The Visitor by Katherine Stansfield

Author:Katherine Stansfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2013-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

Three

Her screaming wakes her. The dream again. In it she’s walking on the beach below the drying field, her feet cut and bleeding. She doesn’t know where she’s been or why she’s there until she hears it. Her name, whispered in her ear. She can’t stop walking towards the water’s edge. There’s something rising from the waves, something covered in weed and muck. It’s reaching out to her. Its hand is a broken shell. She screams.

It’s hard to be certain she’s awake. The line between sleep and wakefulness isn’t an honest one in the dream. Her throat is hoarse. Her back’s slick with sweat and sticking to the all tossed about sheet. It could still be with her, that thing in the water. Though she knows what it is. Of course she knows.

The minutes pass. There’s no voice calling her name. It’s gone.

The house is empty. Her parents and Polly are at chapel. Pearl had a bad chest in the night, bad enough even to miss the service, but not so bad her mother would stay at home with her. She’ll be praying for Pearl.

The cup on the floor by her bed is smashed, the wood around it damp. Her throat is dry as bone. She gets up to find a drink and her legs sway. She makes it to the top of the stairs then has to rest. Her chest is still bad though many people said she’d grow out of it. Old Mrs Pendeen was adamant it wouldn’t trouble Pearl past sixteen yet here she is, twenty-one and worse than ever. Old Mrs Pendeen seems annoyed by this, as if Pearl hasn’t tried hard enough to prove her right.

The house’s only mirror hangs at the top of the stairs. Pearl looks a sight, but that’s her usual self: still untidy and untucked, unable to shake off the little girl who became grubby as soon as she stepped outside. Her body has broken from that shell though and stretched itself thin, finding few curves to grace her. Today her face is flushed from coughing, the dream and the previous day’s work. Her hands have become those of her mother’s, sore and roughly musical when rubbed together, the skin split from days in the palace.

Pearl knows now that she’s not beautiful. She has some sense of the way men look at women and can tell if a person is sweet on another. It doesn’t trouble her – after all, nothing can be done – though she wonders if perhaps she might be thought pretty, if a person would take the time to look at her, to see past the redness of her eyes and the shadows in her face.

She stirs herself and sets off down the stairs, one at a time and with another rest halfway. Nicholas will call for her soon. She needs to be ready, her hair brushed and her cleanest skirt on, the only one that’s not for best and that’s not been worn to the palace. Not that he’ll notice of course.

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