I, Huckleberry , livre ebook

Marshall Cavendish International - Simon Chesterman

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103 pages

English

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Magna Carta: The most famous legal text in history. The foundation of the rule of law. Stolen. When Huckleberry Jones is packed off by his parents from New York to a camp for "exceptional teenagers" at Oxford University, his first question is: Why? But meeting the beautiful, enigmatic Kat might just make his time there worthwhile. Together with new friends Mei and Tshombe, he discovers that teenagers from four continents can have more in common than their differences. Then Huck finds himself trapped in a mystery linked to an 800-year-old parchment-and solving it could cost him his life.

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Publié par	Marshall Cavendish International
Date de parution	26 juin 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789814893541
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Praise for Raising Arcadia
A 16-year-old girl detective stars in a mystery paying tribute to Sherlock Holmes This series opener is pleasurably packed with clever, solvable, well-explained puzzles; hits the spot for a mystery lover.
Kirkus Reviews
First-time novelist Chesterman creates an engrossing story that keeps readers chasing the truth. Fans of quirky protagonists, puzzling mysteries, and spy craft will enjoy this.
School Library Journal
It was intoxicating to have such a strong character use intellect rather than supernatural abilities or weaponry to solve the minor puzzles (where the reader is pitted against Arcadia) and the more sinister mystery twists that ultimately shake Arcadia s trust in family and identity.
Glee Books

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2020 Simon Chesterman
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

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The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Marshall Cavendish is a registered trademark of Times Publishing Limited
National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Name(s): Chesterman, Simon.
Title: I, Huckleberry : a novel / by Simon Chesterman.
Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2020
Identifier(s): OCN 1152340336 | eISBN: 978 981 4893 54 1
Subject(s): LCSH: Teenagers--Fiction. | Mental health--Fiction. | Teenagers--Mental health--Fiction. |
Classification: DDC 828.99343--dc23
Printed in Singapore
For T
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav n of hell, a hell of heav n.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Is it all right if we don t begin at the beginning? To make sense of things, to really understand, you sometimes have to start at the end. Time s funny like that. We experience life in one direction-a series of moments and encounters, flowing one to the next. Yet their significance only dawns on us as our own sun begins to set.
It s a clich that youth is wasted on the young. That kind of misses the point. Youth is all potential: everything s possible. If we knew what was coming, if we could foresee the doors that would open and those that would slam in our faces, then who would bother? The daily struggles that loom like mountains, then recede in the rear-view mirror. When you re a kid, every day is a new beginning. Even the police give us a free pass, wiping the slate clean at the magical age of eighteen. A chance to start over. By then, though, it s too late. You are who you were. One day you look back and every step that you thought was a choice seems predestined, nudging you, pushing you to wherever the hell you ended up. Every decision, every happenstance, inexorably forming your character and shaping your destiny.
In any case, to make sense of my story you definitely need to begin with the end. We ll get to the only child, born-to-loving-parents-in-Riverdale, NY, and so on soon. None of that means anything unless you know where it is leading. Which is to me, age sixteen, running up the stairs of a medieval clock tower, clutching a fragment of an 800-yearold parchment, booted footsteps clattering behind me.
The banister is slick and offers neither balance nor grip. I reach another wooden landing and pause to catch my breath, panting clouds of vapour into the cold night air. The wood creaks under my weight-too many kebabs, I guess. With enough force it might be possible to smash some of the beams, but that s unlikely to block the path. In my pocket, my fingers close on Kat s cigarette lighter. A fire? But the wood is too damp.
The footsteps below do not pause. Onward and upward, then. I continue to climb, one leg after the other, though that s as far ahead as my plan goes. The parchment is getting damp. In the bare light of the stairwell I imagine the text beginning to bleed, quill strokes of a thirteenth-century royal scribe undone by a twenty-first-century dropout.
And criminal. If only it were the police chasing me. The boots reach another landing and continue up the next flight. My leg aches but I push on, past the frozen mechanism of the clock, bursting suddenly through an arch and onto a narrow balcony, its crenellated ledge overlooking spires and gabled roofs. The mist has become a drizzle and I almost slip on the weatherworn stone. I take out my phone, but it s too late. Thirteen messages. Nowhere else to run and no one left to call.
From the street below, student carollers rouse themselves against the rain once more and break into song. They probably stand around a cardboard box or open violin case, raising money for starving children, animal welfare, some worthy cause. What they lack in talent they make up for in enthusiasm. Bless them. Urgent good tidings and dreams of figgy pudding waft up from the cobbled street below. It almost brings a smile.
Almost. I wonder what hitting the cobblestones from this height will feel like. Painful, most likely, before the darkness. The footsteps behind me slow as they approach the archway, wary of a trap. I turn my back, looking out across the dreaming spires one last time. The still night air carries the voices of the carollers, offering final wishes for a Merry Christmas. Until the resonance is broken by the scrape of a knife on stone, whetting the blade one last time before the end.
She fooled us all. My fingers tighten on the parchment, damp ink now leeching through to my skin. I close my eyes and brace myself for what is to come.
1
So, I was indeed born to loving parents in Riverdale, New York. Technically, that s the Bronx, but our neighbourhood had more in common with the Upper West Side than the rest of the borough. Going by property prices and school fees, we might as well have been part of gentrified Manhattan. Even the numbered streets just carried on into the two hundreds, after a small gap that appears to have sunk in Spuyten Duyvil Creek.
My parents were academics who met as New Yorkers studying abroad at Oxford University. Maybe that fixed its place for them as a kind of romantic time capsule, idealised for architecture and academia as much as for the fading memory of their own youth. A photograph of the two of them in a convertible hung in our hallway, green hills rolling behind their younger and happier selves. They gave up driving years ago and now rarely look beyond the city. I remember Dad explaining the sun s motion by saying that it rises in the Upper East Side and sets in the Upper West Side. It was years later that I found out he stole that from a New Yorker cartoon.
I say my parents were loving, but they weren t exactly affectionate. Our bookshelves bore dozens of tomes on developmental neurobiology, child psychology, and so on, mostly purchased in the three months leading up to my birth. I was a teenager before I began to understand that my parents were more comfortable thinking of me as a challenging new research project than the fruit of their loins.
Mom and Dad s hearts were usually in the right place, but their methods left something to be desired. As part of a war on sugar when I was eight, Mom spent several weeks trying to persuade me that the ice cream cart occasionally plying our streets only rang its bell when it had run out of ice cream. A falsifiable claim, as I showed her in chocolate mint. She was angry but took a photo nonetheless. I still have it somewhere.
Another of their obsessions was the danger posed by social media. When they finally consented to let me have my own phone at age twelve-a few well-placed news articles about kidnappings may have helped my case-they bought the only device still in production that had no access to the internet. That put me in the niche market that lumped the children of over-protective parents together with old folks who just wanted a damn telephone with numbers like they used to make.
Oh, and they named me Huckleberry. As Dad never tired of explaining, this was after Mark Twain s most famous character, who rafted down the Mississippi River in the antebellum South with an escaped slave on a crusade against racism. What will be your crusade, son? he used to ask. When I got around to reading Huckleberry Finn , I pointed out to him that Huck only ended up on the river because his father was the town drunk-and that he thought he would go to hell for freeing Jim.
Dad looked fit to explode-he wasn t big on being contradicted-but Mom told me she liked the name precisely because Huck did the right thing, despite what everyone else believed. A good heart is a better guide in this world than a badly trained conscience, she told me. Aim for that, and you ll do just fine.
Mrs Sellwood used to say that wisdom is the compliment that experience pays to failure. She said a lot of stuff. Much of it sounded l