The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Flammarion 2007

Translation copyright © Sarah Ardizzone 2009

Mathias Malzieu has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Chatto & Windus

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 9780701183691

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For you Acacita, who made this book grow in my belly

Firstly: don’t touch the hands of your cuckoo-clock heart. Secondly: master your anger. Thirdly: never, ever fall in love. For if you do, the hour hand will poke through your skin, your bones will shatter, and your heart will break once more.

CHAPTER ONE

In which Little Jack is born on the coldest day on earth and miraculously resuscitated

It’s snowing over Edinburgh on this 16th day of April, 1874. An eerie, freezing cold gridlocks the city. Old people wonder whether this might be the coldest day on earth. The sun seems to have disappeared for good. There’s a biting wind, snowflakes lighter than air. WHITE! WHITE! WHITE! A muffled explosion. This is all we can see. Houses resemble steam engines, as the grey smoke exhaled by their chimneys sparkles in the steel sky.

Edinburgh and its steep streets are being transformed. Fountains metamorphose, one by one, into bouquets of ice. The old river, usually so serious, is disguised as an icing sugar lake that stretches all the way to the sea. The din of the surf rings out like the sound of windows smashing. Miraculously, the hoarfrost stitches sequins on to