The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  Slowly the Missus raised herself out of her chair and, one foot painfully in front of the other, shuffled out of the room to see to the baby who, in the years her memory had lost, had grown up, married, had twins and died. John didn’t stop her. She would forget where she was going before she even reached the stairs. But behind her back he put his head in his hands and sighed.

  What to do? About Charlie, about the Missus, about everything? It was John’s constant preoccupation. At the end of a week, the nursery was clean and a plan of sorts had arisen out of the evenings of deliberation. No reports of Charlie had been received, from near or far. No one had seen him go, and no one outside the house knew he was gone. Given his hermit-like habits, no one was likely to discover his absence, either. Was he under any kind of obligation, John wondered, to inform anyone – the doctor? The solicitor? – of Charlie’s disappearance? Over and over he turned the question in his mind, and each time he found the answer to be no. A man had the perfect right to leave his home if he so chose, and to go without telling his employees his destination. There was no benefit John could see in telling the doctor, whose previous intervention in the household had brought nothing but ill, and as for the solicitor…

  Here John’s thinking out loud grew slower and more complicated. For if Charlie did not return, who would authorize the withdrawals from the bank? He knew obscurely that the solicitor would have to be involved if Charlie’s disappearance was prolonged, but yet…His reluctance was natural. At Angelfield they had lived with their backs to the world for years. Hester had been the one outsider to enter their world, and look what had happened there! Besides, he had an innate mistrust of solicitors. John had no specific charge against Mr Lomax, who gave every appearance of being a decent, sensible chap, yet he could not find it in himself to confide the household’s difficulty to a member of a profession which made its living from having its nose in other people’s private affairs. And besides, if Charlie’s absence became public knowledge, as his strangeness already was, would the solicitor be content to put his sign on Charlie’s bank papers, just so that John and the Missus could continue to pay the grocery bills? No. He knew enough about solicitors to know that it would not be as simple as that. John frowned as he envisaged Mr Lomax in the house, opening doors, rummaging through cupboards, casting his eye into every dark corner and carefully cultivated shadow of the Angelfield world. There would be no end to it.

  And then, the solicitor would only once need to come to the house to see the Missus wasn’t right. He would insist on the doctor being called in. And the same would happen to the Missus as had happened to Isabelle. She would be taken away. How could that do any good?

  No. They had just got rid of one outsider; it was no time to invite in another. Much safer to deal with private things privately. Which meant, now things were as they were, by himself.

  There was no urgency. The most recent withdrawal had been only a few weeks earlier, so they were not entirely without money. Also Hester had gone without collecting her wages, so that cash was available if she did not write for it and things got desperate. There was no need to pay for a lot of food: there were vegetables and fruit to feed an army in the garden, and the woods were full of grouse and pheasant. And if it came to it, if there was an emergency, a calamity (John hardly knew what he meant by this – was what they had already suffered not a calamity? Was it possible that worse should be in store? Somehow he thought so) then he knew someone who would have a few discreet cases of claret out of the cellar and give him a bob or two in return.

  ‘We’ll be all right for a bit,’ he told the Missus, over a cigarette, one night in the kitchen. ‘Probably manage four months if we’re careful. Don’t know what we’ll do then. We’ll have to see.’

  It was a self-comforting pretence at conversation; he’d given up expecting straightforward answers from the Missus. But the habit of talking to her was too long in him to be given up lightly. So he continued to sit across the table in the kitchen, sharing his thoughts, his dreams, his worries with her. And when she answered – random, rambling drifts of words – he puzzled over her pronouncements, trying to find the connection between her answer and his question. But the labyrinth inside her head was too complex for him to navigate, and the thread that led her from one word to the next had slipped through her fingers in the darkness.

  He kept food coming from the kitchen garden. He cooked; he cut up meat on the Missus’s plate and put tiny forkfuls in her mouth. He poured her cold cups of tea away and made fresh ones. He was no carpenter, but he nailed fresh boards over rotten ones here and there, kept the saucepans emptied in the main rooms, and stood in the attic, looking at the holes in the roof and scratching his head. ‘We’ll have to get that sorted,’ he would say, with an air of decision – but it wasn’t raining much, and it wasn’t snowing, and it was a job that could wait. There was so much else to do. He washed sheets and clothes. They dried stiff and sticky with the residue of soap flakes. He skinned rabbits and plucked pheasant, and roasted them. He did washing up and cleaned the sink. He knew what needed to be done. He had seen the Missus do it a hundred times.

  From time to time he spent half an hour in the topiary garden, but he could not enjoy it. The pleasure of being there was overshadowed by worry about what might be going on indoors, in his absence. And besides, to do it properly required more time than he was able to give it. In the end, the only part of the garden that he kept up was the kitchen garden and the rest he let go.

