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

with the castle. The door was open. Inside, Calcifer was roaring, "Porthaven door! Someone's been
banging on it ever since you left."
9: In which Michael has trouble with a spell
It was the sea captain, come for his wind spell at last, and not at all pleased at having to wait. "If I miss
my tide, boy," he said to Michael, "I shall have a word with the Sorcerer about you. I don't like lazy
boys."
Michael, in Sophie's opinion, was far too polite to him, but she was feeling too dejected to interfere.
When the captain had gone, Michael went to the bench to frown over his spell again and Sophie sat
silently mending her stockings. She had only one pair and her knobby feet had worn huge holes in
them. Her gray dress by this time was frayed and dirty. She wondered whether she dared cut the
least-stained bits out of Howl's ruined blue-and-silver suit to make herself a new skirt with. But she did
not quite dare.
"Sophie," Michael said, looking up from his eleventh page of notes, "how many nieces have you?"
Sophie had been afraid Michael would start asking questions. "When you get to my age, my lad, " she
said, "you lose count. They all look so alike. Those two Letties could be twins, to my mind."
"Oh, no, not really," Michael said to her surprise. "The niece in Upper Folding isn't as pretty as my
Lettie." He tore up the eleventh page and made a twelfth. "I'm glad Howl didn't meet my Lettie," he
said. He began on his thirteenth page and tore that up too. "I wanted to laugh when that Mrs. Fairfax
said she knew who Howl was, didn't you?"
"No," said Sophie. It had made no difference to Lettie's feelings. She thought of Lettie's bright, adoring
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face under the apple blossom. "I suppose there's no chance," she asked hopelessly, "that Howl could be
properly in love this time?"
Calcifer snorted green sparks up the chimney.
"I was afraid you'd start thinking like that," Michael said. "But you'd be deceiving yourself, just like
Mrs. Fairfax."
"How do you know?" said Sophie.
Calcifer and Michael exchanged glances. "Did he forget to spend at least an hour in the bathroom this
morning?" Michael asked.
"He was in there two hours," said Calcifer, "putting spells on his face. Vain fool!"
"There you are, then," said Michael. "The day Howl forgets to do that will be the day I believe he's
really in love and not before."
Sophie thought of Howl on one knee in the orchard, posing to look as handsome as possible, and she
knew they were right. She thought of going to the bathroom and tipping all Howl's beauty spells down
the toilet. But she did not quite dare. Instead, she hobbled up and fetched the blue-and-silver suit, which
she spent the rest of the day cutting little blue triangles out of in order to make a patchwork sort of skirt.
Michael patted her shoulder kindly as he came to throw all seventeen pages of his notes onto Calcifer.
"Everyone gets over things in the end, you know," he said.
By this time it was clear Michael was having trouble with his spell. He gave up notes and scraped some
soot off the chimney. Calcifer craned round to watch him in a mystified way. Michael took a withered
root from one of the bags hanging on the beams and put it in the soot. Then, after much thought, he
turned the doorknob blue-down and vanished for twenty minutes into Porthaven. He came back with a
large, whorled seashell and put that with the root and the soot. After that he tore up pages and pages of
paper and put those in too. He put the lot on front of the human skull and stood blowing on it, so that
soot and bits of paper whirled all over the bench.
"What's he doing, do you think?" Calcifer asked Sophie.
Michael gave up blowing and started mashing everything, paper and all, with a pestle and mortar,
looking at the skull expectantly from time to time. Nothing happened, so he tried different ingredients
from bags and jars.