Salamander by Thomas Wharton Read Free Book Online Page A

great-grandfather the Huguenot exile, had been worn to the rounded smoothness of driftwood. The inscription burned into the underside of the frame,
N LaFlotte 1663
, had almost disappeared.
    In their games of pretend he and Meg had called the press the
chimera
. It was his word, gleaned from the books of fabulous stories he read to her at bedtime. As always she took everythinghe said as an article of faith. She truly believed the press was some kind of monster, and was afraid to go into the print shop. He remembered her sudden tears when he pretended he had been turned to stone by an evil spell. She had lost him.
    The press had waited for him like this, he remembered, the day she died. She was eight years old. He was eleven, a child watching another child die. Before he began his apprenticeship in the print shop they had been constant companions. While his father worked late hours, he was the one who cooked her supper, put her to bed, and read to her from the Greek myths, La Fontaine’s Fables,
The Thousand and One Nights
. They invented an imaginary kingdom in which everyday things blossomed with wonder. The rooms of the house were transformed into ogres’ lairs and the mossy caves of sorcerers. Their father was the king, but his printing press stymied them for a long time. It seemed their father was both its master and its victim, and so the press could not quite be any one thing.
    He and his father sat by her bedside day and night while the smallpox slowly consumed her, burning her to ash before their eyes. They washed the bleeding sores that covered her arms and legs, and finally her face. When she woke screaming from the fever nightmares he soothed her with her favourite stories. His efforts to comfort her at last became empty when she went blind.
    He remembered most of all the smell of her dying. In the end she became a thing to him, the source of the graveyard stench that turned her sickroom into an antechamber of hell. He hated her for what she had become, what she had done to both of them.
    On the last day she drifted in and out of delirium, shivering, babbling nonsense, and then thrashing awake, moaningthat she was on fire.
Papa, please make it stop
. He ran through the shop to fetch cool water from the pump in the court, and each time he passed the press he was aware of its silent waiting presence, mutely abiding all.
    They sat at her bedside through the night until her tortured breathing finally ebbed away. Still he remained kneeling beside her, exhausted, his heart worn as thin as paper. After some time he heard the creak of the press screw from the shop. He hadn’t noticed when his father had left the bedroom, but he was gone, already back at work finishing his latest commission. After listening for a while to the sounds from the shop, he finally left Meg and went to join his father at the press.
    The work went on. Every day since then, and here, too, in this castle that was like something he and Meg might have dreamed. Flood took a deep breath and tied on his apron.
    There was a noise behind him and, thinking it was one of the bookcases, he stepped nimbly aside.
    – I’m sorry if I startled you, the Countess said. Sometimes I forget what this place can do to newcomers,
    He was glad to see her again, the only sane soul, it seemed, in this madhouse. He hoped she would linger and talk for a while, but she merely asked him if he was satisfied with the arrangements. He told her that he was, and then wondered why he had, since he most definitely was not. She said she would inform her father that all was well, and turned to leave.
    – Once I’ve finished a book, Flood said quickly, stepping down from the press platform, all I will have to do is deposit it on one of the passing shelves.
    Irena frowned.
    – I’m afraid no one is allowed to add or remove anything from these bookcases, she said, without my father’s approval.
    – I had thought from what the Count said that you were in charge of the library
    –