The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason
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Название: The Lady Tree
Автор: Christie Dickason
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007439638
isbn:
He went down into his office where he collected up a small bundle of papers, a bag of coins, and his pistol, all of which he locked into a cupboard set into the wall. He opened the doors and drawers of his collection, then closed them again. One of Malise’s men was strolling in the forecourt. John watched him for a moment. Then he left the office to sharpen his knife on the whetstone in the lean-to outside the kitchen.
His uncle brought him safely to Hawkridge House and left again at once, a single horseman and groom, seen only by the family of house servants and two stable grooms.
Aunt Margaret had already been resident on the estate for fifteen years and resigned to spinsterhood. At first she had twitched and exclaimed, and cried out that they would all be ruined if John were discovered and retaken there. Then, still muttering disasters, she had applied poultices to his sores and rashes that prison had bred (even an above-ground apartment). She half-drowned him in tisanes, decoctions and nourishing broths. She doused him for lice and fleas. She prayed for him twice a day on her knees in the little chapel, on the tiles of tulips and royal Spanish pomegranates, her head bent between the female acrobat, the monkey, and a cockerel being swallowed by a fish.
‘Poor, poor lamb. Poor doubly bereft little soul. My poor, dear nephew, so fierce, so unfortunate!’
‘I’m well, aunt! I’m well! I don’t need dosing!’
But she pursued him with mint and rosemary, with garlic and willow bark, and with the panic of suddenly acquired responsibility. Like his uncle, she understood better than John how the butterfly must now reverse nature and shrink back into a worm.
Two soldiers arrived a week after John did. They were making polite enquiries. No one who mattered had evidence to link Beester with his nephew’s escape, however much some might suspect it. John saw nothing of his aunt’s performance, of course, as he was hidden in the attics, but he picked up awestruck comments from the servants. The soldiers left later the same day, well-fed and unsuspecting.
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