Read Online The Tide Knot by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online Page B

leads down to our cottage and Mary’s. Our cottage will have lights on in the windows by now. It gets dark early in November. Granny Carne knows her way in the dark. I’m glad that I don’t have to walk past there and see other people living in my home. I wonder if the curtains are the same red checked curtains that Mum made when we were little. They always looked so welcoming with the light shining through them when we came home from school on winter afternoons.
      I wonder if the people who are living in our cottage ever go down to our cove. I wonder if they will ever catch sight of Faro or Elvira sitting on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, where Conor and I first met them. I hope they don’t. I’m not just being selfish in hoping that. If they see the Mer, their lives won’t ever be the same again.
      But Granny Carne’s cottage is at least two miles from the sea. I don’t know how far inland the power of Ingo can reach, but Granny Carne’s cottage definitely belongs to Earth.
      Maybe that’s why Sadie is sleeping so peaceful y by the stove. I don’t feel peaceful, though. I’m going to stay because of Sadie, but I wish I didn’t have to. I’m not at home here.  
      It takes a long time to get ready for the night at Granny Carne’s. I help her carry in more wood from the stack in her woodshed and fill the scuttle full of coal. The stove’s got to be kept going through the night. Before Granny Carne goes to bed, she riddles the stove out with an iron poker with a hook on its end. By the time she finishes, the hook glows red. I help shovel out the hot ash into the ash pan. Granny Carne says ash is good for the earth, and she’ll spread it on her vegetable patch tomorrow, when the ash is cold. She stokes up the stove with logs and a thick layer of fine coal and closes the damper on the front.
      Suddenly I remember something. “We had a stove like this when I was little, before Mum got electric heaters.”
      “That was the way everywhere before the electric came.” Granny Carne talks as if electricity had only just been invented. “They’ll never bring the electric all the way up here, but I don’t miss it,” Granny Carne continues. She has lit the kerosene lamps. I like the light they give. It’s soft and yellow, and it gives warm color to the white walls. She uses kerosene lamps downstairs and candles upstairs. “You don’t need a lot of light to sleep by,” she says.
      The cottage smell s of candles and woodsmoke, kerosene and stone. There are big shadows in the corners of the room. It’s not a frightening place exactly, but it has too much power to be comfortable. I’m glad Sadie’s here. If I wake up in the night, I’ll hear her breathing, and if I say her name, she’ll wake up at once.
      Granny Carne gets slowly to her feet from where she’s been kneeling by the stove. She mutters something, too quietly for me to hear.
      “Now he’ll sleep through the night,” she says. “Praise fire, and he’ll serve you well .”
      “Does your fire ever go out?”
      “He’s been alive as long as I have, my girl. Sometimes he’s burned low, but he’s never died.”
      “Granny Carne?” I ask hesitantly. “How long have you—I mean—how many years—”
      She looks at me with her arms folded. Her fierce owl eyes are bright with amusement. She knows exactly what I eyes are bright with amusement. She knows exactly what I want to know, because it’s what everybody in Senara has asked themselves, one time or another. How old is Granny Carne? How many years has she been living up there in her cottage, with people from the village coming to see her privately when they have troubles to which they can’t find an answer? Years…decades…or even centuries?
      “I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth, Sapphire,” she says. “Does that answer your question?”
      “No,” I say boldly.
      “You want more?”
      “Yes.”
      “You ask a