Читать онлайн «The Taxidermist's Daughter»
Автор Кейт Мосс
Dedication
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part III
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Kate Mosse
Copyright
I do remember an apothecary and hereabouts he dwells . . . and in his needy shop a tortoise is hung, an alligator stuff’d and other skins of ill-shaped fishes.
William Shakespeare,
’Tis now, replied the village belle,
St Mark’s mysterious eve,
And all that old traditions tell
I tremblingly believe;
How, when the midnight signal tolls,
Along the churchyard green,
A mournful train of sentenced souls
In winding-sheets are seen.
The ghosts of all whom death shall doom
Within the coming year,
In pale procession walk the gloom,
Amid the silence drear.
James Montgomery, ‘The Vigil of St Mark’, 1813
Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
Willa Cather, circa 1912
PROLOGUE
April 1912
Midnight.
In the graveyard of the church of St Peter & St Mary, men gather in silence on the edge of the drowned marshes. Watching, waiting.
For it is believed that on the Eve of St Mark, the ghosts of those destined to die in the coming year will be seen walking into the church at the turning of the hour. It is a custom that has long since fallen away in most parts of Sussex, but not here. Not here, where the saltwater estuary leads out to the sea. Not here, in the shadow of the Old Salt Mill and the burnt-out remains of Farhill’s Mill, its rotting timbers revealed at each low tide. Here, the old superstitions still hold sway.
Out at sea, the curlews and the gulls are calling, strange and haunting night-time cries. The tide is coming in fast, higher and higher, drowning the mudflats and saltings until there is nothing left but the deep, shifting water. The rain strikes the black umbrellas and cloth caps of the farm workers and dairymen and blacksmiths. Dripping down between neck and collar, skin and cloth. No one speaks. The flames in the lanterns gutter and leap, casting distorted shadows up and along the flint face of the church.
The taxidermist’s daughter stands hidden in the shadow of the cypress trees, having followed her father here across the marshes. Connie can see Gifford in the knot of men at the porch, and is surprised. He shuns friendship. They live a solitary life on the other side of the creek, in a house filled with fur and feathers, bell jars and black beaded eyes, wire and cotton and tow, all that is left of Gifford’s once celebrated museum of taxidermy. A broken and dissolute man, ruined by drink.
