A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Author:Daniel Mason
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), General
ISBN: 9781529038514
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Doctor Forbes’s reply was swift, affirmative, and girded with recipes, for inhaled stramonium and a tincture of poppies, to calm the boy and help him sleep.

Summer, then! said Charles, radiating determination. And they would travel north, and make a great loop and so avoid the mills of Southwark altogether. Perhaps the warmer weather would come early that year. They might even try in May, just three months off.

And Reason had spoken, flexed its muscles. It was simple, a matter of seasons, winds. Why then did she accept Morwenna’s saucers of vinegar, the dried ear of a donkey she’d sent for from Cornwall, the spar stones she enclosed in a little bag around William’s wrist? For could he make it to May? Every morning she woke to find someone thinner, paler. He hardly ate. In her dreams at night—the same dreams that conjured up enchanted corridors coursing through the sulphurous fog—he slurped ravenously at glistening stews. But the doctor had warned against anything rich or salted, and William pushed away the tepid clabber Morwenna delivered to their room. He moved as if his whole body were very heavy. By the time February finally turned to March, sapped by the fits at night, by the poppy tincture, he scarcely left his bed.

She read to him. One by one, she brought out all his favorites: a children’s Ovid, Crusoe, books of science, and illustrated fairy tales. But how different these stories seemed now! Watching him out of the corner of her eye, she found herself wondering what he thought of them: the mocking vision of a crystal carriage, these fables of children consumed by witches, of mothers offering malicious goblins their firstborn sons?

These metamorphoses. A girl transformed into a laurel tree, a crocus, a galloping heifer.

A boy into a murmuring brook.

For I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy, which I had no means or strength to contend with: my business was to hold my breath, and raise myself upon the water if I could; and so, by swimming, to preserve my breathing, and pilot myself towards the shore, if possible, my greatest concern now being that the sea, as it would carry me a great way towards the shore when it came on, might not carry me back again…

Let us read something different, she said to him, but by mid-month, he was sleeping much of the day. Alone then, she tried to turn her mind from the thoughts that rose up from the darkness. The blame was hers: she had done something to deserve this. Other times, she felt the needle shift and point toward him. If he didn’t get so frightened. If he ate the food Morwenna prepared for him. There must be some solution, some secret he knew the answer to, some reason they had been imprisoned in their tower, in their room with its pale blue paper, that parody of the sky they couldn’t see. Didn’t he wonder?

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