The Book of Nights by Sylvie Germain

Author:Sylvie Germain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909232952
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2013-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

When Two-brothers heard the double tidings he felt at once dejected and happy; now life gathered strength and hope inside him, now death came piercingly to the fore.

Night-of-gold-Wolf-face took in the two young women on his farm. It was Juliette who came first. She did not want to stay down below in that widows’ house, where terrible fears haunted her. She was afraid her child might fall as soon as it was born and die on the spot. Margot shared her bedroom with her, and Mathilde moved in with the two little ones she was raising. Hortense came hard on the heels of her rival and also took up residence at the farm. A bed was made up for her in the corner of the kitchen, but she would often slip out at night to go and join Two-brothers.

As her pregnancy advanced, Juliette increasingly fell victim to an inexplicable desire to eat insects. She was constantly catching crickets and grasshoppers, or stealing from spiders little flies trapped in their webs, in order to crunch them. As for Hortense, she developed such an obsessive hunger for earth and roots that she spent the whole day running across fields and woods in order to devour the damp earth from the foot of trees or the trough of furrows.

It was during that spring that Margot became engaged to Guillaume Delvaux. He came from town and had not been very long in Montleroy, where he had taken the job of village schoolmaster.

The children did not like him and immediately nick-named him the Switch, for he was never without a long pliant cane that he liked to swish as he passed by their benches. The people from the village and from Blackland were no more fond of him, because of his rather peculiar ways and somewhat haughty manner. He did not mix with anyone, never went out, either to go to church or to the cafe. Eventually people associated him with some occult activity and there were even those who made their children wear amulets to protect them from the Switch’s evil eye.

Margot met him when she took the two little girls to school. She certainly had not armed herself with any amulet, and she was utterly defenceless when she fell for this newcomer’s charm. He seemed to pay no attention to her at all, and never spoke to her. Yet one day he stopped her outside the school gates and said to her, ‘Mademoiselle Peniel, I’d like to talk to you. Come this evening, after school. I’ll be waiting for you in the classroom.’

Since she just stood there, completely bemused, he asked her, ‘Will you come?’

She simply nodded and went off without asking any questions. She did not return to Upper Farm that day, and walked along the road straight ahead of her, without stopping, her head filled with emptiness. A cataclysmic emptiness. But the time was engraved within her, and all of a sudden she turned back, like an hour-glass reversed. When she

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.