Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue EPUB & PDF

Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Emma Donoghue
• Language: English
• Genre: Lesbian Fiction
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 2 MB
• Price: Free

My dear Lister,
Last night I went to the Manor again.
I open the door here—I don’t delay even to pick up a cape—and step out
across the village green. My shoes write inscrutable, fleeting messages on
the dewy grass. When I reach the moon-marked road, all I have to do is
follow it. In less than a quarter of an hour, at the walls of York, where
Bootham Bar has been arching for eight hundred years, here’s that antique
hodgepodge, King’s Manor, hiding our school behind its redbrick face.
The great medieval door with its lion and unicorn opens at my touch, and
I find myself in the scented courtyard.

I turn right to enter the Manor School
itself, where three generations of one family have watched over the betterborn daughters of the North. I walk invisible from one familiar, ramshackle
room to the next. Through the kitchen and pantry, refectory and offices, and
up the footworn stone stairs I float. Through the classrooms on the first
floor. Into the north wing, past the mistresses’ chambers, and up again, to
the second-floor attic. Past Cook’s room, then the one the four maids share,
then the box room full of trunks and portmanteaus. The fourth door is the
Slope’s, and it springs open to my fingertips.

You’ll understand my wishful fancy; I pay this visit, in fact all these
tender nightly visits, in my mind’s eye only. In the flesh, I’ve not passed the
lion and unicorn and entered our school in eight years. These days of course
I’m prevented, thwarted by circumstances beyond my control. But last year,
or in any of the intervening years since I left, although I often passed the
lovely old silhouette of King’s Manor, somehow—careless—I never
thought to knock on that ancient door. Eliza, I ask myself now, why didn’t
you go back while you still could?

You won’t be surprised that I so treasure these old haunts. It was in York
that I received my education; where I was stamped like warm wax by a seal,
formed once and for all. I know you’ll recall the song—where all the joy
and mirth made this town heaven on earth. At the Manor School, I tasted
heaven on earth even as I toiled to pack my poor skull with the knowledge
and wisdom I was told I’d need for life. The joke is, Lister, the only lesson I
learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you.

We two were so young—had barely seen the change of fourteen years, as
Capulet says of his daughter. Less than a twelvemonth the pair of us spent
under our Slope’s slanted ceiling, but there are fleeting times in life,
especially in youth, that shine out more strongly than all the rest and will
never fade: veins of gold in dull rock. For the rest of my life, I believe, I’ll
be transported back in dreams to memory’s private theatre, where our girl
selves still move and chat and laugh.

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