The Breaking Hour by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Author:Kevin Crossley-Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enitharmon Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

GRAIL OF ASH

No longer my sweet throstle, attending the sun’s rising. Defying the dusk. Your voice was so parched and husky.

I know who I was …

My Gracie.

Scarcely a day I’ve not talked to you, since you went walking up around the mountain.

Not what may have happened, and what did not happen. The sightings and the hearsay. In his account of the three parishes, Martyn Lewis has recorded all that.

Not the chatter about how with his eye-glass Elijah spied you on the third day ‘bouncing down’ from the mountain, and you wearing a grey dress and pale green apron. Or how you were seen on the docks at Swansea in the year of Trafalgar. Stuff!

Not the old stories either. Falling in with the Fair Family. ‘Just one sip … such delights….’ Doubting Tom, everyone used to call me that.

No! How our marriage … our children … the smoke from our chimney …

Memories and echoes. Memories and askings. What is time then? And what is memory? What’s the use of it? Why do we forget? What is hereafter?

Gracie. You were fifteen.

Scarcely a day … And how at last you did come back from the mountain. How you looked as you had looked, so long before. Your skin, apple-blossom. The spring in your step.

I was on my way up to cut the peat.

You were on your way down.

Your tresses, Gracie. Still the same. Barley breaking the red.

Your voice husky. Then so wild, desolate.

Tom!

And before what happened happened. And before the west wind stooped, and plucked and scattered you.

Again, again and always,

I know who I was. I do not know who I am.

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