Showing results by narrator "Elsa Lepecki Bean" in All Categories

They say it is not the fall that kills you. Maybe for humans this is true. Perhaps one could go on falling forever, and yet live on. I have heard them say you can get used to anything. Among my people, though, it is the fall itself that is the end. It is not, as you might imagine, a literal casting out. God does not throw us down from on high. It is, like many things, a process: One decision on top of another until you realize suddenly that you are too far gone to turn back. It is too late to do anything but go on falling. Or so, at least, it went for me.

Goldengrove’s towers and twisted chimneys rose at the very edge of the peaceful Weald, a stone’s throw from the poisonous marshes and merciless waters of Rye Bay. Young Tabby Palethorp had been running wild there, ever since her mother grew too ill to leave her room. I was the perfect choice to give Tabby a good English education: thoroughly respectable and far too plain to tempt her lonely father, Sir Kit, to indiscretion. I knew better than to trust my new employer with the truth about my past. But knowing better couldn’t stop me from yearning for impossible things.