EBOOK
About
EVERY STORY IS THE STORY OF A SECRET
This is a story that unfolds across two far-flung centuries, across two worlds. In each, the lives of a father and his two daughters are about to be catapulted into crisis.
France. 1284. In the heat of an August night, Christina-sister of Marguerite, daughter of the heretic sculptor Giles of Beauvais-struggles to keep a secret. The year is also 2001. We're in Chicago, where Christina Carver, daughter of rebel physicist Dr Giles Carver, also keeps a secret, even from her sister Maggie. When a bell rings for matins-when a telephone rings in the middle of the night-Christina will fail to wake and all six lives will change forever. ALISON MacLEOD was born in Canada and has lived in the UK since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels, and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013, and a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. MacLeod is the joint winner of the 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University.
1
The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.
She slept deeply. There was a commotion outside, some panic at the site, but she didn't wake.
The night before, she hadn't wanted to sleep. She'd told her sister she was hungry, that she could eat a dog, a baby, the moon; that she was hot, too hot to lie there together in bed, the two of them rolling into the dip, their arms and legs smacking in the muggy heat; that the sky was crazy with summer lightning and they should go outside and see; that her bees would be restless under such a sky — they'd swarm come morning if she wasn't careful; that each of her bees was a memory in her head, a syllable of sweetness and light ready to sting her conscience; that she'd seen a bear dancing on the cathedral steps that afternoon and the hurdy-gurdy player had told her that bears will try to make love to women because they mate on two legs, not four; that she'd heard a Dominican tell a crowd by the bathhouse that there are 301,655,722 angels and so many demons in the air, a needle dropped from heaven to earth must strike one; that, par le diable, she was hot.
'Marguerite,' she'd said, turning to her sister, 'are you asleep? Marguerite?'
There was an explosion of stone. The man known as l'Ymagier — the Imaginator — ran into the street in the direction of the lodge. But he only got as far as the scaffolding at what was to be the west tower.
He'd seen it once before.
It took five men three hundred steps on the great wheel to lift even a hundredweight of stone ten feet. The bishop was insisting the vaults of St Pierre would reach an unimaginable one hundred and sixty feet. And the work was to be done faster, so the hoists were growing by the day, and suddenly every drooling halfwit knew the measure of faith: at Beauvais, the cathedral would rise above Notre Dame, above Chartres, above even Amiens. Its towers would scatter the stars.
One of the five that morning had missed the count, lost his footing. The load came crashing to the ground, spinning the treadmill backwards like a frenzied wheel of fortune at a Michaelmas fair, breaking each man's legs over and over again.
Quarrymen,lime carriers, plasterers, pointers, artificers, scaffolders and stone cutters knelt where they stood. L'Ymagier too went down on his knees, if self-consciously. He was not easy with common observances. Somebody was shouting for the master mason. Chalk dust had turned the air to a milky film. Traders from the market were arriving, breathless — they'd heard it too. Loud as God's fist. A monk from St Germer led the crowd in a prayer for the five. Three of them fainted as they were lower
This is a story that unfolds across two far-flung centuries, across two worlds. In each, the lives of a father and his two daughters are about to be catapulted into crisis.
France. 1284. In the heat of an August night, Christina-sister of Marguerite, daughter of the heretic sculptor Giles of Beauvais-struggles to keep a secret. The year is also 2001. We're in Chicago, where Christina Carver, daughter of rebel physicist Dr Giles Carver, also keeps a secret, even from her sister Maggie. When a bell rings for matins-when a telephone rings in the middle of the night-Christina will fail to wake and all six lives will change forever. ALISON MacLEOD was born in Canada and has lived in the UK since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels, and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013, and a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. MacLeod is the joint winner of the 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University.
1
The world yearns. This is its sure gravity: the attraction of bodies. Earth for molten star. Moon for earth. A hand for the orb of a breast. This is its movement too: the motion of desire, of a longing toward.
She slept deeply. There was a commotion outside, some panic at the site, but she didn't wake.
The night before, she hadn't wanted to sleep. She'd told her sister she was hungry, that she could eat a dog, a baby, the moon; that she was hot, too hot to lie there together in bed, the two of them rolling into the dip, their arms and legs smacking in the muggy heat; that the sky was crazy with summer lightning and they should go outside and see; that her bees would be restless under such a sky — they'd swarm come morning if she wasn't careful; that each of her bees was a memory in her head, a syllable of sweetness and light ready to sting her conscience; that she'd seen a bear dancing on the cathedral steps that afternoon and the hurdy-gurdy player had told her that bears will try to make love to women because they mate on two legs, not four; that she'd heard a Dominican tell a crowd by the bathhouse that there are 301,655,722 angels and so many demons in the air, a needle dropped from heaven to earth must strike one; that, par le diable, she was hot.
'Marguerite,' she'd said, turning to her sister, 'are you asleep? Marguerite?'
There was an explosion of stone. The man known as l'Ymagier — the Imaginator — ran into the street in the direction of the lodge. But he only got as far as the scaffolding at what was to be the west tower.
He'd seen it once before.
It took five men three hundred steps on the great wheel to lift even a hundredweight of stone ten feet. The bishop was insisting the vaults of St Pierre would reach an unimaginable one hundred and sixty feet. And the work was to be done faster, so the hoists were growing by the day, and suddenly every drooling halfwit knew the measure of faith: at Beauvais, the cathedral would rise above Notre Dame, above Chartres, above even Amiens. Its towers would scatter the stars.
One of the five that morning had missed the count, lost his footing. The load came crashing to the ground, spinning the treadmill backwards like a frenzied wheel of fortune at a Michaelmas fair, breaking each man's legs over and over again.
Quarrymen,lime carriers, plasterers, pointers, artificers, scaffolders and stone cutters knelt where they stood. L'Ymagier too went down on his knees, if self-consciously. He was not easy with common observances. Somebody was shouting for the master mason. Chalk dust had turned the air to a milky film. Traders from the market were arriving, breathless — they'd heard it too. Loud as God's fist. A monk from St Germer led the crowd in a prayer for the five. Three of them fainted as they were lower