The Dead of Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

first glimpse of the man I had heard so much about and in whose hands my fate now rested.
    He was pale and gaunt; his eyes were deep-set and peered out, twinkling dimly from beshadowed sockets. Long white hair was swept back from his high forehead and dripped into coils at his collar. He held out one of his long, pale hands for me to shake and I did not prolong the greeting: his hand was as cold as it looked. If there was a spider at the heart of this house, then surely it was he.
    ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ I replied without conviction.
    ‘I was very sorry to hear about your mother,’ said Sir Stephen.
    ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘You have your father’s looks,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘Have you your father’s courage, I wonder?’
    ‘I don’t know, sir,’ I answered.
    ‘Time will tell, eh?’ he said. ‘Time will no doubt tell. Your father was a good man and a very brave man, my boy. As you know, without him I would not be standing here today.’
    I made no response and I think my expression betrayed my feelings that this seemed a poor trade. Sir Stephen narrowed his eyes a little and his smile flickered and died.
    ‘This is my sister, Charlotte,’ he said after a pause.
    It was as if he had lit a lantern. As dark and gloomy as he was, so the woman that now stepped forward was like a bright flame.
    ‘Michael,’ she said, her dress swishing over the floor, and she embraced me as though I were a long-lost and dearly loved relative. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’ Her voice was clear and pure.
    Her skin, I distinctly remember, was like silk it was so smooth. She was pale too, but in her the paleness was like marble, finely carved, and framed by tumbling black ringlets. She was quite the mostbeautiful woman I had ever seen until that moment or since, and though her face was a little cool in its beauty, it changed its climate entirely when she smiled, as she did then.
    ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ I replied.
    ‘
Charlotte
,’ she corrected. ‘We shall be friends, shall we not, Michael?’
    ‘Ah, Sir Stephen,’ said Jerwood, coming from the kitchen with Hodges. ‘Good to see you again, sir. And Charlotte, you are looking as lovely as ever. You have met your ward, I see.’
    ‘Tristan,’ said Charlotte, ‘you must tell me all the news from London over dinner. Perhaps you could show Michael to his room, Hodges?’
    ‘Come along then, sir,’ said Hodges, turning to me. ‘I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.’

CHAPTER FIVE
    Hodges fetched my bag from the hall and, picking up a lamp in the other hand, set off, with me in pursuit.
    We climbed a wide staircase with carved wooden posts and a sweeping handrail smoothed by centuries of use. The walls of the stairwell were lined with a dark wallpaper covered all over with stylised foliage, so that every inch of wall space seemed to coil and sprout in a way that was quite dizzying to my eyes.
    The light from the lantern created a bubble of relative brightness, like a white bloom shining inthe midst of the dingy forest of foliage crowding in on us, and I clung to its glow with the dogged determination of a moth.
    Grim portraits of Sir Stephen’s ancestors stared out at me as I passed, their faces perched atop white lace ruffs like heads on dishes, looking at me with expressions that seemed to declare their disapproval of my presence in their house.
    At the top of the stairs was a huge and rather sinister grandfather clock, bristling with carved pinnacles and curlicues, as ornate as a medieval bell tower and with a tick so deep and resonant that I could almost feel the teeth in my skull vibrate as I walked by.
    I followed Hodges down a maze of corridors, hurrying to keep step with the servant, for I was all too aware of the darkness that moved like a great beast behind us. I had an unnerving sensation that it concealed something terrible, something I had a horror that I might see were I ever to turn my head. My heart had been fluttering