"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - The St Germain Chronicles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

“What on earth has that to do with the glass?” Twilford asked, blustering to
conceal his perplexity.
“I’m coming to that,” Charles Whittenfield said with a great show of patience. “If
you’ll let me do it in my own way.”
“Well, I don’t see how we can stop you,” muttered an older man sitting in the
corner hunched over his pipe.
 “Everard, please,” Dominick put in imperiously.
The older man gave Dominick a contemptuous glare. “No manners these days.
None at all.”
“Pray go on,” said the sixth guest in slightly accented English. It might have been
because he was the only one not drinking that his clothes were the neatest and most
elegant of any man’s in the room.
“I intend to,” Whittenfield said to his guests. “As I’ve intimated, my
many-times-great-aunt Sabrina was stranded in Antwerp because Sir James was in
prison and she was destitute. She had been cast out by her family when she had
elected to follow her husband to the Continent, so she could not turn to them for
relief, not that she was the sort who would have, in any case. Of course, Sir James’
family had washed their hands of him some years before and would have nothing to
do with him or any of his. Sabrina could play the virginals and had a fair knowledge
of botany, as many well-bred women did in those days, but those were the limits of
her skills. Yet she must have had courage for all of that, because she did not despair,
or if she did, she conquered it. She was determined to keep her children with her, as
the alternative was giving them to the care of nuns, and being a good English
churchwoman, she could not bear to surrender her unprotected babes to Roman
Catholics.” He recrossed his legs. “My uncle George married a Roman Catholic, you
know. There was the most frightful uproar and dire predictions, but Clara has
shown herself to be a most reasonable woman and a truly excellent wife. No trouble
there, I assure you. So all those warnings came to naught.”
“The glass, Charles, the glass,” Twilford insisted.
“I’m coming to that,” the young peer protested with mock dismay. “You’ve no
patience—positively you haven’t a jot.” He held out his glass for refilling as Everard
helped himself to the port. “So,” he resumed after an appreciative moment, “I trust
I’ve made her predicament clear to you. Her husband was in prison, she had no one
to turn to, her children as well as herself were in real danger of starvation, she was
living in the poorest part of the city in a low-ceilinged garret in a house that should
have been pulled down before the Plantagenet's fell. There was no reason for her to
hope for anything but an early grave in Potter’s Field.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Dominick interrupted. “Very touching plight. But as her daughter
had a daughter we must assume that all was not lost, at least not then.” He splashed
a bit more brandy into his snifter and lit up another cigar.
“Well, Charles, what happened?” Everard demanded. “Did she catch the eye of
an Earl traveling for pleasure, or did some other person come to her aid?”
“Not quite that,” Whittenfield conceded. “Not a traveling Earl in any case, but a
traveling Count.”
“Same thing,” Dominick scoffed.
“He was, as you perceive from the title, a foreigner,” Charles persisted. “He had
arrived in Antwerp from Ghent some time before and had purchased one of the
buildings not far from where Sabrina lived in terrible squalor.”
“And he gave her the mirror for primping,” Everard finished. “There’s nothing
very mysterious about that.”