An extract from Sin

PROLOGUE

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There are many ways to have a deprived childhood. One of them is to be too lucky. This knowledge, time’s present, comes slowly. They say the veil that hides the future from us was woven by an angel of mercy. But what blinds us to our unpredictable past? Why are we hooded as we search amongst its ruins, trapped in the intricate web of motive and action? Novelists of our own lives, making ourselves up from bits of other people, using the dead and living to tell our tale, we tell tales. This is a tale – fragments from a life. From lives. Particularly mine. And hers.

ONE

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I never knew her really.

I came closest to her through her husband, the man with whom I now live. And through her son, whose name was Stephen.

And through the lie.

There were some, not many, whose world it was natural for me to enter, searching for a secret knowledge of her. And others, peripheral figures, on the outer edges of whose lives I waited, silent, hooded. Hoping to trap some fleeting image that would light my path to her. Whenever I lost her, I slipped under the dark waters of my own life, tracing, from beneath the gloomy waves, the faint white glimmer of her soul. And when she hid from me, I sought her out. For I knew she hid only for advantage later. Subtle, secret, opaque, I would crush her yet.

Though she wounded me beyond pain, I too inflicted deep hurt. Not born to murder her, still I sought to break her. With a small silver hammer of exquisite design, I would seek the exact point at which even the gentlest pressure would smash the glass. And her substance would be mine.

Sometimes, it is in the split-second half decision we nearly didn’t make that we stumble by chance into ecstasy, or despair. But chance did not bring her into my life. By grand design she waited for me. In my own home. She was my mother’s first child. Though not her firstborn. A terrible injustice to me.

Her name was Elizabeth Ashbridge. And I even envied her that.