Jacky was frowning again, but after a pause she nodded. “All right, but only because poor Doyle thought so highly of you. And it doesn’t mean I’m conceding anything, you understand?” She grinned, then caught herself and frowned sternly. “Come on, I know a place in St. Martin’s Lane where they’ll even let you sit by the fire.”
She hopped down from the wall as Ashbless stood up, and together they walked away, still bickering, north toward the Strand in the clear dawn light.
EPILOGUE—APRIL 12,1846
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
After standing in his doorway for nearly a quarter of an hour, staring out across the gray, hummocked expanse of the Woolwich marshes that stretched for several miles under the rain-threatening sky, William Ashbless nearly took off his coat and went back inside. The fire was drawing well, after all, and he had not entirely killed the bottle of Glenlivet last night. Then he frowned, tucked his cap lower over his bone-white hair, touched the pommel of the sword he’d strapped on for the occasion, and drew the door closed behind him.
During the last couple of solitary years, Ashbless had fretfully noticed that his memory of Jacky’s face had disappeared—the damned portraits had looked fine when they were new and she was still alive to supplement them, but recently it had seemed to him that they hadn’t ever caught her with her real smile on. But today, he realized, he could remember her as clearly as if she’d just that morning taken the coach into London; her affectionately sarcastic grin, her occasional snappishness, and the gamin, Leslie Caron prettiness that, to his mind, she had kept right up until her death of a fever at the age of forty-seven. Probably, he thought as he crossed the highway and started out along the marsh path—which he’d morbidly watched appear over the last couple of seasons, knowing he would this day walk it—
The path rose and fell over the hilly marshes, but when the river came into view after ten minutes of brisk walking, his step was still springy and he wasn’t panting at all, for he’d been exercising and studying fencing now for years, determined at least to seriously injure whoever it might prove to be that was destined to kill him.
He leaned back and stared up at the turbulent gray clouds.
Хаос в Ваантане нарастает, охватывая все новые и новые миры...
Александр Бирюк , Александр Сакибов , Белла Мэттьюз , Ларри Нивен , Михаил Сергеевич Ахманов , Родион Кораблев
Фантастика / Исторические приключения / Боевая фантастика / ЛитРПГ / Попаданцы / Социально-психологическая фантастика / Детективы / РПГ