Amelia Dee and the Peacock Lamp Read Online Free PDF

replenish the oil in the lamp. Naturally, there was a princess in the story, and the light hung in her room. The princess loved a handsome young man, who was a gardener, or sometimes he was a guardsman, or sometimes he was a metalworker, but in the story he was never a prince, and her parents, the king and the queen – whose name was sometimes Eugenie, especially if Amelia was thinking of the story on a day when Eugenie Edelstein had been particularly pompous – wouldn’t let her marry him. They sent the handsome young man away. The princess became very sad, and wouldn’t eat, and refused to leave her room. And as a protest, she refused to allow the lamp to be lit. So the door to the lamp, which had been opened every evening, remained closed, as the princess pined for her lover.
    Then the story had different endings. Amelia had never written them down, but they were all in her head. Sometimes the king and queen relented, and they allowed the handsome young man to come back, and the princess and the young man were married, and the lamp was lit again every night. That was quite a soppy ending, almost a fairy tale, and Amelia felt guilty for even thinking of it. But sometimes that really was the ending she preferred, when she was in a soppy mood. Other times, the king and queen forced the princess to marry a horrible, nasty prince, and they became king and queen in their turn, and grew old, and eventually the nasty husband died, and the princess was left, although now she was a lonely old queen, and one day an old man arrived at the palace, and it was the handsome young man who had been driven away so many years before, and even though it was so many years since they had seen each other, and they had both grown old, they recognised each other at once, and as they kissed, the lamp, which still had a little oil left from all those years before, burst into light once more, but as soon as they had kissed, they died in each other’s arms, and the light sputtered out forever. But that was still fairly soppy, although at least they both died. Sometimes, when they kissed, they became young again, and they lived happily ever after, which was even soppier. So sometimes, the handsome man wasn’t allowed back, and the princess didn’t marry a nasty prince, but pined away in her room, and died of sadness, and the lamp never glowed again. And sometimes, after she had died, the ghost of the princess came back, and the animals on the lamp sprang to life as phantom beasts, vicious, bloodthirsty, and would obey nobody but the ghost-princess, who had no sadness now, but demanded vengeance. There was no end of bloodcurdling things that could be done in that big palace when the ghost-princess came back in the night with her phantom tigers and monkeys and rhinoceroses and other beasts – much more scary and bloodcurdling than anything Amelia ever read in her horror books – and sometimes Amelia had to stop imagining them before she frightened herself so much that she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
    Funnily enough, after a while, Amelia had found that she was glad she hadn’t succeeded in opening the lamp, but had only swung on it. It seemed that there must have been a reason for it. Amelia was sure she had never written any of her stories down before that day. It was as if swinging on the lamp, and almost falling to her death, was the thing that had made her start. And yet if she had opened the door, she felt, none of the stories that she wrote would ever have taken shape. It was as if the lamp contained the stories – not only the ones about itself, but all the other ones that came into Amelia’s mind – and Amelia only had to look at it to delve into the endless store of ideas that were locked up inside it. But if she had managed to open the door that day, all the ideas would have flown away.
    It would sound ridiculous to anyone else if she had to explain it, she knew, but to Amelia it seemed that somehow the lamp was deeply connected to