  Once we got used to it, there was a certain comfort in our new existence. The wine cellar proved a substantial and discreet source of household finance and, as time went by, our way of life began to feel sustainable. Better really if Charlie were just to stay absent. Unfound and unreturning, neither dead nor alive, he could do no harm to anyone.

  So I kept my knowledge to myself.

  In the woods there was a hovel. Unused for a hundred years, overgrown with thorns and surrounded by nettles, it was where Charlie and Isabelle used to go. After Isabelle was taken to the asylum, Charlie went there still; I knew, because I had seen him there, snivelling, scratching love letters on his bones with that old needle.

  It was the obvious place. So when he disappeared, I had gone there again. I squeezed through the brambles and hanging growth that masked the entrance into air sweet with rottenness, and there, in the gloom, I found him. Slumped in a corner, gun by his side, face half blown away. I recognized the other half, despite the maggots. It was Charlie all right.

  I backed out of the doorway, not caring about the nettles and the thorns. I couldn’t wait to get away from the sight of him. But his image stayed with me and, though I ran, it seemed impossible to escape his hollow, one-eyed stare.

  Where to find comfort?

  There was a house I knew. A simple little house in the woods. I had stolen food there once or twice. That was where I went. By the window I hid, getting my breath back, knowing I was close to ordinary life. And when I had stopped gasping for air, I stood looking in, at a woman in her chair, knitting. Though she didn’t know I was there her presence soothed me, like a kind grandmother in a fairytale. I watched her, cleansing my eyes, until the vision of Charlie’s body had faded and my heartbeat returned to normal.

  I walked back to Angelfield. And I didn’t tell. We were better off as we were. And anyway, it couldn’t make any difference to him, could it?

  He was the first of my ghosts.

  It seemed to me that the doctor’s car was forever in Miss Winter’s drive. When I first arrived in Yorkshire he would call every third day, then it became every other day, then every day and now he was coming to the house twice a day. I studied Miss Winter carefully. I knew the facts. Miss Winter was ill. Miss Winter was dying. All the same, when she was telling me her story she seemed to draw on a well of strength that was unaffected by age and illness. I explained the paradox by telling myself it was the very constancy of the doctor’s attention that was sustaining her.

  And yet in ways invisibl
e to my eyes, she must have been weakening quite seriously. For what else could explain Judith’s unexpected announcement one morning? Quite out of the blue she told me that Miss Winter was too unwell to meet me. That for a day or two she would be unable to engage in our interviews. That with nothing to do here, I may as well take a short holiday.

  ‘A holiday? After the fuss she made about my going away last time, I would have thought the last thing she would do would be to send me on a holiday now. And with Christmas only a few weeks away too!’

  Though Judith blushed, she was not forthcoming with any more information. Something wasn’t right. I was being shifted out of the way.

  ‘I can pack a case for you, if it would help?’ she offered. She smiled apologetically, knowing I knew she was hiding something.

  ‘I can do my own packing.’ Annoyance made me curt.

  ‘It’s Maurice’s day off, but Doctor Clifton will run you to the station.’

  Poor Judith. She hated deceit and was no good at subterfuge.

  ‘And Miss Winter? I’d like a quick word with her. Before I go.’

  ‘Miss Winter? I’m afraid she—’

  ‘Won’t see me?’

  ‘Can’t see you.’ Relief flooded her face and sincerity rang out in her voice as at last she was able to say something true. ‘Believe me, Miss Lea. She just can’t.’

  Whatever it was that Judith knew, Doctor Clifton knew it too.

  ‘Whereabouts in Cambridge is your father’s shop?’ he wanted to know and, ‘Does he deal in medical history at all?’ I answered him briefly, more concerned with my own questions than his, and after a time his attempts at small talk came to an end. As we drove into Harrogate the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter’s oppressive silence.

  Angelfield Again

  The day before, on the train, I had imagined activity and noise: shouted instructions and arms sending messages in urgent semaphore; cranes, plangent and slow; stone crashing on stone. Instead, as I arrived at the lodge gates and looked towards the demolition site, everything was silent and still.

  There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away. Even the path was indistinct. My feet were there one moment, gone the next. Lifting my head I walked blindly, tracing the path as I remembered it from my last visit, as I remembered it from Miss Winter’s descriptions.

  My mind map was accurate: I came to the garden exactly when I expected to. The dark shapes of the yew stood like a hazily painted stage set, flattened into two dimensions by the blank background. Like ethereal bowler hats a pair of domed forms floated on the cloud-like mist, the trunks that supported them fading into the whiteness beneath. Sixty years had left them overgrown and out of shape, but it was easy today to suppose that it was the mist that was softening the geometry of the forms, that when it lifted, it would reveal the garden as it was then, in all its mathematical perfection, set in the grounds not of a demolition site, nor of a ruin, but of a house intact.

  Half a century, as insubstantial as the water suspended in this air, was ready to evaporate with the first ray of winter sun.

