I have not until today felt the need to tell my story. There are no happy endings here. In fact it may be that because you are reading this I am dead. Dead. There is no more. And all of the things that I have done have ceased to matter. I am the last you see. The last chapter in the story is my own. I have no expectation of forgiveness. I ask only that you hear me and what it is I must tell you before I go.
The house is quiet around me. I am well and truly alone. This house is as much a part of my story as the characters in it. It has been my torment and my delight. My refuge and my prison. My guardian and my jailer. I hate to imagine it when I’m gone. It offers me no comfort to think of others climbing the stairs, looking from the windows, hiding in the attics. I want it inhabited by ghosts. All of us dancing in the halls as if no time has passed at all. As if it were all just a dream.
I was born a murderess and became an orphan. I never knew my father though I lived with him the whole of his life. He could never forgive me you and I have often wondered, had he been given the choice would he have had ripped me from her piece by piece if it meant saving her.
I am told she was beautiful. There is a photograph in the hall of a rather sombre looking girl whose countenance was saved by a pair of arresting eyes. Poets have basked in the depths of eyes like hers. Large and most certainly on the verge of tears that would remain unshed. Neither brown nor grey nor green but some combination of the three, changing with her moods and surroundings, her eyes spoke volumes. Had the eyes been slightly smaller in size or perhaps more brown than green she would have become unremarkable. It is amazing how closely linked the measurement of beauty is to ugliness. Millimetres really. Perhaps if I had followed in her footsteps and been born a beauty everything would have turned out differently. Perhaps, if only...it seems I have been uttering those words the whole of my life. Sometimes I wonder ,if she had lived, what she would have thought of her little daughter. Would she have loved her unconditionally as mothers do or would she, as time drifted by, become less and less enamoured until one day she just forgot her altogether. I hope not. It would be nice to think that she would have loved me. That someone would have. I am sounding maudlin. I despise myself when I slip into such a state. It is unbecoming.
It seems that I must go back. Back to the beginning if you are to understand my story.
