The Man Who Rained (30 page)

She felt the earth’s deep electricity filling up the church below her, just as the floodwater filled the streets. It flushed up from ancient rocks and secret subterranean caverns, from the
gyro of the great globe itself, up into the foundations and the vaults, rising through the stone walls, surging up the church’s pillars, playing over buttresses and arches, adding its whine
to the bell’s hum. It filled every cell of her body. Billions of particles of the earth’s electricity channelled into her, a mountain of energy of which she was the peak. Her jaw fell
heavily open. Her mouth tasted full of lead.

‘Finn,’ she managed to croak. She couldn’t move. She could sense the energy rising out from the top of her head, lifting her hair with it, reaching up for the storm. She closed
her eyes and imagined Finn’s face was only an inch away from hers.

A pillar of white. Everything in freeze-frame. Raindrops suspended like perfect pearls. And everything getting whiter and whiter until it was all so searing and bright that it was as if her eyes
had been replaced with stars. She heard a scream from somewhere. She guessed it was her own.

The lightning didn’t strike. It set their connection on fire.

Elsa came to. She thought she had opened her eyes because she could see lights twinkling in their hundreds. After a moment she realized she wasn’t blinking. The lights
were inside her head and her eyelids were closed.

Somebody said something. Her body felt like a bottle bobbing on an ocean. She drifted back into unconsciousness.

She came to again, slower this time. She was lying on a firm but comfortable mattress. There were no lights, only the blotched darkness of her closed eyelids. With great
effort, she opened them. Looking at anything felt like staring into the sun, so she quickly shut them again.

Somebody spoke, but the words were just fuzz in her ears. She tried once more to open her eyes and found the bright world a fraction more bearable. She could make out surfaces, although they all
seemed aglow. A shape loomed over her. ‘Try to focus, Elsa.’

Slowly the shape took on colours, hundreds of them dancing a scintillating jig. Her eyes rolled out of concert with each other.

‘Elsa, it’s okay.’

She took a deep breath. The colours kaleidoscoped across her vision. She choked her need to cry out. At last the colours settled into rows of diamonds, each a different shade and each
sickeningly vivid. Together they made a pattern.

One of Kenneth Olivier’s jumpers.

She shielded her eyes.

‘Elsa!’ Kenneth cried out with relief. ‘Thank God! How are you feeling?’

She nodded and looked away, at anything but his clothing. This strange bare room she was lying in had grey stone walls, a grey stone floor and a grey stone ceiling, although her blurry vision
added green hues to everything she saw, as if the room were lit by gaslight.

‘Where am I?’ Her words tasted bitter.

‘Drink some water.’

She sipped from the glass he offered her, unable to look at him. The water felt like molten metal in her throat.

‘You’re in the nunnery of Saint Catherine. It’s where we take all people who are struck by lightning.’

Of course, she remembered it now. She had been on the belfry with the wind tearing at her clothes and the rain crackling in her ears. She had looked up at the pitch black underside of the storm
and whispered Finn’s name.

The lightning strike had lasted under a second, but she had experienced it as if in slow motion. It started with the air constricting, pressing bluntly at her jugular and the pulses in her
wrists. Then her hair had lifted as if she were underwater. She had stood very straight, her spine like a taut rope, and felt the connection her dad had described so many times. A line of
electrified air that had joined her to Finn’s storm. She’d stared upwards, awaiting the bolt, but it had not come down from the cloud. It had begun in
her
, her vision blazing
with more light than it felt possible for her eyeballs to contain. Then white fire had ascended in time with her whisper. ‘Finn.’

