A Dangerous Place by Winspear Jacqueline

Author:Winspear, Jacqueline [Winspear, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-29T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Maisie strolled at a deliberate slow pace toward Miriam Babayoff’s house. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts before a new conversation, and perhaps fresh ideas, cast them into disarray. There were times she felt her energy rising, but still, she was in the midst of a long physical and emotional recovery, not over it by a long chalk—especially when it came to the renewal of her spirit. After losing her new family in as long as it took for a small aircraft—no bigger in the distant sky than a butterfly in her hand—to fall to the earth, she had felt crushed in every part of her being. Even after the necessary arrangements had been made with regard to her husband’s remains, and even with Frankie and Brenda and Lady Rowan at her bedside in the Toronto hospital, she had found it hard to hold a thought in her mind for longer than it took another to shatter it. Then, at her insistence, they had left, sailing for England without her. And discharging herself from the hospital, she’d traveled to Boston, hoping for the chance to claw back something of herself in the company of people who knew she required a certain latitude, so that she might, perhaps, begin to fathom who she could possibly be in the world, if she made up her mind to be part of it once more. It was in the return to India that the soft healing of her soul had begun, and she could have remained there, easily. She could have lived in the bungalow set within the hills of Darjeeling for a long time. She might have stayed there forever. But Brenda had called her home.

Reflecting again, she acknowledged that it had been in the application of her mind that she had come through war’s aftermath and the loss of Simon all those years ago. It was in application that she had risen from the ashes to become of some account to herself. And it was in getting to know the dead, especially, that she had tasked herself with witnessing the path through the myriad different responses that conspired to ignite terror—envy, greed, love, want, grief; they were many and powerful.

She knew very well that she had not given due consideration to her first lesson from Maurice. It had been issued on the very first day of her apprenticeship, when she accompanied him to the scene of a murder. He had taken time to inspect the body and, it seemed, to ask questions of the very air around him, both then and later in the day, when she assisted at the postmortem. “There is more to this than the wound that killed a human being, Maisie. We must spend time with the dead in silence, to try to hear them. Then we ask questions, not to gain an immediate answer but to let them know, even in their netherworld, that we care enough to give voice to our lack of understanding.

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.