The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Authors:Ken Follett
- Publish Date: September 15, 2020
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages:926
- Price: Free
Thursday, June 17, 997
It was hard to stay awake all night, Edgar found, even on the
most important night of your life.
He had spread his cloak over the reeds on the floor and
now he lay on it, dressed in the knee-length brown wool tunic that
was all he wore in summer, day and night. In winter he would wrap
the cloak around him and lie near the fire. But now the weather was
warm: Midsummer Day was a week away.
Edgar always knew dates. Most people had to ask priests, who
kept calendars. Edgar’s elder brother Erman had once said to him:
“How come you know when Easter is?” and he had replied: “Because
it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the twenty-first day
of March, obviously.”
It had been a mistake to add “obviously,”
because Erman had punched him in the stomach for being sarcastic.
That had been years ago, when Edgar was small. He was grown now.
He would be eighteen three days after Midsummer. His brothers no
longer punched him.
He shook his head. Random thoughts sent him drifting off. He
tried to make himself uncomfortable, lying on his fist to stay awake.
He wondered how much longer he had to wait.
He turned his head and looked around by firelight. His home was
like almost every other house in the town of Combe: oak-plank walls,
a thatched roof, and an earth floor partly covered with reeds from the
banks of the nearby river. It had no windows. In the middle of the
single room was a square of stones surrounding the hearth. Over the
fire stood an iron tripod from which cooking pots could be hung, and
its legs made spidery shadows on the underside of the roof. All
around the walls were wooden pegs on which were hung clothes,
cooking utensils, and boatbuilding tools.
Edgar was not sure how much of the night had passed, because he
might have dozed off, perhaps more than once. Earlier, he had
listened to the sounds of the town settling for the night: a couple of
drunks singing an obscene ditty, the bitter accusations of a marital
quarrel in a neighboring house, a door slamming and a dog barking
and, somewhere nearby, a woman sobbing. But now there was
nothing but the soft lullaby of waves on a sheltered beach.
He stared
in the direction of the door, looking for telltale lines of light around
its edges, and saw only darkness. That meant either that the moon
had set, so the night was well advanced, or that the sky was cloudy,
which would tell him nothing.
The rest of his family lay around the room, close to the walls
where there was less smoke. Pa and Ma were back-to-back.
Sometimes they would wake in the middle of the night and embrace,
whispering and moving together, until they fell back, panting; but
they were fast asleep now, Pa snoring. Erman, the eldest brother at
twenty, lay near Edgar, and Eadbald, the middle one, was in the
corner. Edgar could hear their steady, untroubled breathing.
At last, the church bell struck.
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