Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp Read Online Free PDF Page A

came in with the groceries. Amelia would have been dead, of course, and she imagined what everyone would have done. Tears. Grief. Accusations. ‘If only you had been watching her.’ ‘No, if only you had!’ Maybe she would come back as a ghost, as often happened in the horror books she loved reading. Maybe she would haunt the house. Maybe she would meet the ghost of old Solomon Weiszacker, who probably haunted the house as well. She wondered what kind of a ghost old Solomon Weiszacker would be. Probably a disappointed one, seeing as he had obviously made a big mistake about the kind of houses that were going to be built in Marburg Street. It didn’t take much to get Amelia’s imagination going, far less than this. Ideas always seemed to be popping up in her head about things that had happened or might have happened or should have happened, often of the most extraordinary nature.
    Most of the time, Amelia herself didn’t know where her ideas came from. Sometimes she turned them into stories. Everyone thought she was reading when she was in her room, and often she was reading, but not always. Sometimes she was writing.
    Amelia had whole drawers full of the stories she had written. Some of them went back years, and were in the big childish writing she had when she was smaller. She couldn’t remember exactly why she had started. Her mother, with her painting and her sculpting and her weaving, seemed to do everything else. Maybe that had something to do with it. Amelia couldn’t remember exactly when she had started, either, but it was after she swung on the lamp. She had never actually written down the story about how she had swung and crashed to the ground and was found by Mrs Ellis and met Solomon Weiszacker’s disappointed ghost, but it was vivid in her mind, every word of it. And it must have been shortly after this happened – or would have happened had the lamp not been strong enough to hold her – that she did start writing down her stories and putting them away in drawers, first in one drawer, then another, which were now full of the things she had written.
    Amelia always made sure the door of her room was closed when she was writing. She had never told anyone about the stories, apart from the sculpted lady outside her window, who knew all her secrets. Sometimes Amelia had a feeling that writing stories was a slightly silly thing to do, and other people would laugh if they knew. She wrote stories at school, of course, like everyone else, but they didn’t count because the teachers made everyone do it. All the kids were always laughing about a boy in Amelia’s class called Martin Martinez, who wrote stories in his spare time and brought them to school where he loved to read them out and was always trying to get them into the school magazine. Everyone said he thought he was some kind of a new Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare or something. Most of Martin Martinez’s stories had something to do with Argentina, which was where his family came from. Privately, Amelia thought her stories were much better than the ones Martin Martinez wrote. And he was a terrible boaster, and didn’t seem to realise that the more he boasted about his stories, the more everyone laughed at him. Yet Amelia couldn’t help admiring him just a little, despite herself, for showing his stories to the world.
    The lamp was always giving Amelia ideas, and not only about what would happen if she plunged to her death and came back as a ghost. She often wondered where the lamp came from. From its size alone it was obvious that it must have been intended to hang in a very large room, and from its beauty that it must have been designed for a place of great elegance and luxury. Amelia’s favourite story about the lamp was that it had once hung in a faraway palace, long before the days when there was electricity, and there had been oil burning inside it, and every evening a servant would come with a ladder and open the little door and