"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

empty.
Troy and Aunt May went on hauling. Hayley scraped rapidly and
painfully up over the tiles, and agonisingly across the spike, and
landed on the stool in the bath again, soaking wet and with her
dress torn completely open down the middle.
Someone shouted, “She did it!”
There were cheers from the crowded bathroom behind her.
Someone else said, “What was it? What is she holding?”
Blinking in the lantern light, Hayley turned herself around on
the stool. Cousins and aunts were packed into the tiny space, dimly
lit and staring, with Cousin Mercer ducking his wet head in
through the door at the back and Tollie squashed up against the
bath in front. Troy gently prised the torch out of Hayley’s right
hand and switched it off. Aunt May seized Hayley’s left wrist.
“Good heavens!” she said.
Hayley looked that way to find that her fingers were clamped
round a pork chop. It was large. It was raw, and whitish with
waterlogging, and sort of triangular, but there was no doubt what
it was. It was almost exactly the right size and shape to block a
drain.
“It’s a pork chop!” Aunt Alice exclaimed. “However did that get
into the gutter?”
Hayley looked at Tollie, down near her soaking shoes, and knew
at once. If ever she saw guilt and annoyance, it was in Tollie’s face
at that moment. No doubt Tollie had hoped to be the one who went
heroically out through the window. But when Aunt May said, “We
have crows and seagulls here all the time—one of them must have
dropped it,” Hayley did not contradict her. Even though Tollie
looked up at her with scorn and dislike, for being too feeble to tell,
Hayley did not say a word. She was shivering all over and her front
hurt.
Aunt Celia said, “Poor child ! She’s bleeding!”
Hayley was seized and carried away. The pork chop was taken
from her like a trophy and she was carried over marshy carpets,
first to somebody’s bedroom, where Harmony bathed her scraped
front and spread soothing ointment there, while cousins ran about
finding her some fur slippers and a large fluffy dressing gown.
Then, wrapped in these luxuries, she was carried downstairs again.
“I can walk!” Hayley protested.
“Yes, but you’re not going to—you’ve saved the day,” Aunt May
told her.
She ended up in the kitchen, which was still dry and beautifully
warm, where the aunts made quarts of cocoa. There Hayley sat in a
wooden armchair, surrounded by relatives who were all praising
her—except for Tollie, who sat in a corner and glowered at
her—sipping cocoa and gradually warming up. Some of the warmth
was from the unusual feeling of being the centre of everyone’s
admiration—apart from Tollie’s of course. When Troy appeared, in
a red dressing gown, he said, “Well done! You’re a brave one, aren’t
you!” And Aunt May, now wearing a musty-smelling fur coat,