The Specimen Read Online Free

would
have allowed had she been born a boy. It didn’t matter. The knowledge was not his alone to keep.
    Gwen rounded the last corner and stopped the barrow next to Murray. “We have miscalled the lad, Murray. This was nothing to do with him.”
    Murray turned and looked into her eyes, and she returned his hard stare. His eyes flickered as she saw him understand her meaning. Together they set about pulling the books from the dirt. Some
were not very badly damaged on the inside and could be saved. But Smith’s volume had received special attention from Euphemia, and Gwen began to find small fragments of the pages torn by hand
from their binding and ripped bit by bit beyond repair. Here was a corner bearing the partial remains of an intricate illustration of an ammonite. Every book in the bonfire had been part of
Gwen’s armoury, as she had come to think of it, against the blinkered and determined stupidity of people like the vicar who had the intelligence to recognise the truth but turned his eye from
it, and Euphemia’s gaggle of black-clad visitors who shunned the truth completely in favour of spirits and their messages from the other side. Euphemia called her a traitor. A traitor to
their mother and her faith. Gwen knelt down and let the pain of her grief enter her body; she let it snake through her, probing its tongue into each dark crevice.
    She told herself after some minutes that it didn’t really matter that the books had been burned. They were, in theory, replaceable, and the truth of what had been contained in them, the
spirit of them, still lived in her head and in the heads of others. What mattered was the vicious nature of Euphemia’s spite. Gwen chided herself for bringing Euphemia’s desire to take
possession of the house to the fore, to eradicate every memory of their blasphemous father who had detained Reverend Sparsholt in loud debate on the steps of Helford Church on the day of their
mother’s funeral. “She had her time in Heaven while she was alive.” Gwen remembered the passionate grief in her father’s voice. “Now her flesh will rot under the
soil,” he said, “And that is
all
, Sparsholt. That. Is. All.” And so every trace of his sinful library was to be purged from the house, in order that Euphemia could fully
dedicate and fashion the place to the memory of their mother. Gwen saw now that Euphemia was also attempting to annihilate Gwen’s sense of herself, and her right to belong to the place.
Euphemia wanted, she could see, to deny the house and its contents any hold on Gwen.
    There was one thing she had now though, which Euphemia did not have, and did not know about: her new friend, Mr Scales. Gwen recalled the fossil in his hand as they had spoken that afternoon.
She went over and over their conversation. Parts of it had become lost, but most of it she could remember, and its urgency. The intensity of the conversation had soon eradicated all the usual
formality and convention. They had not made polite enquiries about each other’s history; they had existed fully in the moment with no regard for the past or the future.
    Gwen tidied herself up, smacking dirt and ash from her clothes while Murray pushed the barrow of books to one of the potting sheds and she followed behind. Murray left her to it, and Gwen began
the ordeal of assessing the damage in detail. As she examined each part of Euphemia’s essay on destruction, Gwen knew that she would never mention Euphemia’s existence to Mr Scales.
There would be no poisoning the air with the mention of her, of what she had done, of the way she had made Gwen feel.

Chapter II
    The Spiritual meetings held at Carrick House attracted a plethora of bizarre people. Like a bundle of strange insects, Gwen thought, batting at the glass in the door,
blundering around the dimmed lamps. She couldn’t bear it; she hated their sweaty hands and, in their wide hopeful eyes, that grateful admiration of her sister. No spirits, though,