"Walter Jon Williams - Wall, Stone, Craft" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

WALL, STONE, CRAFT
Walter Jon Williams


1




She awoke, there in the common room of the inn, from a brief dream of roses and death. Once Mary came awake she recalled there were wild roses on her mother’s grave, and wondered if her mother’s spirit had visited her.

On her mother’s grave, Mary’s lover had first proposed their elopement. It was there the two of them had first made love.

Now she believed she was pregnant. Her lover was of the opinion that she was mistaken. That was about where it stood.

Mary concluded that it was best not to think about it. And so, blinking sleep from her eyes, she sat in the common room of the inn at Le Caillou and resolved to study her Italian grammar by candlelight.

Plurals. La nascita, le nascite. La madre, le madri. Un bambino, i bambini…

Interruption: stampings, snortings, the rattle of harness, the barking of dogs. Four young Englishmen entered the inn, one in scarlet uniform coat, the others in fine traveling clothes. Raindrops dazzled on their shoulders. The innkeeper bustled out from the kitchen, smiled, proffered the register.

Mary, unimpressed by anything English, concentrated on the grammar.

“Let me sign, George,” the redcoat said. “My hand needs the practice.” Mary glanced up at the comment.

“I say, George, here’s a fellow signed in Greek!” The Englishman peered at yellowed pages of the inn’s register, trying to make out the words in the dim light of the innkeeper’s lamp. Mary smiled at the English officer’s efforts.

“Perseus, I believe the name is. Perseus Busseus—d’ye suppose he means Bishop?—Kselleius. And he gives his occupation as ‘te anthropou philou’—that would make him a friendly fellow, eh?—” The officer looked over his shoulder and grinned, then returned to the register. “ ‘Kaiatheos.’ ” The officer scowled, then straightened. “Does that mean what I think it does, George?”

George—the pretty auburn-haired man in byrons—shook rain off his short cape, stepped to the register, examined the text. “Not ‘friendly fellow,’ ” he said. “That would be ‘anehr philos.’ ‘Anthropos’ is mankind, not man.” There was the faintest touch of Scotland in his speech.

“So it is,” said the officer. “It comes back now.”

George bent at his slim waist and looked carefully at the register. “What the fellow says is, ‘Both friend of man and—’ ” He frowned, then looked at his friend. “You were right about the ‘atheist,’ I’m afraid.”

The officer was indignant. “Ain’t funny, George,” he said.

George gave a cynical little half-smile. His voice changed, turned comical and fussy, became that of a high-pitched English schoolmaster. “Let us try to make out the name of this famous atheist.‘’ He bent over the register again. ‘ ’Perseus— you had that right, Somerset. Busseus—how very irregular. Kselleius—Kelly? Shelley?” He smiled at his friend. His voice became very Irish. “Kelly, I imagine. An atheistical upstart Irish schoolmaster with a little Greek. But what the Busseus might be eludes me, unless his middle name is Omnibus.”

Somerset chuckled. Mary rose from her place and walked quietly toward the pair. “The gentleman’s name is Bysshe, sir,” she said. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

The two men turned in surprise. The officer—Somerset—bowed as he perceived a lady. Mary saw for the first time that he had one empty sleeve pinned across his tunic, which would account for the comment about the hand. The other—George, the man in byrons—swept off his hat and gave Mary a flourishing bow, one far too theatrical to be taken seriously. When he straightened, he gave Mary a little frown.

“Bysshe Shelley?” he said. “Any relation to Sir Bysshe, the baronet?”

“His grandson.”

“Sir Bysshe is a protege of old Norfolk.” This an aside to his friends. Radical Whiggery was afoot, or so the tone implied. George returned his attention to Mary as the other Englishmen gathered about her. “An interesting family, no doubt,” he said, and smiled at her. Mary wanted to flinch from the compelling way he looked at her, gazed upward, intently, from beneath his brows. “And are you of his party?”

“I am.”