Wakening the Crow Read Online Free PDF Page B

a teacher, a man called Dr Barnsby, barnsby md , who was the headmaster of a boarding-school for boys called the Manor House School in the early 1800s, he kept a record of the penny, unum denarium , the penny he gave to the boy for the tooth he’d lost... yes, like the tooth-fairy, but keeping an account because... well, I guess because a penny was quite a lot in those days and if he was running a school with fifty or eighty or a hundred little boys he’d want to keep a record for his accounts and...’
    She was looking at me sideways. She took off her specs. She swallowed a mouthful of wine from her glass and then held it to my lips for me to drink too. As she reached to the bedside table to put the glass down, her breasts lifted and the warm scent of jasmine rose from her body.
    ‘And Rosie, he was here, in England...’ I was saying, although my tongue was loose with the wine and my excitement. ‘Edgar Allan Poe, he was here when he was a boy in around 1818 or so, and he went to a school called the Manor House School and the headmaster was a man called Dr Barnsby and he...’
    She silenced my mouth with hers. At the same time, she snapped shut the little velvet box with the tooth and the slip of paper inside it and pushed it deep down into the bedclothes.

 
    Chapter Six
     
     
    D ARKNESS. W E BOTH woke very suddenly.
    It could have been midnight, not long after we’d made love and fallen into an exhausted sleep. It could have been the small hours: two or three o’clock in the morning and the streets frozen into silence. It could have been seven o’clock, and Rosie’s alarm about to rouse her, grumbling and groaning, for another day at work.
    A deep darkness. And yet softened by the glow of a golden streetlamp, outside on the corner, near the doorway of the church.
    Someone, something, was moving in our room.
    ‘Chloe?’ I sat up. Rosie was already sitting up. She was staring into the shadows. I caught the gleam of her eyes and the glisten of her open mouth. ‘Chloe, my darling... what are you doing?’
    She was standing at the foot of our bed. In her cotton night-dress, her hair tumbling to her shoulders, she seemed to be staring at us, as now, we both sat up and stared at her. She wasn’t smiling. She had the puzzled, petulant look on her face of the old Chloe. She had her eyes on us, but no, I realised that she didn’t really see. She was asleep. Asleep, and listening. Every wire and fuse in her body and her bewildered little brain was a-buzz with the energy of listening.
    ‘Hey baby...’ Rosie slipped out of our bed and moved around to her. ‘Hey baby, let’s get you back into bed... or do you want to come into bed with Mummy and Daddy?’
    But Chloe squirmed away from her. As she did so, the two of us, me and Rosie, we held our breath and listened too, as if we could tune into the wavelength of the restive child. And we heard it, we seemed to hear what the girl was hearing, and we glanced at each other with a tiny gasp of relief.
    ‘It’s only Mouse,’ Rosie whispered. ‘It’s Mr. Mouse, that’s all. Let’s go and see what he’s doing and tell him it’s bedtime and he’s got to go to bed and go to sleep...’
    I followed, as Rosie very gently and slowly walked the child out of our bedroom and back into her own. Indeed, there it was, the mouse was in its cage, on its treadmill. I’d done everything I could to silence the turning of the wheel, with a drop of oil here and a smear of soap there, so that the busy little beast could run as many miles as it liked in the dead of night without keeping Chloe awake. But now, maybe because the world outside was stopped so utterly and locked into an icy stillness, the wheel was just audible. No more than a hiss and a click, but it must have woken the child.
    Rosie nodded at me, and I understood her nod, as she manoeuvred Chloe to her own bed. By the time she was tucked into the bedclothes, I’d reached into the mouse’s cage, persuaded it off the