The Memory Palace by Christie Dickason

Author:Christie Dickason [Dickason, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007392094
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

After Rachel had left again, Zeal lay fuming and turning in the dark. She had recognized finality in his tone. It had taken the loss of her child to shake his tongue loose again after the false start on their wedding night. What would it take to shake it loose again now?

Yet, I’m certain that he wants to tell me, almost as much as I want to hear.

She got out of bed again, pulled on thick woollen stockings and returned to stand at the window.

I’m worse off than I was before Philip started his tales, she thought. With my head now full of beautiful nightmares, John feels farther away even than before.

The sky had just begun to lighten to a thick grey. The long track up from the lake was empty. At its lowest point, it disappeared into a low-lying mist, out of which poked the top of Sir Richard’s pavilion. Though the scene had a half-bewitched air, it felt solid and true compared to cities of gold.

But cities of gold already felt far more solid and true in her mind than an Antilles tobacco farm.

I am doing as Philip said – accommodating his wonders into what I think I know.

She tried to imagine John walking up out of the mist now, like Philip with his fish.

Write to me! she begged him. Let me know you are alive. Show me where you will be for the next six and a half years. I need images. I need your words sitting solidly on the page, even when I know how far short words fall from the truth. The cord that bound us in the air has snapped. The spider’s web of my imagination is stretching beyond its strength.

She tried to think how to tell him that his child, about whom he had not known, was now dead.

I have waited too long to begin the telling.

As if on a secret signal, the birds began their pre-dawn clamour, like an entire village shouting all at once. She did not feel tired. She had slept too much in the past three days. Her heart was numb but her thoughts circled restlessly.

She took Philip’s map from her cupboard, pausing absently for a moment over her small coffer, which seemed subtly out of place. Then she carried the map to the table and lit a fresh candle from the stub of the old.

The world, laid out like a ragged pelt, centred on the Caribbean, with the mouth of Hell near one edge, just off the Indian coast. And there was Nevis. A tiny inconsequential blob of ochre and green, floating on a lapis lazuli sea, in the belly of the island chain that curved from its sea horse head at Hispaniola to the tiny tail bones dangling below Barbados, near the Guyana coast.

She touched Nevis. John is here. So far as I know.

I will make Philip show me where he saw his city, she resolved. He can’t deny me that. Otherwise, his adventures and John’s will grow more and more jumbled in my head.

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