The Comet Seekers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

comet’s not where it should be. Róisín has her hair in a sideways ponytail so she can lay her head flat on the ground, and she’s grinning at him like she knows a secret she’s not quite decided to share.
    It’s there now, she points.
    And it’s true. The comet has moved on. It really must be the fastest thing in the whole of the sky. It has passed by stars and through the transparent scattering of clouds and even though it looks like everything is completely still overhead now, even though he hasn’t actually seen the comet moving, he knows that it has moved. Róisín’s hand is still holding his.
    He doesn’t want to take his eyes off the sky. He doesn’t want to move. He watches the comet for a long time – longer than ever before. They lie side by side and stare at the sky and Liam wonders if staying perfectly still is the way to live in one week, in one moment, for the rest of his life.
    But when he looks back down to the farm everything has moved. He can feel the rush of the wind as the Earth races around the sun. He feels like he needs to cling on, or he will go flying off into space. Things shifted while he wasn’t looking at the ground and now the world is different; everything is beautiful, and wild, and precarious, because now he knows how the sky can change.

1759
    Halley’s Comet
    In Bayeux, two sisters in lace dresses read to one another as their husbands play cards and drink cognac. The family home was once deserted, so the story goes, burned down to its stone foundations, but it was rescued by twin sisters, like them, and now it is filled with books and flowers and laughter. They read in the paper about the naming of a comet after an astronomer who did not live to see it arrive, but they are not saddened by this. They know that their house is filled with more than children – sometimes, when a comet flies through the sky, they see generations past and know that their family is tied to the skies and to their home and they are glad.
    That evening as the sun starts to dip they look for it in the sky, Halley’s comet – it is flying low, over the sea to the north. So thesisters take the carriage out past Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, with their three daughters and Henri, the youngest, the only son. He loves the beach, Henri; he runs along the coast exploring the caves and collecting sea-urchin shells. Don’t stray too far, his mother calls, and he turns back and waves before racing on – his mother likes to stay near Bayeux, he knows, but Henri wants to go to sea.
    The sisters watch the sky as the night falls and the stars begin to shine from the dark, but they don’t notice that the wind is building up and the waves are crashing closer to the shore. They point out constellations to their daughters and teach them to read the skies, to follow the patterns of light in the dark and watch how the comet moves between them. But then they look down.
    Where is Henri? A question at first, changing to a shout, his name called by his mama and aunt and sisters, but Henri doesn’t hear – he is trapped by the waves along the coast, the ground sinking beneath his feet as tides pull him further out to sea. He tries to gasp in air, to shout, but his mouth fills with water and his eyes sting with salt; he can’t see through the dark, through the crash of the waves, but then a hand is holding his, an arm pulled around his waist, and he is lying, coughing on the rough sand of the beach.
    Mama? he says, as soon as he is able, with his eyes still scrunched up from the salt and his sisters running to him.
    He forces his eyes open, sees the whites of the waves crashing on the rocks beyond the sand. His sisters are crying and his aunt is running deeper into the sea – why is she in the sea now? Her lace dress is ghostly as it catches the light of the stars, disappears beneath the waves, and reappears again. As she walks, falls, crawls back to the beach, her hair is soaked and sticking to her face like seaweed. She wants