"Mary Stewart - This Rough Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

"A local boy and girl: they're twins."

"Good heavens. Papa must be a literary gent?"

Phyllida smiled. "You could say so."

Something in her expression roused my curiosity, just as something else told me she had meant to; so
I—who can be every bit as provoking as Phyllida when I try—said merely, "Well, in that case hadn't you
better have a change? How about Caliban for your unborn young? It fits like a glove."

"Why?" she demanded indignantly.

" 'This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child,' " I quoted. "Is there some more coffee?"

"Of course. Here. Oh, my goodness, it's nice to have you here, Lucy! I suppose I oughtn't to call it luck
that you were free to come just now, but I'm awfully glad you could. This is heaven after Rome."

"And paradise after London. I feel different already. When I think where I was this time yesterday… and
when I think about the rain…"

I shuddered, and drank my coffee, leaning back in my chair to gaze out across pine tops furry with gold
towards the sparkling sea, and surrendering myself to the dreamlike feeling that marks the start of a
holiday in a place like this when one is tired and has been transported overnight from the April chill of
England to the sunlight of a magic island in the Ionian Sea.

Perhaps I should explain (for those who are not so lucky as I) that Corfu is an island off the west coast of
Greece. It is long and sickle-shaped, and lies along the curve of the coast; at its nearest, in the north, it is
barely two miles off the Albanian mainland, but from the town of Corfu, which is about halfway down the
curve of the sickle, the coast of Greece is about seven or eight miles distant. At its northern end the island
is broad and mountainous, tailing off through rich valleys and ever decreasing hills into the long, flat
scorpion's tail of the south from which some think that Corfu, or Kerkyra, get' its name.

My sister's house lies some twelve miles north of Corfu town, where the coast begins its curve towards
the mainland, and where the foothills of Mount Pantokrator provide shelter for the rich little pocket of
land which has been part of her husband's family property for a good many years.

My sister Phyllida is three years older than I, and when she was twenty she married a Roman banker,
Leonardo Forli. His family had settled in Corfu during the Venetian occupation of that island, and had
managed somehow to survive the various subsequent "occupations" with their small estate more or less
intact, and had even, like the Vicar of Bray, contrived to prosper. It was under the British Protectorate
that Leo's great-grandfather had built the pretentious and romantic Castello dei Fiori in the woods above
the little bay where the estate runs down to the sea. He had planted vineyards, and orange orchards,
including a small plantation (if that is the word) of the Japanese miniature oranges called koùm koyàt for
which the Forli estate later became famous. He even cleared space in the woods for a garden, and
built—beyond the southern arm of the bay and just out of sight of the Castello—a jetty and a vast
boathouse, which (according to Phyllida) would almost have housed the Sixth Fleet, and had indeed
housed the complicated flock of vessels in which his guests used to visit him. In his day, I gathered, the
Castello had been the scene of one large and continuous house party: in summer they sailed and fished,
and in the fall there were hunting parties, when thirty or so guests would invade the Greek and Albanian
mainlands to harry the birds and ibexes.