Wakening the Crow Read Online Free PDF

swig of wine and licked her lips.
    ‘So what’s the protocol? I mean, with the tooth-fairy and all that?’ she said, pondering the issue with mock-seriousness. ‘The tooth’s come out, but we’ve lost it, so she can’t put it under her pillow and expect to find a sixpence in the morning, can she?’
    I frowned, assuming the gravity of the situation. ‘I don’t know, but I remember when one of my baby-teeth came out and I was playing football and I swallowed it... I still found a sixpence under my pillow the next morning. So I guess the tooth-fairy is allowed to use his own discretion in matters like this? Remind me, when we go up, and I’ll put a little something there.’
    ‘And so,’ she said, ‘what is it, this relic you’ve been dying to show me...’
    Not bothering to clear the plates and dishes from the table, we’d just switched off the lights and gone upstairs with our glasses and the rest of the wine. I’d tiptoed into Chloe’s room and slipped a newly-minted one-pound coin beneath her sleeping head. And then Rosie and I were tumbling into our own big bed. The heat of it was almost overwhelming, the enfolding warmth of the church tower and our awareness of the crackling of ice outside our windows, the tumbling heat of our bodies and the buzz of the wine in our heads. We seemed to sink into our deep soft pillows as we lay close and clinked our glasses, and then I opened the black velvet box I’d been waiting to show her.
    She reached for her specs from the bedside table. All of a sudden, despite her otherwise nakedness and the tousle of her hair, she assumed her previous authority as a dentist’s assistant.
    ‘A tooth, yes, it’s a human tooth. Quite old, I would say, from the yellow and brown discoloration. It’s from a child, yes, it’s what we call a primary or deciduous tooth, what the layman would call a baby tooth.’ She angled it this way and that and held it so close to her glasses that it almost touched the lens. ‘I would say it’s from the upper-left quadrant, I’m remembering Palmer’s notation, the chart we use to designate individual teeth. It has two cuspals or points, so it’s the tooth just behind the front-left canine. Yes, I’d say it’s the upper-left first bicuspid.’
    I was bursting to ask her. ‘Is it possible to say whether it’s from a boy or a girl? I mean, is it possible to tell the difference between a boy’s tooth and a girl’s?’
    ‘I don’t think it is possible, no,’ she answered, looking at me quizzically over the top of her glasses. ‘Children start losing their baby-teeth anytime around six years old, until they’re maybe twelve or thirteen. I seem to remember that girls tend to lose them and replace them with their adult teeth a bit earlier than boys do.’
    ‘And there’s this,’ I said, my voice hoarse with excitement. ‘Hey, I’m not saying that your super-scientific information isn’t interesting, because it is and it just helps to confirm this other thing... but look, inside the box, underneath the satin stuff, I found this.’
    It was a slip of paper, folded many times. It was yellow with age, freckled and blotched. When I unfolded it, very gently, trying not to let my hands shake too much, the inside of the paper was whiter, as though it had seldom been opened and exposed to the light, but the lines of the folds were brown. On it, there were a few words of faded copper-plate hand-writing.
    ‘You read it, Rosie. Just read it aloud, whatever you think it says. I’ve been re-reading it all day. I know what I think it says. Go ahead...’
    She squinted at the writing and read it, hesitating, pausing.
    ‘Dentem puer... ex eapoe... unum denarium... 29th oct 1819... barnsby md... Manor House School.’
    ‘It’s in Latin,’ I said, and I teased the piece of paper from her fingers. ‘It’s in Latin and...’ and the words seemed to tumble from me in one breathless rush, ‘it says that this is the tooth of a boy, dentem puer , and