Water, Stone, Heart - By Will North Page 0,97

made of paper instead of stone. The entire building shuddered and the massive beams and pegged joists supporting the upper story groaned.

Nicola clung to the banister at the top of the stairs as the house lurched. The glass in her beloved studio window shattered, but the frame held. There was no way to know how long the structure would last, and she knew she needed to flee. But like many old cottages, there was only one way out: down the stairs. And the lower floor was flooded to the ceiling. Unlike her neighbor Trudy, she had no back garden; her house was backed by a sheer slate cliff face.

When she heard the rescue helicopters thumping up the valley, her head instinctively jerked upward and she saw, at last, her escape. She placed the wrapped portrait on her paint stand and, with her eyes clenched tight, smashed a wooden chair through the glass of the old skylight in the loft's sloping rear roof. On the second try, it splintered like an antique Christmas ornament, raining razor-sharp shards on her head. She shook them out of her hair as best she could, then pulled a folding step stool beneath the hole. With a pillow from her bed, she snapped off the remaining bits of glass in the window frame. Then she tied the drop cloth holding Ella around her neck and, grateful at long last for her height, pulled herself out onto the wet slate roof.

But that was as far as she could get. The distance to the roof peak was too great and the slate too slick for her to climb higher. And so she sat there in the downpour, her feet braced against the frame of the skylight, and prayed the cottage would hold.

By 5:15, the rain gauge at Lesnewth had recorded no significant rain for nearly forty-five minutes; in Boscastle, however, the rain was so diabolically heavy and the visibility was so poor that Captain McLelland called to the crew in Rescue 193, “Check your orientation points in case we ditch!”

Andrew had just managed to coax Lee down through the tree limbs toward the rushing water and the rope when he heard a shout.

“Andrew!”

He peered through the branches and saw Roger scrambling furiously upslope, and, a moment later, he saw why: yet another wall of water was funneling down the narrow valley, one so choked with debris that the water was barely visible, as if the surging mass were a torrent of trash. Effortlessly, the tidal wave ripped the young tree that held their rope from the ground like so much brush. Andrew tore open the quick-release knot at his waist and watched the rope whip away through the branches like a line on a harpooned whale.

“See?” Lee yelled, and just for a fraction of a second, he wanted to throttle the wise little kid. Instead, they climbed higher into the venerable old oak.

And there they sat. Roger had disappeared.

“Where's Daddy?” Lee cried, clinging to Andrew's soaked shirt. And Andrew prayed that he hadn't been sucked into the flood.

What Andrew didn't know was that Roger had heard the helicopters farther down the valley. Now, with their own rescue plan destroyed, he'd scrambled back up the hillside to his ATV. At the edge of the woods, he threw downed limbs, leaves, and a bale of just-mown hay into a pile until he heard the hammering rotors of one of the helicopters again. Then he poured half the contents of his spare fuel can on the pile and lit it. There was a towering explosion of flame, and then a thick, white cloud of smoke as the wet leaves and hay burned.

Then he waited. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 6:00 p.m. The rain had stopped. He willed a helicopter up-valley.

Nicola was desperately cold. It might have been August, but the rain felt arctic, and as if it were trying to suck the life out of her. Her calves, flexed to hold her against the skylight frame, kept cramping. The hard roof slates felt like ice cubes through her wet slacks. She was at the limit of her courage, and her consciousness. She drifted off to that night, not even a week ago, when Andrew was caressing her on her chaise—how flushed with warmth she had felt, how full of life and joy and tenderness, how loved. And it was to this memory, as much as to the roof, that she clung, waiting, praying to be seen. But the