"Mary Stewart - Rose cottage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

Brandons were locally known) went north to their newly purchased
Scottish estate, he went with them, to help with the recovery and
re-making of the long neglected garden. There he met and fell in love
with Mary Campbell, the kitchen-maid. They were married the following
spring, in Todhall. A year later their daughter was born. In an
uncharacteristically poetic moment they called her Lilias, a name taken
from one of the portraits of long-dead Brandons that hung at the Hall.
Lilias was my mother. I barely remembered her, but the memory was all
delightful. Deliciously pretty, full of joyous spirits and invariably
kind, she danced her way up from scullery-maid to the heights of
house-maiding at the Hall with a light heart and, as was found to my
cost, what her eighteenth-century namesake would have called a light
skirt.

I had never been told who my father was. My mother was of course
banished from service at the Hall when she was found to be pregnant.
Her parents, defying the customs of the time, took her in, and cared
lovingly for her and, in due time, for her baby, while the Brandons,
without a word on the subject, left their gardener and their cook to
manage their own affairs.

Which showed their good sense, since cooks as good as my grandmother
were even in those days hard to come by.

When I was five years old, my grandfather died.

I could barely remember him; a comfortable, earth smelling giant who
when my mother was elsewhere used to take me up to the walled garden
and let me play "helping Granddad," he called it in the back premises
behind the glasshouses. Soon after his death Gran's elder sister came
from Scotland "to keep her company". This was Aunt Betsy, and with her
came change.

Aunt Betsy was religious. Her religion, which kept her very strictly
in the paths of righteousness, also obliged her to see 'that other
people trod the same thorny path. Things which had never been said
before, were said now, and frequently. (So much I did hear, later,
from my grandmother.) Rose Cottage was no longer a place of kindness,
but of Godliness with a capital G. My mother stood it for a year, then
one night, soon after my sixth birthday, she left.
The room I shared with her was at the front of the cottage, over the
kitchen, which was our main living-room. I was wakened from sleep by
raised voices.

Gran's, urgent with something that could have been despair or anger. My
mother's, unwontedly shrill and tearful. Aunt Betsy's, high, hard, and
assured. I slid down under the bedclothes and covered my ears.

A door slammed. I pushed the blankets back and sat up. Light