Beyond Measure by Pauline Holdstock

Author:Pauline Holdstock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC014000
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Published: 2003-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chiara frowned and closed her eyes.

“We don’t have to tell him — not just yet — that it was flayed from the corpse of a hanged man. I want to see his face when he learns it. For now, his ignorance is a fine amusement.”

Sofonisba looked at Chiara for affirmation, but Chiara was already backing away before she turned and ran.

In the dark storage room next to the kitchen, Chiara draws her hand down over her eyes and across her mouth one last time, her features calm as death. She gets up slowly. There is no one now. She is on her own on this path to Heaven or Hell. Her loneliness is as cold as the brook water, as clear. She draws a deep breath and exhales in one long sigh. Since the boat, the time she thinks of as the beginning of her life, she has been like a leaf in a stream, attaching here to a rock, swept on, sticking there. Perhaps she thought that she had come to rest, come to something like a home in Orazio’s house. Sofonisba owned her and she had no complaint. For the converse was true: she belonged. But she is not Sofonisba’s creature. She has been betrayed. Chiara does not exist. She is of no worth to anyone whether she lives or dies.

Whoever she is, she is still standing naked on the barrel at the docks. She is still watching the buyers stare and move on. She is still alone.

She is frightened now, whirled back to the beginning of her life here, everything before it a darkness, an unremembered dream. Everything that came after it lost. Ill luck and it won’t wash off. A veil of ill luck has fallen over her. She has been clothed in it and it cannot be removed, nor peeled away like the hanged man’s skin. She has seen how ill luck attaches to a man or a woman and spreads like a plaguey skin. She wants to cut herself away from it and does not know how. She prefers her own flawed skin to this. Miserably she dresses and it seems to her as if her every action exists only to point to her misfortune. Even the sky is confirming her intuition and darkening in the east where the clouds are piling up.

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