The House of Storms by Ian R. MacLeod

Author:Ian R. MacLeod [MacLeod, Ian R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480423671
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-05-10T16:25:00+00:00

IV

WITH AUTUMN, MARION DECIDED it was finally time to leave Bewdley and take the cabin boat downriver. Noll was easy about that as he was about most things, and stood the following morning on the jetty, hands stuffed into his white coat as he watched her disappear, not bothering to wave. With a little help from Nurse Withers, he was quite capable of coping on his own. After all, as he’d said to her so many times that she’d often thought he meant something else, he’d managed the infirmary well enough before she came. She even wondered now, as the bridge tollhouse took the last view of the infirmary roof, which still dimly proclaimed Merrow’s Feedstuffs, if he really expected her to return.

The last of the town slipped away and the banks rose higher in clusters of forest, green turning effortlessly to amber and bronze. Working and travelling the Severn, she’d come to love this season above all others. Autumn hadn’t existed on the shore as it did here, where smoke twirled above the next scatter of woodsmen’s houses to join with the sky’s overarching grey. And it was possible to think of the river herself—although admittedly sometimes dangerous and capricious, a stealer of fortunes and a taker of lives—as a friend in a way which you could never think of the Bristol Channel and the open sea. Yes, she decided, this was what she’d wanted to do. This, for as long as it lasted, was where she had wanted to be.

She reached Stourport by mid-morning. Here the Severn met the Stour, and linked with the canals of Dudley and Deritend, then north towards the Trent and Preston, and south and west to the Thames and London. If ever there was a town which looked both east and west, this was it, and instead of the NO TO THE BONDING STATUTE and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE WEST posters which fluttered elsewhere across England, the walls merely advertised picture houses and dances; the ordinary pursuits of a life she was sure would soon disappear. Swirled out and on from the locks, she reached a flatter landscape of fields and small towns. In Worcestershire now. She moored at Worcester at lunchtime, with the cathedral looking down from its cliff, and headed for food, and regretted not saying more to Noll.

‘We’ve had a letter from the Church Board,’ she’d said to him last night as they sat outside on the jetty. ‘They’re handing responsibility for our entire infirmary over to some emergency committee.’

‘We can’t refuse?’

She’d shaken her head, and Noll had continued smoking his cigarette. He managed to keep himself as aloof from all the recent bad news as he did from the practical business of running the infirmary.

‘But I think,’ she’d said eventually as they both stared out it the darkly purling river, ‘that I’d like to go and see my family for a few days.’

Leaving Gloucester somewhat the warmer for a pie and a light ale, with flyboats and stageboats and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.