Water, Stone, Heart - By Will North Page 0,90

hedge of stone and, to his amazement, passed right over it. It was only a few moments later, as the stronger force far beneath the surface of the flood worked on the base of his creation, that the entire structure seemed to soften before his eyes and slowly, elegantly melt away. It put him in mind of something without real substance, like a bowl of ice cream dissolving on a sunny café table. It made no sound as it vanished—at least no sound he could hear above the thunder of the flood itself—and Jamie thought this a form of passing he would like to emulate when his own time came. It was dignified, a sort of yielding to the inevitable.

The connected shops along Bridge Walk—the continuous block of stone-built structures that included the Cornish Stores general store, the Spinning Wheel Restaurant, the Rock Shop, the Boscastle Bakery, and the sixteenth-century building that housed the Riverside Hotel—had become an island in the stream. The Valency normally ran peacefully behind the buildings, and the apartments above the shops had balconies to take advantage of the river view.

There was a small footbridge over the river leading to tables in a popular tea garden on the bank opposite the hotel. Both had vanished. The front side of this block of buildings normally faced the main road through town. The road, too, had disappeared, to become an entirely new branch of the Valency—a vicious, snarling water beast that ripped at anything in its path and carried with it a swirling, pitching stew of half-drowned automobiles, trees, recycling bins, fences, and traffic signs, all of it just so much detritus purged by what seemed an insanely vengeful God of Street Sweeping, intent on flushing the entire village into the ocean.

Jeffrey and Sheila Miles, owners of the Riverside Hotel, had evacuated guests from their rooms and diners from the restaurant sometime after 4:00 p.m., when water began seeping under the back wall, behind which the river flowed. The guests fled quickly; no one paid his bill, but it hardly mattered. Jeffrey had decided that the newer concrete building that housed the Cornish Stores at the other end of the block would be better able to withstand the flood and had hauled Sheila uphill through the now knee-deep water to shelter with the owners, their friends André and Trisha LeSeur.

Jeffrey and Sheila were so intent on reaching the Cornish Stores, and on doing so without being swept away, they barely noticed the fire brigade volunteers frantically working to secure the front door of the Boscastle Bakery against the rapidly rising floodwater. Inside, Ethan and Debbie Churchill and their two young assistants had been baking batches of saffron buns in the bakery's massive gas ovens when, as at the Riverside, water began seeping through their back wall. The fire brigade volunteers, who'd ducked into the bakery to phone for more emergency assistance, knew what those outside did not: that it was suicidal to be wading through the flood at the rate it was rising. They ordered the bakery staff upstairs and, once the outside door was secured, they plodded—in firemen's boots that having been overtopped by the floodwater now felt like lead weights on their feet—to the next shop, the Spinning Wheel Restaurant. Once inside, they struggled to force the doors closed against a thigh-deep torrent. Neither they nor the restaurant owners, Rory and Jennifer Dunn, would ever use those doors again, because at that moment, the wall of water that had crashed through the car park now swept past the shops and instantly raised the water level to halfway up the restaurant's windows. The fire brigade members and the owners retreated to the apartment upstairs.

At the Rock Shop, Sandy White had sensed trouble the moment she noticed water gushing through the street. She did a quick assessment of the shop, locked the front door, and calmly began boxing up what was most valuable: the wine. When she'd carried the last of the cartons upstairs, she phoned her husband, Ron, who was off on a buying trip in London, and told him to double his orders. “I think we may lose some inventory,” she said. In fact, they would lose almost everything.

Next door at the bakery, the river smashed through the back wall and flushed everything in the shop, including the massive oven, out into the street, where it was gripped by the current and ripped downstream to the harbor.

The sheer force of the cresting river shook the Cornish