Mir_over: переводы

→‘I know what he wants. He wants me to do something for him that he cannot do himself because of what he is.’

→Her spectacled glance touched his very briefly, then dropped quickly to the rearrangement of the silverware. ‘Not even to see what he wants?’

→Speaking carefully – as if she were carrying fragile glass – he replied, ‘I know. It doesn’t mean I’m going to obey him.’

→Now, at the mention of the vampire’s name, the guarded silence was back.

→For three months, it had seemed to him that he watched green shoots peeping hesitantly from the cracks in a sheathing of stone.

→Only at Christmas – at long last – had he heard her laugh unaffectedly for the first time; had he heard her get into an argument, as she’d used to, with one of her stuffier Willoughby cousins about whether or not cats had souls. Christmas night, she had woken up in the darkness and wept in his arms. At New Year’s, on the way home from dinner with her uncle, the Dean of the College, she had asked him, ‘What will you do with this year, Jamie?’ and he’d heard in her voice that she didn’t mean his students or his research into obscure legends or Serbian verb-forms.

→She had loved him.

→A suspicion confirmed when she had miscarried at the end of October, returning to her silence and, for a time, passing into a remoteness that had terrified him. She had done her best to comfort his grief, and had seemed to be forcing herself through the motions of being comforted, but he knew there was a part of her that had retreated too far to be touched.

→And killed her when he was done with her, Lydia did not add, though she kept her wide, velvet-brown eyes on her egg as she tore her toast into tiny fragments and dabbled them in the rummelled-up yolk – fragments that she set on the edge of her plate, uneaten.

→Loving Ysidro – and finding the body of that poor companion lying drained of blood on her bed – had torn her apart inside. For nearly eighteen months now Asher had watched her shut herself into the dissecting rooms of the Radcliffe Infirmary, retreat into the Radcliffe Camera’s shelves of medical lore, and conceal herself in her study here on Holywell Street as she penned concisely-reasoned articles about experimental procedures and pineal secretions. He had thought she was coming out of it last September – not quite a year after they had returned from that terrible journey to Constantinople – when, he suspected, she had conceived a child . . .

→This Asher knew. His own emotions had been scalded by his relationship with the vampire Countess of Ernchester: he knew what Lydia had gone through. Though she was no longer the sheltered girl who’d scandalized her family by marrying a man a dozen years older than herself – and an impoverished lecturer at that! – he knew that in many ways, her absorption in medical research had continued the emotional insulation that her father’s fortune had begun. She was still far more conversant with the endocrine systems of human beings than she was with their behavior, lives, or souls.

→It is our lure to be attractive, Ysidro had told him, when they had parted in the stillness of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It is how we hunt. It means nothing.

→Asher suspected – watching how his young wife now carefully arranged her coffee spoon, egg spoon, and knife so that they made a precisely symmetrical pattern where they rested on the edge of the plate – that she loved Don Simon Ysidro still.

→Asher knew the signs and wished he had not needed to bring up the vampire’s name with her.

→‘He can do that.’ Lydia returned to the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, an egg and toast on a pink-and-green china plate and a second muffin for him. The note of remote disinterest in her voice didn’t fool Asher for one single second. ‘When he decided I needed a chaperone, if I was going to travel with him to Vienna to find you last year, he – he used dreams to summon one.’

→He could find no crack, no join. Only the stickiness gumming his hands, hot and fresh as if just pumped from a wound. The gas seared his throat, and he stood, groping desperately at the wall in the blackness—

→But the moonlight faded, turning a ghastly greenish-yellow. Instead of guerrilla fighters, something like a mist began to ooze into the hut with a thick movement not like other mist. Wisps of it burned Asher’s throat and eyes, gagging him with a smell like concentrated mustard. He’d heard of this at the Foreign Office, this new weapon the Germans were developing, poison gas that would leave a man paralysed and blind . . .

→It has to be coming in from somewhere . . .

→He was dreaming again.

→He was fan quai, a Long-Nose devil. With the fall of darkness, those silent, dutiful peasants rose as one, to close in on a lone foreigner like sharks.