The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  Details fell into place. Emmeline talking to herself behind a closed door, when her sister was at the doctor’s house. Jane Eyre, the book that appears and reappears in the story, like a silver thread in a tapestry. I understood the mysteries of Hester’s wandering bookmark, the appearance of The Turn of the Screw, and the disappearance of her diary. I understood the strangeness of John-the-dig’s decision to teach the girl who had once desecrated his garden how to tend it.

  I understood the girl in the mist, and how and why she came out of it. I understood how it was that a girl like Adeline could melt away and leave Miss Winter in her place.

  ‘I am going to tell you a story about twins,’ Miss Winter had called after me, that first evening in the library, when I was on the verge of leaving. Words that with their unexpected echo of my own story attached me irresistibly to hers.

  Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

  Except that now I knew better.

  She had pointed me in the right direction that very first night, if I had only known how to listen.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Lea?’ she had asked me. ‘I am going to tell you a ghost story.’

  And I had told her, ‘Some other time.’

  But she had told me a ghost story.

  Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

  Or alternatively: once upon a time there were three.

  Once upon a time there was a house and the house was haunted.

  The ghost was, in the usual way of ghosts, mostly invisible, and yet not quite invisible. There was the closing of doors that had been left open, and the opening of doors left shut. The flash of movement in a mirror that made you glance up. The shimmer of a draught behind a curtain when there was no window open. The little ghost was there in the unexpected movement of books from one room to another, and in the mysterious movement of bookmark from page to page. It was her hand that lifted a diary from one place and hid it in another, her hand that replaced it later. If, turning into a corridor, the curious idea occurred to you that you had just missed seeing the sole of a shoe disappearing around the far corner, then the little ghost was not far away. And when, surprised by the back-of-the-neck feeling that someone has their eye on you, you raised your head to find the room empty, then you could be sure that the little ghost was hiding in the emptiness somewhere.

  Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.

  She haunted softly. On tiptoe, in bare feet, she made never a sound; and yet she recognized the footfall of every inhabitant of the house, knew every creaking board and every squeaky door. Every dark corner of the house was familiar to her, every nook and every cranny. She knew the gaps behind cupboards and between sets of shelves, she knew the backs of sofas and the underneath of chairs. The house, to her mind, was a hundred and one hiding places, and she knew how to move between them invisibly.

  Isabelle and Charlie never saw the ghost. Living as they did, outside logic, outside reason, they were not the sort to be perplexed by the inexplicable. Losses and breakages and the mislaying of random items seemed to them part of the natural universe. A shadow that fell across a carpet where a shadow ought not to be did not cause them to stop and reflect; such mysteries seemed only a natural extension of the shadows in their hearts and minds. The little ghost was the movement in their peripheral vision, the unacknowledged puzzle in the back of their minds, the permanent shadow attached, without their knowing it, to their lives. She scavenged for leftovers in their pantry like a mouse, warmed herself at the embers of their fires after they had gone to bed, disappeared into the recesses of their dilapidation the instant anyone appeared.

  She was the secret of the house.

  Like all secrets, she had her guardians.

  The housekeeper saw the little ghost as plain as day, despite her failing eyesight. A good thing too. Without her collaboration there would never have been enough scraps in the pantry, enough crumbs from the breakfast loaf, to sustain the little ghost. For it would be a mistake to think that the ghost was one of those incorporeal, ethereal spectres. No. She had a stomach, and when it was empty it had to be filled.

  But she earned her keep. For as much as she ate, she also provided. The other person who had the knack of seeing ghosts, you see, was the gardener, and he was glad of an extra pair of hands. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and an old pair of John’s trousers, cut off at the ankle and held up with braces, and her haunting of the garden was fruitful. In the soil potatoes grew swollen under her care; above ground the fruit bushes flourished, producing clusters of berries that her hands sought out under low leaves. Not only did she have a magic touch for fruit and vegetables, but the roses bloomed as they had never bloomed before. Later, she learnt the secret desire of box and yew to become geometry. At her bidding leaves and branches grew corners and angles, curves and mathematically straight lines.

