After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

wrapped in paper and tied with waxed string, several opened out and surrounded with scraps of paper in the long grass. Seeing Eve and John come towards her the girl snatched up a clay doll and shook its ugly little head to send them away. ‘You can’t have her, she’s mine!’
    ‘I tell you the child never sleeps, up in the attic and down in the cellar at all hours, bringing out her treasures.’ Eve touched Clare’s head with a fond gesture. ‘Last week it was a cannonball, of all things – it had been used as a doorstop in a room we never use, and she carried it out to the garden thinking it would make a bowling ball, and dropped it twice, and broke the floorboards on the way…’ Then she fell to her knees, and tearing at a bundle of tissue withdrew a bundle of bamboo pipes set around a lacquered black dome. ‘What’s this doing here, with these old things – isn’t this mine? Didn’t I have it last year?’ She examined it, frowning, then pushed the black dome beneath her lower lip, and blowing over the pipes produced, without a thought, a line or two of Bach. So it was her , he thought, at the piano last night, and in the morning . He was disappointed, and would much rather it had been Hester making something fine and beautiful with her ugly hands.
    Clare set the clay doll down in the grass, and covered it with a sheet of tissue paper, carefully leaving its upturned face exposed. Beside it lay a corked jar of yellow liquid in which a mouse or vole curled its pink hands and waved a naked tail. She said, with a shy eager smile, ‘I found them, all by myself, and brought them down while everyone was still in bed. Look!’ She held up her wrist, which was looped three times with a string of irregular blue beads. ‘What do you think? Where do you think they came from?’
    John stooped and tugged at the beads. He had seen something like it before, in a glass case or displayed on a cloth somewhere. ‘It might be tomb beads – from Egypt, you know. Nothing precious, just chips of glass – something to be buried with, so you don’t go in poverty to the afterlife. Then in time all the sand blows away, and there they are, waiting to be picked up.’ He thought she might recoil, but instead she stroked them thoughtfully, satisfied, and turned to a larger parcel, wrapped not in paper but in a length of chamois leather. John, by an instinct for the familiar he later regretted, saw in the parcel the dimensions of a small book, and felt the idea of leaving recede a little further. He crouched beside her, and with a proprietorial murmur – ‘Shall I, do you think?’ – took it from her. The strings came untied easily, as if it had been recently opened and they’d lost the habit of their knot. Inside the chamois was a second layer of frayed blue cloth, wrapped tightly around the book’s pale vellum binding. The gilding on the spine had worn away, and John, setting the book on his knees, turned to the title page. The thick paper showed an engraving of a bearded man, splendidly aloof, resting a long finger on a rolled parchment.
    It was a volume which had come and gone from his own shelves over the years – a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems, inscrutable and lovely, the Old English and the new shown on facing pages. The book’s scent was so familiar it conveyed the sound of the clock ticking in the empty shop, and the bell above the door. The weight of the book spread evenly between his palms gave him the courage an icon might to a man of anxious faith.
    Clare bent forward and traced a line or two with her finger. ‘ Where is the horse gone ,’ she read: ‘ Where the rider …’
    ‘… and where the giver of treasure …’ It gave John such pleasure to be back over the border of his own familiar land that he went on, eagerly, as if she’d asked to be taught: ‘Noone knows now – might not have known then! – who was the rider, or where he rode, or even who wrote the poems. Their meaning is mine or yours;