Read Online The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield - Free Book Online Page B

distance
between us.
     
    Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed
fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In
a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as
though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it tome.
     
    But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.
     
    The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its
whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the
base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had
cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently
altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were
drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of
her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was
set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what
had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of
the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had
no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending
from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.
     
    Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less
the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful
act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me by the
appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and
unreadable language.
     
    A sudden vertigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my
air.
     
    ‘I’m sorry,“ I heard her say. ”One gets so used to one’s own
horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.“
     
    I sat down and gradually the blackness at the edge of my vision
receded.
     
    Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swiveled
her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist back into her lap. In a protective
gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.
     
    ‘I’m sorry you didn’t want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea.“
     
    ‘I’ll hear it another time.“
     
    Our interview was over.
     
    On my way back to my quarters I thought of the letter she had
sent me. The strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of
before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I understood. From
the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her
masterpieces with her left hand.
     
    In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold
watermark tin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush, I was pleased with
the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and e
plain upright chair that stood under the window. I switched on the desk lamp
and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils.
They were brand-new: unsharpened columns of red, just what I like to start a
new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I
screwed it like a vise to the edge of the desk and set the paper basket
directly underneath.
     
    On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the
elaborate valance to the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the
curtains, and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was
hardly a job for one person; the curtains were floor length, lined and
interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a
few minutes, first one then the other curtain was folded and in a cupboard. I
stood in the center of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.
     
    The window was a large expanse of dark glass, and in the center
of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not
unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk on the other side of the glass, and
farther back a