The Lost Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

the garden and reading aloud, and why is it so important to me, now, to know?
    And then I get to it. The page I've been dreading:
    The pocket almanac for 1836, January 11, has the following prophetic entry in Mrs Yelloly's hand: 'This year seems to begin cloudy and overcast. Oh! Let it by Thy pleasure to turn these shadows to our eternal benefit.'
    1837 - This prayer was answered in the following year for at least one of her children, for Nicholas passed from the night of clouds and sickness of this present world into the brightness of that land which has no need of the sun.
    That land which has no need of the sun. Victorian euphemism at its finest.
    Time passed and the New Year of 1838 opened on the party assembled at Woodton for the Christmas season, and Mrs Yelloly' s almanac opens with its accustomed prayer of thanksgiving and of hope, and with never a foreboding of the shadows of Azrael's wing which must even then have been hovering over her home, for Mary at that time must have been ill of the fell consumption which was so soon to terminate her young life.
    'In the spring John came home with the germs of smallpox, and Mary, to escape infection, was hurried off to Sam's bachelor quarters at Ipswich. John had long been consumptive but the fiercer microbe of the fever prevailed over its brother phthisis and, after his recovery from the smallpox, John was a hale man to the end of his days. Less fortunate was Jane, who succumbed to the infection on 21st June, and was buried at Woodton by night.
    'Anna and Harriet were both ill of the disease at the same time and, to add the culminating blow to the poor, distressed mother, Mary died of the shock of her hurried removal, at Ipswich, on the very day of Jane's death, and was brought home to Woodton by Sarah (who had nursed her) within the week, and the funeral sermon was preached for both sisters on the same day.
    'At the funeral sermon at Woodton, when Jane and Mary were buried, the preacher said: "Both were young and lovely; the one asked for, and had, the blessed sacrament on her deathbed, the other was delirious, but in her wanderings all her ravings were of singing hymns and pious words.'"
    Which of you is it who has the sacrament, you or Jane? And which of you is delirious and raving? If Jane dies of smallpox, then is it more likely that she's the feverish one? Or does it work the other way in that, understanding she's going to die, she has time to request a blessing?
    But you - you die of shock. It's not expected. Something in you just bends and snaps. One moment you're weak, you're ill, but still very much here. Next moment, you're gone. They can't think you are going to die or they would never send you off to Ipswich. Dying in Sam's bed, away from home. Breath stopped, goodbyes unsaid. Singing hymns and saying pious words - that seems unlikely. Are you delirious? Do you even know what's happening?
    And what about your mother, the twenty-two-year-old who knitted the purse full of poetry and hope? How does she cope with all of this? Is that pocket almanac stuffed with prayers really any consolation? Does she honestly believe that this - the systematic and painful decimation of her cheerful and creative young family - is some all-powerful and benign God's will?
    Suffolk, June 1838. The road to Woodton. Not day at all, but night - a hot, moonless, shapeless, starless June night. No shimmering hedgerows or blue skies, no poetry or hope - just a muddy old coach hurtling through the dry, dark lanes, kicking up the dust.
    So dark on this earth tonight that no one's even bothered to draw the curtains. Who, after all, is going to look in and see what's there on that punched leather seat?
    Two young women, one dead, one alive. The living one holding the dead one tight in her arms. The dead one's loose fair hair already wet with the living one's tears.

FLATLINE
    The long-awaited relief,
    after so many a laboured breath,
    it's all over now. It's been
    long lost amongst for