For a moment she’d felt so interconnected with him that it was as if they were inside each other’s minds. Her thoughts had boiled with things he remembered and things he felt,
carried on the lightning to the root of her imagination, so that they became as lucid as scenes of her own life flashing before her eyes. Betty turning out the light after kissing him goodnight; a
canary materializing out of sunlight on to his cupped palms; a mouse creeping over the doorstep of the bothy; a broken vase; a winter’s day when icicles hung as long as swords; Daniel
demonstrating how to fold paper birds; Betty laying out cakes and sandwiches for a picnic; starting a campfire by rubbing two logs together and feeling immeasurably pleased at the first fizzling
spark; the shockwave of lightning that had flicked Betty away from him; the self-hatred that followed; and at last
her
, on the day when he first saw her outside the ruined windmill.

Then, like a fire stamped out, all of it had been over and gone and she had tipped backwards into darkness.

Kenneth tried to stop her from sitting up. He needn’t have worried because a pain in her ribcage nailed her back to the mattress. She grunted as she hit the pillow.

‘Elsa, please go slowly. You need rest.’

‘Kenneth ...’ She tried to wet her dry lips, but her tongue was like a pebble. ‘He’s up there! I saw him ... in the lightning!’

She tried to sit up again, but hot tears of pain rolled from her eyes. She wheezed and screwed up the bed sheet in her fists. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing a good rest won’t heal, but all of your muscles seized up when the lightning struck. It will be a while before you can get out of bed.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s no good. I have to get back to him.’ Again she tried to sit up and again her muscles mutinied. She flopped back in stiff pain.

‘You can’t go anywhere,’ lulled Kenneth. ‘You simply need to rest.’

She began to sob, and her strained muscles doubled her hurt. She had connected with Finn, but she did not know what it meant to have done so. Even if, as it had seemed in the lightning strike,
he was up there somehow, disembodied in the chaos of the storm, how could she reach him if she were stuck in this bed?

Although the cell walls were built from thick stone, she thought she could hear a hushed rumble beyond. ‘Is he still there, Kenneth?’ she sniffed. ‘Please look out of the
window for me.’

The cell had a window that overlooked Thunderstown. With some reservation, Kenneth got up and peered out of it. After a moment he came back to her bedside. ‘It’s a strange thing. Up
here the night is so calm, but down there the storm is still raging, yes.’

She gasped with relief. She grabbed Kenneth’s hand and squeezed it fearfully. ‘How long do you think he can last for?’

‘Elsa, what do you mean?’

‘How much longer do you think he can rain for?’

‘I ... I don’t know what to say, Elsa. I think you should save your energy. It’s a terrible thing to lose a person. Preserve your strength.’

An appeal of thunder penetrated the cell. She could feel it in the springs of the mattress beneath her.

‘Don’t say I’ve lost him. How could you say I’ve lost him when you’ve seen for yourself he’s still up in the sky?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t know, Elsa. I just don’t know.’

When once again she tried to sit up she could barely even budge an inch. The bed felt like a coffin and she grunted in frustration.

‘Elsa, Elsa,’ soothed Kenneth. ‘Rest. Things are going to be tough for you. You need to look after yourself. You can’t leave this bed until tomorrow.’

Stuck like this, any hope that she’d woken with deserted her. Back came the powerlessness that she’d felt in Candle Street, and a red-hot hatred for Sidney Moses and Abe Cosser, and
a sense that love – in which she had banked her trust – had betrayed her.

Her dad, too, had let her down. His old story about the lightning’s path to connection – she had been sure that would be her rescue. But what good did it do to connect with Finn for
only a fraction of a second? All it did was demonstrate how helpless she was.

‘Elsa,’ Kenneth mopped her mouth with a handkerchief, ‘you are very unwell. Perhaps you should go back to sleep.’

‘How can I sleep when he’s right there? When the next time I wake he might have rained himself away?’

‘Just know that you are among friends and we will do all we can. Dot will be back soon. And Daniel, I expect.’

‘Daniel?’

‘Yes. He was here for a while after he brought you in. He waited by your bedside and fussed about you and argued with the nuns over what was best for you. Then, when you almost came to
earlier, he panicked. He said he’d be the last person you’d want to see, and headed off to hide in the chapel. As for me, I’m just glad he found you. If he hadn’t thought to
check the church was secured against the storm ... I dread to think what would have happened.’

