A Terrible Beauty
Preview Chapter: Chapter 1
The letter lay among the others on the hall table for three days.
Then the housekeeper moved it to his desk, where it sat for three more,
awaiting his return from the sanatorium. When
at last he shuffled into his study to sit at his
desk, it ended up at the bottom of the pile, behind the latest Journal of
Archaic Languages and more promising missives from colleagues around the world.
Simon Donovan read for a long time, submerging himself in the pleasure
denied him by uncompromising doctors and anxious nurses.
In the realm of letters and language, in the world of scholarship and
theories, there was no room for weak hearts and labouring lungs.
Reality only returned when he rose to fetch a text or reference from the
bookcases that lined the walls of the study.
Then he would hear his joints creak and the harsh inhalation of his
breath, very loud in the quiet room. When
he reached toward the upper shelves, something in his chest would twitch and
throb. The sensation always
surprised him. The various betrayals
of his body had been a long, slow process that his mind could never seem to
remember from one manifestation to the next.
When he set aside the journal, it was to discover darkness waiting beyond
the circle of light from his lamp. He
leaned back in his chair for a moment, rubbing his forehead with two fingers.
Beyond the window, a thin strip of sky glowed red, caught between the
peaks of the roofs across the street and the lowering dusk.
He heard voices from the street and the distant toll of the cathedral
bell. They will be here soon, he
thought. Time to be dressing for
dinner and rehearsing his litany of reassurances and platitudes or practising a
paternal reprimand in case things got out of hand.
He smiled slightly. Things
did tend to get out of hand. They
always had, which had no doubt contributed to the amount of time he had spent in
his study over the years. Anna had
been able to take it all in stride, of course.
She could arbitrate disputes with the wisdom of Solomon and both the
victor and the vanquished were won over with cookies and kisses.
Though, of course, that had been many years ago now.
More years than he cared to contemplate had passed since his family had
discovered, to their sorrow, that not all things could be cured with cookies and
kisses. The magic of such talismans
had long been lost to them, lost even before the keeper of them had been.
He thought of his sons, making their way across the city towards him.
Peter would be driving. Wife
safely absorbed in one of her seemingly endless rounds of social events,
children put to bed by the nanny, his eldest would no doubt be here first.
Gabriel would hire a cab, as usual. Matthew
might as well, unless he had spent his meagre earnings on things far less
practical than transportation. If it
was one of what he referred to as his “poor periods”, he would likely cadge
a ride from Gabriel or take the trolley to the nearest stop and walk the rest of
the way.
Simon looked back at his desk. From
beneath the sober covers of the Journal of Archaic Languages, a thin
oblong of pale cream emerged. He
reached for it idly, another excuse not to rise from the creaky comfort of his
old chair.
The envelope was of heavy ivory paper.
There was no return address, only the postmark of a town of which he had
never heard. He saw the handwriting
on the face and turned the envelope over hastily, aware of a twinge somewhere
deeper than his heart. A dollop of
crimson wax sealed the envelope, an archaic gesture that did nothing to relieve
his sudden anxiety. Pressed deep
into the bloody blot was the letter “S” in curving script.
Simon licked his lips, his mouth tasting as dry as dust.
He turned the envelope in his hands again and forced himself to consider
the handwriting. It had been more
than twenty years. More than twenty
years since he had expunged every trace of that hand from his files ... and his
heart. How could he be sure now that
he knew it? Most likely, the letter
was from some innocuous friend or acquaintance, newly enamoured of an old custom
of correspondence.
He looked up at the narrow line of red outlining the roofs.
His fingers touched the seal. There
was still time to be rid of it. If
the jumble of torn envelopes in his waste basket would not do, the fire burning
low on the far side of the study would. Burning
would be better, certainly. Then,
though he might wonder what secret lay inside the envelope, he would never be
able to know. Throwing it out, even
tearing it up, would make it far too easy to change his mind and succumb to
curiosity.
The seal cracked beneath his fingers.
The initial step taken, he had
no choice but to go on. He lifted
the flap of the envelope and drew the single sheet of folded paper out into the
light. There was no writing on the
outside though he could see the faint outlines of the ink inside as it bled
through the paper. Knowing that he
was committing himself irrevocably, he unfolded the letter
Dear Simon ...
It took only a few moments to read it. She had always had an admirable
economy about her sentences, he thought absurdly and read the words again.
And then a third time, to be certain.
Brief fancies flickered through the back of his mind.
It was a hoax. She was not
serious. But she had always been as
serious as she was articulate.
Dear Simon ...
Far away, the doorbell tolled.
He heard the door open and the murmur of voices.
Someone called his name.
He looked up from the letter and saw that the sun had disappeared.
There were footsteps on the stairs and a knock on the door.
“Dr. Donovan?” Mrs. O’Brien’s voice came, muffled by the thick
oak door of his sanctuary. “Dr.
Donovan, Mr. Peter is here.”
Simon Donovan stared down at the letter in his hand.
The words ceased to mean anything, the writing changing from the language
he knew to the angular strokes of the ancient tongue with which he had struggled
all those years ago. “Sidonie,”
he said softly, for the first time in twenty years.
“Sidonie.”
Copyright: Nancy Baker
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