  I brought my wrist close to my face and read the time. I had arranged to meet Aurelius, but how to find him in this mist? I could wander for ever without seeing him, even if he passed within arm’s reach.

  I called out, ‘Hello!’ and a man’s voice was carried back to me.

  ‘Hello!’

  Impossible to tell whether he was distant or close by. ‘Where are you?’

  I pictured Aurelius staring into the mist looking for a landmark.

  ‘I’m next to a tree.’ The words were muffled.

  ‘So am I,’ I called back. ‘I don’t think yours is the same tree as mine. You sound too far away.’

  ‘You sound quite near, though.’

  ‘Do I? Why don’t you stay where you are and keep talking, and I’ll find you!’

  ‘Right you are! An excellent plan! Though I shall have to think of something to say, won’t I? How hard it is to speak to order, when it seems so easy the rest of the time…What dismal weather we’re having. Never known murkiness like it.’

  And so Aurelius thought aloud, while I stepped into a cloud and followed the thread of his voice in the air.

  That is when I saw it. A shadow that glided past me, pale in the watery light. I think I knew it was not Aurelius. I was suddenly conscious of the beating of my heart, and I stretched out my hand, half fearful, half hopeful. The figure eluded me and swam out of view.

  ‘Aurelius?’ My voice sounded shaky to my own ears.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  His voice was in quite the wrong direction. What had I seen? It was not Aurelius. It must have been an effect of the mist. Afraid of what I might yet see if I waited, I stood still, staring into the aqueous air, willing the figure to appear again.

  ‘Aha! There you are!’ boomed a great voice behind me. Aurelius. He clasped my shoulders in his mittened hands as I turned to face him. ‘Goodness gracious, Margaret, you’re as white as a sheet. Anyone would think you’d seen a ghost!’

  We walked together in the garden. In his overcoat Aurelius seemed even taller and broader than he really was. Beside him, in my mist-grey raincoat I felt insubstantial.

  ‘How is your book going?’

  ‘It’s just notes at the moment. Interviews with Miss Winter. And research.’

  ‘Today is research, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you need to know?’

  ‘I just want to take some photographs. I don’t think the weather is on my side though.’

  ‘You’ll get to see it properly within the hour. This mist won’t last long.’

  We came to a kind of walkway, lined on each side with cones grown so wide that they almost made a hedge.

  ‘Why do you come here, Aurelius?’

  We strolled on to the end of the path, then into a space where there seemed to be nothing but mist. When we came to a wall of yew twice as high as Aurelius himself, we followed it. I noticed a sparkling in the grass and on the leaves: the sun had come out. The moisture in the air began to evaporate and the circle of visibility grew wider by the minute. Our wall of yew had led us full circle round an empty space; we had arrived back at the same walkway we had entered by.

  When my question seemed so lost in time that I was not even sure I had asked it, Aurelius answered. ‘I was born here.’

  I stopped abruptly. Aurelius wandered on, unaware of the effect his words had had on me. I half ran a few paces to catch up with him.

  ‘Aurelius!’ I took hold of the sleeve of his greatcoat. ‘Is it true? Were you really born here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  He gave a strange, sad smile. ‘On my birthday.’

  Unthinking, I insisted, ‘Yes, but when?’

  ‘Some time in January, probably. Possibly February. Possibly the end of December, even. Sixty years ago, roughly. I’m afraid I don’t know any more than that.’

  I frowned, remembered what he had told me before about Mrs Love and not having a mother. But in what circumstances would an adopted child know so little about his original circumstances that he does not even know his own birthday?

  ‘Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?’

  ‘Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.’

  I was lost for words.

  ‘One does get used to it, I suppose,’ he said, and I regretted that he had to comfort me for his own loss.

  ‘Do you really?’

  He considered me with a curious expression, wondering how much to tell me. ‘No, actually,’ he said.

  With the slow and heavy steps of invalids, we resumed our walking. The mist was almost gone. The magical shapes of the topiary had lost their charm, and looked like the unkempt bushes and hedges they were.

  ‘So it was Mrs Love w
ho—’ I began.

  ‘Found me. Yes.’

  ‘And your parents…’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘But you know it was here? In this house?’

  Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. ‘I wouldn’t expect other people to understand. I haven’t got any proof. But I do know.’ He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue.

  ‘Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can’t explain it.’

  I nodded, and Aurelius went on.

  ‘The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I’ve been coming ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway—’

  His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

  ‘Anyway, the minute I got here I knew. This is home, I said to myself. This is where I come from. There was no doubt about it. I knew.’

  With his last words Aurelius had let the lightness slip, allowed a fervour to creep in. He cleared his throat. ‘Obviously I don’t expect anyone to believe it. I’ve no evidence as such. Only a coincidence of dates, and Mrs Love’s vague memory of a smell of smoke – and my own conviction.’

  ‘I believe it,’ I said.

  Aurelius bit his lip and sent me a wary sideways look.

  His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had been planning for years for this moment.