Excerpt from The Original by Nell Stevens, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue

There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.

It was a portrait of a haggard old lady—though I believe she was in fact only thirty-two years old—on her knees in a field of mud, holding a blazing torch above her head. Her face was covered in open sores. Her eyes were closed. She had the expression of someone who knew she was dying. Before her on the ground was the mangled corpse of a pheasant. The canvas was very white around the flame, dark everywhere else: the mud, the dying woman's body, the bird. I believe it was one of the ugliest paintings that ever existed.

The title of the painting was 'The Drag', which was written on a little plaque screwed to the bottom of the frame, beside the date 1747. The event depicted took place, supposedly, in the thirteenth century. The name of the artist, if it had ever been known, was long since forgotten; there was a single looping 'C' in the lower-right corner, or a shape I imagined might be a 'C'.

The woman portrayed was my many-times-great-grandmother Hodierna, who was the kind of person who adopted stray kittens and gave her clothes away to vagrants. She invited orphans to dinner and donated great sums to good causes. If nobody had stopped her she would have given up the family's whole estate, a great house called Inderwick Hall and three hundred hectares of parkland in a boggy corner of Oxfordshire. Her husband, my many-times-great-grandfather Geoffrey, was a notorious brute who never did a single kind thing in his life.

The story goes that Grandmother Hodierna, on her deathbed, saw a wounded pheasant from her window and was so moved by the sight that she begged my grandfather Geoffrey to do something after her death for the afflicted and disadvantaged of the parish, be they beasts or men. It was approaching nightfall, but still she could see the pale grey underside of the bird's wings flapping in the darkness. Geoffrey looked at her, his poxed, shrivelled, pitiful wife, and said he'd continue all her charitable works and would even take in the bird, would nurse it back to health himself and—laughing—vowed never to eat pheasant again if, at that moment, she could rescue it herself. (Do you believe this story?)

Grandmother Hodierna, miraculously empowered by the strength of her compassionate urges, got up from her deathbed and lit a torch from the fire burning at the foot of her bed. She dragged herself out of the house and, on her knees, clutching the torch, she crossed the garden to the first muddy field of the estate, where the pheasant was flapping hopelessly in a rut, wing broken. She saw it was a hopeless case and that nothing could be done to save it, so she kissed its head and broke its neck without a moment's pause. (What about now?) And because my Grandfather Geoffrey was a liar and a cheat and not to be trusted, and since, in stories like this, people do this kind of thing, Hodierna placed a curse on the family. If Geoffrey or his descendants ever again ate pheasant, the family's sons would perish or become impotent and the line of male heirs would fail. Then she died. The burnt-out torch slid from her hand and she fell forwards, beside the twisted corpse of the bird she had killed.

(This story has been told and retold over the centuries, and each time, surely, the particulars must have shifted in some way, each telling nudging it towards greater strangeness, or greater earnestness, or forgetting some little detail, until, I imagine, it came to bear no resemblance at all to what really happened. And yet, there was this horrible painting of Hodierna: a fixed point. And after many years of dithering back and forth, I find, now, that I believe it all, the whole thing, wholeheartedly, in whatever form the story has come to take.)

There was a room at the back of my uncle's family home, past the gun room and the kitchens, near the servants' quarters, where all the unwanted belongings were kept. It was where my uncle's family put the painting, and also, when I was sent to live with them at the age of nine, where they put me. Hodierna in 'The Drag' was one of the first people I saw when I arrived, before I met my uncle, my aunt, my cousins Eliza, Charles and Teddy. Each night I stared up at Hodierna dragging herself through the mire until I fell asleep. The following year I learned to paint, and 'The Drag' was the one of the first canvases I copied: a portrait of the woman who foretold the end of our family. I copied it over and over in secret, working my way through ochre and brown paint in vast quantities, a little yellow and some white around the torch, dark green for the pheasant's broken neck. I learned so much from it: how to mix the exact shade of the mud on the family estate, how to make human skin look at once alive and on the verge of death, what despair looks like, and resolve.

Excerpted from The Original by Nell Stevens. Copyright © 2025 by Nell Stevens. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.