Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization Read Online Free

concealing her consternation. She wanted to explain that the ghost was a metaphor, and to assure him that she had already decided that it was just too silly for the heroine to fall in love with Cavendish on page one and she was going to change it back to the way it had been before Ogilvie had turned it down. She shouldn’t have listened to him, even if he was a famous publisher. Love stories
were
fairy tales and lies as far as she was concerned and… good Lord, he was reading more of it.
    “Who are you transcribing this for?” he asked, genuinely interested. But she couldn’t tell if he was intrigued or horrified by the text on the page.
    She decided to dodge his question. If he hated it, that would be altogether mortifying. “It’s to be sent to New York tomorrow.
The Atlantic Monthly
.”
    He took that in. Read another page. “Well, whoever wrote this is quite good, don’t you think?”
    Delighted, she tipped back her head, the better to read his reaction. “Is it?” she tested.
    He shrugged as if to say,
Isn’t it obvious to you that it’s good?
“It’s captured my attention.”
    He was being sincere. He truly liked it. He liked her book. Not since Alan had anyone read any of it… until Ogilvie. And Alan had listened carefully, but hadn’t provided commentary except to say things such as, “That’s a nice description of the countryside,” or, “I’m sorry, I’m confused. Is the ghost real or not?”
    But Sir Thomas Sharpe, baronet, had pronounced it
quite good.
No doubt he’d attended superior boarding schools and studied at a great university such as Oxford. He probably had a vast library in his castle and had read Virgil in the original Latin. How could her little book compare?
    Favorably, that was how. He had said so himself. She was galvanized. Here was a kindred spirit.
    Should she confess? Why not?
    “I wrote it. It’s mine.” She heard the pride in her voice.
    He brightened measurably. His lips parted and he was about to say something more when her father’s deep voice boomed out.
    “Sir Thomas Sharpe. Welcome to our fair city.”
    Carter Cushing approached. As he regarded the Englishman, a cloud crossed his face, then vanished when he turned his attention to her.
    “I see you’ve met my daughter, Edith.”
    Edith enjoyed Sir Thomas’s flicker of surprise and smiled at the speechless man as her father escorted him toward the meeting room. The younger man carried his wooden box as if it were a precious object, and Edith determined to find out why he was there. Everything about him was immensely interesting. She rose from the desk, leaving her manuscript where it lay.
    By then the two men had entered the meeting room. She peered through the open door and saw that some of the most prominent businessmen in Buffalo had taken places at the polished desks positioned in a circular arrangement. It was a high-profile gathering; she spotted Mr. William Ferguson, her father’s lawyer. All eyes were on young Sir Thomas Sharpe, who stood in the center. No wonder he’d been nervous. It was like facing a dozen Ogilvies.
    “The Sharpe clay mines have been Royal Purveyors of the purest scarlet clay since 1796.” His voice was firm and authoritative, all traces of the jitters utterly vanished. He held up another wooden container, this one much smaller than the box. Inside lay a deep scarlet brick with some sort of seal on it. He passed it around to the august bewhiskered men, and each examined the intensely hued clay.
    Intrigued, Edith walked into the room and shut the door after herself. Her father’s colleagues were used to her observing from the perimeter and paid her no mind. But Sir Thomas’s gaze flickered, and she was both abashed and pleased that she had proved a distraction.
    “Excessive mining in the last twenty years caused most of our old deposits to collapse, which crippled our operations and endangered our ancestral home,” Sir Thomas continued.
    He has an ancestral home. Just like