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

footsteps on the bare wooden stairs.

My bedroom door opening softly. My mother at my bedside, arms tight
round me. A hand coming gently to stifle my questions.

"It's all right, love. All right. Mummy's going away for a bit,
that's all. Be a good girl now, won't you?"

"Where're you going?"

"Just away. Not far."

"Can't I come too?"

"No, baby, no. But I'll come home soon, see if I don't, and then old
Sourpuss'll get her cards, and we'll all be happy again." A giggle,
then a swift kiss, which let me know that there were tears on her
cheeks.

"I've got to go. Mind your books at school now, Kathy. You're a
bright girl, and you'll go a long way. See it's a better way than me.
Go to sleep now, lovey, and don't forget your mum." A quick hug and
another kiss.

"Good night, baby."

I stood at the window and watched her go down the front path. The
moonlight was strong enough for me to see that she had Granddad's
battered old Gladstone bag in one hand, and in the other a bulging bass
carrier of the sort that the family used for game and salmon.

I never saw her again. She had gone with the gipsies, Gran said. Every
year they came to the same lane near our house for a few nights, and
they were there on the night she left. But by morning the camp had
vanished without trace, and there had been no way of getting in touch
with her. From time to time she wrote, usually with the cards she sent
for Christmas and for Gran's and my birthdays. Some two years later
she sent news that she was going to be married ("so tell the old cat")
and was off to Ireland where "Jamie" had been offered a job. She would
write from there and tell us all about it. But she never did. She had
been killed in a bus crash, she and her Jamie, somewhere in the west of
Ireland. That was all Gran told me; it was Aunt Betsy, inevitably, who
gave me the details. The couple had been the only passengers in the
small country bus, when, in the dark, it ran into a stray bullock loose
on the road, and plunged down a bank and burst into flames. The
driver, "a good man, though no doubt he was a Catholic", had been
thrown clear, but had been badly burned himself in trying to free the
two passengers.

"And it was to be hoped" (this was Aunt Betsy again) "that they were