Read Online Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp by Odo Hirsch - Free Book Online Page A

never even written them. Mr Vishwanath was wrong, there wasn’t anything nice about the old lady, there was no beauty within her. She was harsh, horrible. Amelia didn’t want to show her the story she had written. Suddenly the story seemed like a soft, fragile little creature, and if she showed it to her, the old lady with her angry gaze and her haughty tone was just going to stomp all over it.
    ‘Well?’ said the Princess.
    Reluctantly, almost trembling, Amelia held out the crumpled pages.
    But the Princess made no movement to take them. ‘Read it to me.’
    Amelia stared.
    ‘Read,’ said the Princess, and then she looked away at the sheet-covered window again, and gave a little sigh, as if she didn’t really care about Amelia’s story, except in the sense that it was something that had been done because she was a princess, and since people always want to do things for a princess, a princess is obliged to pretend that she’s interested. But not too interested. In fact, rather bored.
    Amelia hesitated. But the Princess remained impassive, waiting for her to commence.
    Amelia looked down at the first page. ‘There was a princess once . . .’
    ‘Louder,’ said the Princess. ‘I can’t hear you. If you want to read the story you wrote for me, speak so I can hear you.’
    Amelia took a deep breath. ‘There was a princess once . . .’ she began again, more loudly. ‘She lived in a palace with all kinds of marvellous things, gold and jewels and beautiful clothes and lovely furniture, but the thing she loved most was the lamp in her room. They didn’t have electricity in those days, so they had to light oil in the lamp each day and put it out each night. The lamp was made of bronze, and it had six sides and a top and a bottom, and the metalwork of the lamp was very rich, with all kinds of rare and wonderful animals carved in it with such skill and such cleverness you could barely see them unless you looked very closely. There was a tiger, and an eagle, and a rhinoceros, and monkeys chasing each other around the light and one of them had the face of a person. And the bottom of the lamp was made up of a pair of magnificent peacocks. To light the lamp, there was a little door . . .’
    Amelia read. She gazed strictly at the page, concentrated wholly on the words, as if by doing that, and forgetting about the Princess, she could protect her story from the withering harshness of the lady who sat opposite her. So she didn’t see the Princess turn her head as she spoke. She didn’t see the look on the Princess’s face as she described the lamp. She didn’t see the Princess’s hand go to her mouth, and her eyes go wide, nor hear her stifled gasp at the mention of the monkey with the face of the man, or her second gasp at the mention of the two peacocks on the bottom of the lamp. And she didn’t see the way the Princess looked at her after that, without any hint of practised boredom, but with a kind of stunned disbelief.
    Amelia didn’t see any of that. And after a while she did forget about the Princess, losing herself in the words she had written, the images she had created, the flow of the story of the princess and the lamp, how the princess would light the lamp each night, and how it wasn’t lit when she was kept away from the man she loved, and how they were reunited at the end and the lamp came alight for one last night. It wasn’t one of the bloodcurdling versions, with the ghost of the princess and phantom beasts coming to life and lots of blood everywhere, but it wasn’t the soppiest version either. It was the one, in truth, that was Amelia’s own favourite.
    When she was finished, she put the pages down, and only then did she remember where she was, and why she was reading it, and who she was reading it to.
    The Princess didn’t say anything. She was staring at Amelia blankly, as if not seeing her at all.
    ‘That’s it,’ whispered Amelia.
    The Princess gave a little jerk. Her expression became