The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

Author:Natasha Pulley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620409688
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-04-21T09:12:05+00:00

SEVENTEEN

I made some coffee at the church and drank it watching new snow float down outside. The wind spun it and the pollen in great frozen firework undulations between the pines, which creaked and leaned. I hoped Clem was all right. If he managed to keep up a good pace, he could have reached Crucero by now, although the snow must have slowed him down. With any luck, it hadn’t been so bad in the valleys.

Raphael came in with a blast of cold air and stray pollen motes. When I gave him some coffee, he looked at me in the way Navy wives do when their husbands get too much sea in them and start offering guests wine in mugs, but he drank it.

‘What Inti was talking about,’ he said, unprovoked. I turned back, surprised. I had been heating more milk for myself, hovering over the pan because everything boiled so low. ‘My uncle was the priest here seventy years ago. He was the . . . it’s complicated. There were thirty years between him and my mother so it’s odd, but he was my uncle. We look alike, says everyone. He disappeared in the woods. Priests do. We’re the only ones who can cross the border, and no one can cross to find us, so we tend to die out there. There are bears, wolves. That’s all it is.’ He sighed. ‘And people like telling stories. It’s not like there’s a playhouse to go to.’

‘Uh, shame. I was thinking how well you were doing for a hundred and ten.’

Raphael smiled, not wholly, as though it were a new and odd notion, to smile about it, with people who didn’t believe he had been stolen by fairies.

Not wanting to go to bed yet, I sat by the stove sketching a whitewood twig. He put a jug of water down next to it by way of telling me to be careful about sparks, so I put it in the jug for good measure. Opposite me he took out a ball of thread and tied one end of it to a hole bored in the table. He had Don Quixote open in front of him and he turned the page every so often. On to the main string sometimes went smaller strings, as if the main thought were having a side thought, and then sometimes the side strings had ancillary strings too, but not often.

When I moved my sketchbook, the letter in the back fell out. I was about to tuck it back in again when I realised it didn’t belong there any more. It came to me slowly, because it was the first time we had been sitting quietly without a baby or other things to do, and because it had slipped so far from the front of my mind that he was the priest at New Bethlehem. When Caroline had said the letter was for the priest, I’d imagined a tiny old Spaniard in a broad hat.

‘Oh. I forgot,’ I said into the quiet.

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