Читать книгу Dracula: The Un-Dead - Ian Holt, Dacre Stoker - Страница 21

The Fleet Street Dragon was watching him. From Jonathan’s office window, he could see it sitting on the street in the middle of Temple Bar, taunting him, judging him. The Temple Bar had once had a stone archway, which marked where Fleet Street turned into the Strand. Due to its vicinity to the Temple, a complex once owned by the Knights Templar, it was now where the guilds of solicitors organized into an area that was known as “Legal London.” During the eighteenth century, the heads of traitors on iron spikes had been displayed in Temple Bar protruding from the top of the stone archway. That archway had been removed in 1878. Two years later, the Temple Bar Monument had been erected in its place, a forty-foot-tall pedestal surmounted by a black dragon, which stood in the middle of Fleet Street. The Fleet Street Dragon. Of the many solicitors’ offices in the vicinity, among them was Hawkins & Harker.

Jack Seward’s death had sobered Jonathan enough that morning to send him back to London. He spent a couple of days at the office trying to organize the necessary paperwork regarding Jack’s final wishes. It was no easy task. Jonathan’s once-prosperous law firm with a dozen employees had slowly disintegrated to the point at which Jonathan could no longer afford to keep on anyone but himself. He would not even have been able to maintain an office on Fleet Street had Peter Hawkins not purchased the building back in the 1870s. It was ironic that the competing law firms renting space on other floors now provided the only reliable cash flow to Jonathan’s business. To help him survive the daunting task of organizing Jack’s scattered life, Jonathan took frequent breaks at Mooney & Son’s public house a little east on Fleet Street.