Rage the Night by Donna Morrissey EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Donna Morrissey
- Language: English
- Genre: Action & Adventure Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
To the far side of the graveyard the knotted white spine of an old birch
stands resolute against the night sky. Its branches, naked beneath skullcaps
of snow, reach for the serenity of the stars, indifferent as they are to the
awful secret that lies beneath its gnarled roots.
Stepping over the partially buried pickets of the broken-down fence, he
clumps knee-deep through unbroken snow, circles past white-humped
headstones, and kneels beside the one hump nearly hidden at the base of the
old birch. He sits back, bare hands folded before his mouth: not in prayer, to
keep from crying out perhaps, but he’s not sure what he would say—yes,
no, be there, please don’t be there.
He smashes through the mantle of snow and the hard edge of granite
bites his hands. Beneath the faint light of a horned moon he sees a chiselled
name. Frances Elizabeth. As the old nurse said.
It’s nice to meet you, Frances Elizabeth.
He closes his eyes. He sees her, Frances Elizabeth, rocking beside an
open hearth whose fire dances, warming the hands that are folded across her
belly and the infant curled within. The fire dances brighter from a gust of
wind rustling down the chimney. It emblazons her with its light, yet when
he looks at her face he sees only shadow.
He beats down more snow, revealing more words:
, 1879 – 1894,
His heart pumps hard. He digs at the snow with the heel of his boot to
the base of the stone. There are no more words. No surname etched into the
headstone that might connect her to the living.
The blue light of the moon filters through the branches of the encircling
oaks and the air quivers.
You are dead, Frances Elizabeth, yet the air around you is shaped with
spirits and your shadow looms longer in death than in the late evening sun.
He is struck with a desire to beat the remaining snow from this cold
grave, to shovel down through the earth until he reaches Frances Elizabeth
and the little nest of bones upon her skeletal breast. Then all would be still,
the spirits pummelled back into their graves and he restored to what he was
before the old nurse spun out her confessions.
Retracing his footsteps through the graveyard, he returns to the snowtrodden path leading to Doctor Grenfell’s two-storey hospital. As he walks
down its drafty, darkish hallway a door opens and Missus Grenfell stands
there, her stout frame nearly blocking the doorway, her handsome face
etched with concern.
“Where did you go?” She reaches for his arm as he pushes past her.
“Roan, restrain yourself.”
He goes to the bed where the old nurse lies wasting into death. He grips
the edge of her bedding as though to strip naked her hoard of secrets, but
she is gone. Nurse Ivy is gone: eyes sealed, face shrivelling, a dribble of
black liquid leaking from one corner of her mouth
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