over the room and she had to clean it all again. That was Sophie's
trouble. She was remorseless, but she lacked method. But there was a method to her remorselessness:
she calculated that she could not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Howl's
hidden hoard of girls' souls, or chewed up hearts-or else something that explained Calcifer's contract.
Up the chimney, guarded by Calcifer, had struck her as a good hiding place. But there was nothing there
but quantities of soot, which Sophie stored in bags in the yard. The yard was high on her list of hiding
places.
Every time Howl came in, Michael and Calcifer complained loudly about Sophie. But Howl did not
seem to attend. Not did he seem to notice the cleanliness. And nor did he notice that the food closet
became very well stocked with cakes and jam and the occasional lettuce.
For, as Michael had prophesied, word had gone round Porthaven. People came to the door to look at
Sophie. They called her Mrs. Witch in Porthaven and Madam Sorceress in Kingsbury. Though the
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people who came to the Kingsbury door were better dressed than those in Porthaven, no one in either
place liked to call on someone so powerful without an excuse. So Sophie was always having to pause in
her work to nod and smile and take in a gift, or to get Michael to put up a quick spell for someone.
Some of the gifts were nice things-pictures, strings of shells, and useful aprons. Sophie used the aprons
daily and hung the shells and pictures round her cubbyhole under the stairs, which soon began to look
very homelike indeed.
Sophie knew she would miss this when Howl turned her out. She became more and more afraid that he
would. She knew he could not go on ignoring her forever.
She cleaned the bathroom next. That took her days, because Howl spent so long in it every day before
he went out. As soon as he went, leaving it full of steam and scented spells, Sophie moved in. "Now
we'll see about that contract!" she muttered at the bath, but her main target was of course the shelf of
packets, jars, and tubes. She took every one of them down, on the pretext of scrubbing the shelf, and
spent most of the day carefully going through them to see if the ones labeled SKIN, EYES, and HAIR
were in fact pieces of girl. As far as she could tell, they were all just creams and powders and paint. If
they had once been girls, then Sophie thought Howl had used the tube FOR DECAY on them and rotted
them down the washbasin too thoroughly to recall. But she hoped they were only cosmetics in the
packets.
She put the things back on the shelf and scrubbed. That night, as she sat aching in the chair, Calcifer