The Custodian of Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

as if I had disclosed some womanly complaint.
    “The legacy of an old illness,” I said. “A lame pun. Which itself is not so lame a pun.”
    I looked behind at the wake that led like a slowly vanishing road back to Quinton.
    The shape I had seen from the wharf at Quinton was indeed the island of Loreburn, which Patrick indicated by looking at me as he pointed at it. From this distance it resembled a massive rock with a dark green mantle of grass dotted white with gulls.
    I was struck now, as I had been many times before in my life, by the wild but somehow purposeful cacophony of seabirds on remote islands. Patrick and I might have come upon an entirely self-sufficient city in flourishing commotion, a city at the height of its daily commerce, in mid-mayhem and oblivious to the very existence of an elsewhere with other motives and pursuits.
    Suddenly, it seemed that the island and the sky above it had started to revolve. I took hold of the gunwale and closed my eyes in the hope of waiting out this vertigo as I had done so often as a teenager when,having had too much to drink, I lay down and tried to sleep. I wondered what I would do if, when I opened my eyes, the world was still revolving. My whole being was giddy with the effort of holding on lest the spinning culminate in a mad disintegration of my mind. I knew I must not let Patrick see me like this or he might deem me unfit to live alone on Loreburn and take me back to Quinton. The legacy of an ancient illness. I clung more tightly to the gunwale, clenched my teeth and stomach muscles, praying that Patrick would remain as intent as ever on what lay in front of him. At last, the great wheel to which I was bound began to spin more slowly.
    I felt the cold breeze on my forehead, opened my eyes and thought for a moment that I must have hit my head on something, for my vision was blurred by what I thought was blood. It pooled like mercury into smaller shapes, and still smaller ones until the strange evaporation was complete and all things looked as they had before. I drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. I was not often able to breathe so deeply without difficulty. My lungs had never been the same since I was “cured” of TB.
Such a young woman, Miss Fielding. Such a shame
.
    It seemed there was no entryway to that rock, no passage at the end of which there might lie a beach, and beyond the beach, land flat enough and deep enough in topsoil that houses could be built on it. I was soon able to make out individual rocks at the base of the cliffs and to see that what had seemed to be sheer rock had fissures, in the shelter of which grass and small trees grew, improbable spruce trees eking out their stunted life as if their roots were tapping, artesian fashion, into some reserve of water deep within the cliffs. Loreburn Island. But no sign of the settlement. We seemed to be headed straight for the highest, most sheer, least promising headland, were well within the cool dark shadow of it, close enough to shore to hear the breakers and the great multitude of seagulls overhead and to convince me that soon we and our boat would be dashed to pieces on the rocks, when Patrick began furiously to turn the wheel counter-clockwise. The prow of the boat moved slowly from the perpendicular towards the parallel, its slowness at odds with the flurry of motion that was Patrick’s arms.
    When we were at right angles to our wake, I got up and stood in what little space there was beside him at the wheelhouse. And there, abruptly, incongruously, at the end of an inlet to navigate whose narrows he had had to make so wide a turn, was Loreburn.
    Looking like it had somehow been gouged out by the founders of the settlement was a great recess in the cliff. There was a beach, one more deserving of the name than the beach at Quinton, a wide, many-tiered wall of sea-smoothed stones that, for anyone, would be difficult to keep your balance on and, for me, all but impossible. I saw on the rocks the