The Curse in the Candlelight. Sophie Cleverly

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       Chapter One

       SCARLET

      t was the worst birthday I could remember. And considering I had spent my last birthday locked up in an asylum, that was really saying something.

      I ran into what had once been our bedroom, slamming the door shut behind me. I flung myself down on the dusty sheets and beat the pillow with my fists, sending clouds billowing into the air.

      It wasn’t long until I heard light footsteps gently treading the stairs, and the creak of someone pushing the door open. I knew it was my twin, Ivy.

      “Scarlet,” she whispered, somewhere near my ear.

      “No,” I said, my face still in the pillow.

      “No what?” she asked.

      I pushed myself up and stared at her, my arms folded. “No, I’m not going back in there. And no, I’m not going to apologise!”

      She sat down on the bed beside me. “I wasn’t going to say that. I don’t blame you at all. I think she should apologise. But I know she never will.”

      We hadn’t wanted to go to our father’s house that summer in the first place. We’d spent most of the holidays with our scatterbrained Aunt Phoebe, in her cosy cottage. It meant cleaning and tidying and cooking because our aunt could barely remember to do that for herself, let alone us as well, but we didn’t mind. Aunt Phoebe’s house was always filled with love.

      Father’s house, on the other hand, was filled with the stepmother who hated us, and our three hideous stepbrothers. I couldn’t bear it. I missed Father sometimes – or maybe I just missed the way he had been. The rest of them were a nightmare. I hadn’t wanted to go back.

      But in a rare moment of remembering that we existed, Father had turned up at Aunt Phoebe’s the day before our birthday, asking to bring us home. Aunt Phoebe had thought this was a “lovely surprise” and so here we were now. I would rather have caught the plague, to be quite honest.

      Unfortunately, we hadn’t had a choice in the matter. We had waved goodbye to our aunt and sat bundled in the back of Father’s motor car, dreading what would lie ahead at the end of the journey.

      Our stepmother, Edith, had greeted Father warmly, and given us a greeting colder than ice. That was typical. Ivy had tried to say hello to our stepbrothers, but they had just ignored her and carried on playing with their model trains.

      Dinner hadn’t gone any better. Our stepmother had given us the smallest helpings of everything, and then called me greedy when I had asked if there was any more. Her boys got portions the size of mountains, and she gave them seconds. I glared at them one by one, but they were too busy stuffing their faces to notice.

      We’d spent a chilly night in our old twin beds. I spent most of it staring through the crack in the curtains at the black night sky, hoping that if I stayed awake long enough it would delay the arrival of morning. But soon my eyes slipped shut, and I woke up to the weak, watery sun rising on our fourteenth birthday.

      Ivy rolled over sleepily in her bed. “Happy birthday,” she mumbled to me.

      “Happy birthday,” I said back, without much feeling. I peered over at her, through the dust spiralling in the light. She was smiling. “What?”

      “Well …” She sat up and hugged her knees. “You have no idea how much it means to hear you say that.”

      “Sorry,” I said to the ceiling. “I know I should be more grateful not to be ‘dead’, but I’m not. I still hate that I was left there.” The time I’d spent locked in an asylum while our nasty headmistress had told the world that I’d died was never far from my mind. “And I just have a bad feeling about this birthday too.”

      The bad feeling was sitting in my stomach, weighing me down. I climbed out of bed, my bare feet heavy on the old wooden floorboards.

      Ivy СКАЧАТЬ