The Fire Child Read Online Free

am catching up, after twenty-five years of alarm clocks. I sometimes feel so leisured that my latent guilt kicks in, along with a hint of loneliness.
    I haven’t got any proper friends down here yet, so these last solitary weeks when I haven’t been in the house I’ve been using the hours to drive and hike the wild Penwith landscape. I love photographing the silent mine stacks, the salt-bitten fishing villages and the dark and plunging coves where, on all but the calmest days, the waves throw themselves psychotically at the cliffs. Though my favourite place so far is Zawn Hanna, the cove at the end of our own valley. Morvellan Mine stands above it, but I ignore its black shapes and instead gaze out at the sea.
    When occasional summer rain has sent me indoors I’ve tried completing my mental map of Carnhallow. I’ve finally counted the seventy-eight bedrooms and it turns out that there are, in fact, eighteen, depending on how you categorize the tiny, sad, echoing box rooms on the top floor, which were probably servants’ quarters, though they have an odd echo of the monastic cells which must once, I presume, have stood on this ground, in this lush little valley.
    Some days, standing alone in the dust of this top floor, when the sea-wind is combing through the rowans, it feels like I can hear the words of those monks, caught on the breeze:
Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum
…
    At other times I linger in the Drawing Room, my favourite part of Carnhallow, along with the kitchen and the gardens. I’ve checked out most of the books, from Nina’s volumes on antique silverware and Meissen porcelain to David’s many monographs on mainly modern artists: Klee, Bacon, Jackson Pollock. David has a particular liking for abstract expressionists.
    Last weekend I saw him sit and stare at the solid black and red blobs of a Mark Rothko painting for an hour, then he closed the book, looked at me, and said, ‘We’re all astronauts, really, aren’t we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.’ Then he got up and offered me Plymouth gin in a Georgian tumbler.
    But my biggest personal discovery has not been porcelain or paintings but a small dog-eared volume of photographs, hidden between two big fat books on Van Dyck and Michelangelo. When I first opened this battered little booklet it revealed startling monochrome images of historic Kerthen mines and the miners within them.
    The photos must, I reckon, be nineteenth century. I look at them almost every day. What amazes me about them is that the miners worked practically without light: all they had was the faint flicker of the tiny candles stuck in their felt hats. Which means that the moment the camera’s magnesium flash exploded was the only time in their lives when the miners properly saw where they worked, where they had spent every waking hour, digging and hewing and drilling. One precious fraction of brightness. Then back to lifelong darkness.
    The thought of those miners, who once toiled their lives away in the rocks right underneath me, stirs me into action. Get to work, Rachel Daly.
    The drawing is folded and set on the tray, which is warm from the sun. I carry the tray with the lemon-scented glasses into the coolness of the house, the airiness of the kitchen. Then I open my app. There are only two significant places left to explore: I’ve left them to last because they are the ones that give me the most concern. They are the worst of Carnhallow’s challenges.
    The first is the basement and the cellars.
    David showed me this bewildering labyrinth the day we arrived, and I have not revisited. Because the basement is a depressing place: a network of dismal corridors, grimed with dust, where rusted bells dangle below coiled springs, never to be heard again.
    There are many stairs down to the basement. I take the first set, outside the kitchen. Flicking on unreliable lights at the top of the steps, I pick my way down the creaking