Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Why I Stole Your Life

Three years after moving in with Mrs Read under the pretence of being her grandson, Mary has gained an education. But no amount of wealth or education can save Mary and Mrs Read from calamity.

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Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Calamity arrives on Mrs Read’s doorstep in the shape of a man. By the state of him, vomited out by the sea. Such a rotten-looking man. Hair like a mop for ashes, and beard tatty as a rook’s nest, and half an arm gnawed off by something only half hungry. How it might have chewed through to his bone I cannot imagine, as his skin has the brown toughness of a pair of boots. His uneaten arm ends in tree root fingers gnarled around a cup of brandy. A cup, I note, and not one of Mrs Read’s fancy glasses, but a cup from the kitchen which I’m guessing Charles knew to be the right container from the barely detectable wideness of Mrs Read’s eyelid or from a tightness in her upper lip, which Charles well knows how to read as a si…