The Secret of Lost Things. Sheridan Hay

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER ONE

      I was born before this story starts, before I dreamed of such a place as the Arcade, before I imagined men like Walter Geist existed outside of fables, outside of fairy tales. My time at the Arcade would have gone very differently but for him, for his blindness. His eyes were very nearly useless when I met him, and were it not for his condition, I would never have known about Herman Melville’s lost book. Walter Geist’s blindness is important, but it’s my own, with regard to him, that remains a lasting regret. It’s the reason for this story. If I start with my own beginning you will understand how I came to the Arcade, and how it came to mean so much to me.

      I was born on April twenty-fifth, never mind what year precisely; I’m not so young that I care to put my age about, but not so old now that I forget the girl I was.

      My birth date, however, is significant in another sense. April twenty-fifth is Anzac Day, the most important day of commemoration on the Australian calendar. It is the day when Australians pin sprigs of rosemary to their breasts to remember those lost to war, to remember that first great loss, at Gallipoli, where rosemary grows wild on the beaches. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia, once she’s lost her mind to grief. “Pray you, love, remember.”

      It was April twenty-fifth on the island state of Tasmania, when my mother saw stalks of spiky rosemary pinned over hearts, the day she walked to the free public hospital to give birth to me, walked through the crowded Square trying to avoid the ragged annual parade of veterans and gawking locals. СКАЧАТЬ