Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

and around the town, birth and courting and death, hunger and aggression and the ceaseless proclamations echoing over the roofs. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap. There is nothing for breakfast but the bakery will be open by now.

This is the first time she has taken the boat. She and Tom walked around the estuary to Flushing in the summer, stopping to picnic in a glade of beech trees where the leaves were already beginning to turn and drift into the lapping waves. Tom played at building towers and then walls of pebbles. Every dry-stone waller, he said, understands the basic principles of engineering, every shepherd who builds a sheepfold and fisherman who makes a dock. Every mother who knits a jumper, she asked, but he didn’t need to tell her that knitting offers no challenge to gravity. Well, he said, it is not knitting but what is a corset if not a cantilever? In three months’ time he will be home.

She reaches the quay and buys a ticket from a man who calls her ‘me lover.’ She has often stood on the pier before, but never climbed down the stone steps to the water where the boat approaches. It is like descending into a basement, one’s head at the waist and then knee height of the people left behind. The tide is low and under the pier the waves hiss and echo. Seaweed hangs limp against the pilings and she glimpses fish nosing in the shadows. Those are pearls that were his eyes. She allows the boatman to help her into the boat, tugged on its ropes by each wave. She folds herself into a corner of the stern, glad that her gloves cover her whitening knuckles. Dozens of people do this every day, and the water is dense with boats and sailors doubtless competent in a rescue. She looks up at the sunlit trees on the opposite shore and then back over the town. A new perspective. Falmouth appears to advantage from the water, the windows of its white terraces sparkling and the palm trees bowing over gardens and public greens. A flag flies from the square tower of King Charles the Martyr, the Quaker Meeting House is raised high above the taverns and the synagogue broods on the hill. Sun flashes from the windows of the school on St Clare’s Terrace and Ally wonders if there are children inside looking out at the water, imagining themselves in her place and waiting for the day they can leave the schoolroom and follow their fathers out onto the high seas. Or their mothers into kitchens and bars, into lives shadowed by waiting and wondering, and fearing in some cases the day the husband and father comes home and in others the day he doesn’t. As the boatman pulls away from the pier, across the water and over the one part of the estuary open to the sea, Ally keeps her eyes on her new home.

Dr. Crosswyn sent her the address: Rose Tree House, Mylor Church Lane, but even after she’s found Mylor Church Lane with the help of an old man sitting on the pier, she can’t find the house. On one side the wooded hillside rises, impenetrable as a fairy-tale forest, and on the other imposing gateways announce the bloated follies inhabited by Falmouth’s richest men, the church-sized houses adorned with pickings from the boneyard of European architecture, turrets and watchtowers, onion domes and balconies. Doric columns support gothic arches and stone crenellations erupt out of red-brick bay windows. No-one, surely would choose such a thing for a convalescent home, even if the asylum could buy a building of grandeur. The coals, she thinks, the plumbing, the servants required to fetch and carry. It is the committee’s intention that the residents will act as the Home’s cooks and housekeepers, this being judged an excellent training for their discharge. But here? She checks her letter again. In a few minutes she will be late. He said the house was in the village. She must have come too far.

She has turned back when she hears hooves. A pony and trap comes around the corner. Dr. Crosswyn waves. It is the first time she has seen him outdoors and it is strange, somehow, to see him in a hat, holding the reins, as if like the patients he might be expected to exist only within the walls of the asylum. She approaches the carriage, staying well back from the horse. Dr. Crosswyn leans out to offer his hand.

‘Please do climb up. See, there is plenty of room. How are you, my dear? How does it suit you, to be back in Cornwall?’

His gaze runs from the toes of her boots up the blue suit to the hat she chose from Aunt Mary’s milliner. Madwomen are usually but not invariably dishevelled or eccentric in their dress as mad men, interestingly, are not.

‘I am well, Dr. Crosswyn. Quite recovered. And it is a great pleasure to be back.’

He nods and flaps the reins, which makes the horse set off again. ‘That is good news. And Mr. Cavendish will be home later in the spring, I understand?’

From whom, she wonders. Dr. Crosswyn lives in Truro, not Falmouth, and it seems unlikely that there is any indirect connection between Penvenick and the asylum. ‘I hope so, yes.’

‘Splendid.’

She had missed Rose Tree House because the name and the gatepost itself is hidden by brambles and ivy. The driveway is so narrow that thorns and branches squeak along the side of Dr. Crosswyn’s carriage and the wheels jerk and bump.

‘We could walk,’ Ally suggests. ‘Your paintwork.’

He clucks to the horse. ‘One could go nowhere around here if one worried about paintwork. But even so I will have someone tend the drive. We want the patients to have visitors, family and friends. I thought perhaps an At Home once a week, let them practice tea and entertaining and