A Flower That's Free [antikvár]

Chapter One 'Here and there, everywhere, Scenes that we once knew, And they all just recall Memories of you' 'Memories of You' Andy Razaf and Eubie Blake, 1930 at one minute to six on the morning of 14 June, 1936, the black chicken on Kate Kingsley's alarm clock nodded up and down, in time with the ticking of the second hand, as it had done for the past fifteen years with only brief intervals for running repairs. The hour hand had already settled on the six, the minute hand was in the centre of the twelve. The clock had a face painted like a chubby, smiling sun, with broad, wedge-shaped rays fanning out against a blue sky dotted with clouds like white cottage loaves. At the bottom of the clock face, above and on either side of the six, were the black chicken, forever pecking at an invisible grain of corn, and a haughty red and green cockerel with one foot imperiously raised. The minute hand reached the middle of the twelve and the clock emitted a brief, tinny squawk before Kate's hand came down on top of it, sentencing it to another twenty-four hours of beaming, pecking silence. This is my last ordinary day here, thought Kate. Tomorrow, everything else begins. She wanted to go, but she didn't want to leave, and she was quite capable of accommodating these two apparently conflicting impulses. She knew very well that once she was on her way, the second 090