Eventually Elsa managed to drink some more water, but that used up all her energy. After that Kenneth wished her well and said he should go and fetch Dot, who would want to check in on her now
she was awake. He hesitated, then kissed her, father-like, on the forehead. He nodded after doing this, embarrassed but satisfied, and shuffled out of the room.

She exhaled, taking in the stony shade of her surroundings. Her eyes were still hypersensitive from the lightning, making her bed seem to stretch forever, a nightmare of perspective headed for
her distant feet. A moth flew in silence around the ceiling, and she wished she could share in its fluttering freedom. There was a chair and a low bedside table, but there was not so much as a vase
of flowers or a Bible occupying it. The room was as bereft of distractions as she was of ways to get to Finn.

The door opened and somebody cleared their throat to request entry.

‘Come in.’

Not Dot but Daniel, who stopped just inside the doorway and bobbed there in an agitated manner that she wasn’t used to seeing in him. ‘Elsa, it is good to see you awake. Um ...
I’ll go away again if you would prefer.’

‘No, it’s okay.’ Anything to take her mind off itself. ‘I’m just surprised to see you. Kenneth said you were holed up in the chapel.’

He looked unkempt, as if he had slept there, but he sat down urgently at her side and bent his bearded head close to hers. ‘Elsa, I ... I have come to apologize. I have been a fool beyond
reckoning. I never should have tried to get in the way of you and Finn. I hope there is something, someday, that I can do to make it up to you.’

She sighed. His interferences seemed like years ago now. ‘Unless you can turn clouds back into men, I doubt there’s anything you can do.’

He ran his hands back through his hair. ‘I will see to Sidney Moses.’

She grimaced. ‘I don’t want to know. I can’t bear to think about him.’

He nodded, and bunched his fists together between his knees. After he had heard what the townsfolk had done, he had been full of the need for justice. He had considered taking his rifle to the
Moses residence, but he had been needed elsewhere. He knew, from bitter experience, what unfulfilled love could do to a life, and he longed somehow to save Elsa from the agony of it.

‘Is it true,’ she asked, ‘that you apologized to Finn?’

‘Yes. Although now my promise is as good as broken. I would have made it mean something with deeds, but I never got the chance.’

 ‘Do you ... do you think he’s gone, then? Kenneth was talking as if he had.’

‘I don’t know. There is a storm above Thunderstown, so in a sense he is still there. Elsa ... what possessed you to go up to the belfry?’

She told him about her dad’s lightning mantra, and how on its advice she had climbed the church tower. Daniel listened gloomily, and after she had finished he could see no more hope than
her.

He chewed his lip. ‘Elsa, you know I have never been good at letting things go. Heaven knows I have spent my whole life clinging on to things that I should have left behind me. Only lately
have I learned that sometimes you have to let the past leave you. You cannot return to it, and if you cling to it life marches on without you.’

She covered her eyes. ‘It’s just that ... when the lightning struck me, I saw him there. I can’t give up on him after that. But I don’t know what I can do now.’

‘You misunderstand me. I meant to say that I will not let go of him, even if every last raindrop falls out of the sky. Even if every last trace of him evaporates and the sun shines
through. They will say I am mad, no doubt, and that this particular madness of mine has held me back my whole life. But that will only make me well practised.’

‘Thank you. That means something to me.’ Elsa stared up at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and it made a dry rasping noise like the call of a crow. Daniel steepled his big blunt
fingers and pressed them to his forehead, tapping them against his brow while he thought. Far past the nunnery walls, the thunder moaned once more, but now the noise just made her hurt. There would
have been a time when she would have enjoyed the hard light enforced on the world by the death of a thundercloud, when the sun knocked down the storm wall and bored a rainbow through air it had
turned violet. Now she dreaded that spectacle more than anything else.