  In the garden and in the kitchen the little ghost did not need to hide. The housekeeper and the gardener were her protectors, her guardians. They taught her the ways of the house and how to be safe in it. They fed her. They watched over her. When a stranger came to live in the house, with sharper eyes than most, with a desire to banish shadows and lock doors, they worried about her.

  More than anything else, they loved her.

  But where did she come from? What was her story? For ghosts do not appear at random. They only come to where they know they are at home. And the little ghost was at home in this house. At home in this family. Though she had no name, though she was no one, still the gardener and the housekeeper knew who she was all right. Her story was written in her copper hair and her emerald eyes.

  For here is the most curious thing about the whole story. The ghost bore the most uncanny resemblance to the twins already living in the house. How else could she have lived there unsuspected for so long? Three girls with copper hair that fell in a mass down their backs. Three girls with striking emerald eyes. Odd, don’t you think, the resemblance they both bore to the little ghost and she to them?

  ‘When I was born,’ Miss Winter told me, ‘I was no more than a sub-plot.’ So she began the story in which Isabelle went to a picnic, met Roland and eventually ran away to marry him, escaping her brother’s dark, unbrotherly passion. Charlie, neglected by his sister, went on the rampage, venting his rage, his passion, his jealousy, on others. The daughters of earls or of shopkeepers, of bankers or of chimney sweeps; to him it did not really matter who they were. With or without their consent, he threw himself upon them in his desperation for oblivion.

  Isabelle gave birth to her twins in a London hospital. Two girls with nothing of their mother’s husband about them. Copper hair – just like their uncle. Green eyes – just like their uncle.

  Here is the sub-plot: at about the same time, in some barn or dim cottage bedroom, another woman gave birth. Not the daughter of an earl, I think. Or a banker. The well-off have ways of dealing with trouble. She must have been some anonymous, ordinary, powerless woman. Her child was a girl too. Copper hair. Emerald eyes.

  Child of rage. Child of rape. Charlie’s child.

  Once upon a time there was a house called Angelfield.

  Once upon a time there were twins.

  Once upon a time there came to Angelfield a cousin. More likely a half-sister.

  Sitting in the train with Hester’s diary closed in my lap, the great rush of sympathy I was beginning to feel for Miss Winter was curtailed when another illegitimate child came to mind. Aurelius. And my sympathy turned to anger. Why was he separated from his mother? Why abandoned? Why left to fend for himself in the world without knowing his own story?

  I thought too of the white tent and the remains beneath it that I now knew not to be Hester’s.

  It all boiled down to the night of the fire. Arson, murder, abandonment of a baby.

  When the train arrived in Harrogate and I stepped out onto the platform, I was surprised to find it ankle-deep in snow. For although I h
ad been staring at the window of the train for the last hour, I had seen nothing of the view outside.

  I thought I knew it all, when I had my moment of elucidation.

  I thought, when I realized that there were not two girls at Angelfield but three, that I had the key to the whole story in my hand.

  At the end of my cogitations I realized that until I knew what happened on the night of the fire, I knew nothing.

  Bones

  It was Christmas Eve; it was late; it was snowing hard. The first taxi driver and the second refused to take me so far out of town on such a night, but the third, indifferent of expression, must have been moved by the ardour of my request, for he shrugged his shoulders and let me in. ‘We’ll give it a go,’ he warned gruffly.

  We drove out of town and the snow continued to fall, piling up meticulously, flake by flake, on every inch of earth, every hedge top, every bough. After the last village, the last farmhouse, we found ourselves in a white landscape, the road indistinguishable at times from the flat land all about, and I shrunk into my seat, expecting at any moment that the driver would give up and turn back. Only my clear directions reassured him that we were in fact on a road. I got out myself to open the first gate, then we found ourselves at the second set, the main gates of the house.

  ‘I hope you’ll find your way back all right,’ I said.

  ‘Me? I’ll be all right,’ he said, with another shrug.

  As I expected, the gates were locked. Not wanting the driver to think I was some kind of thief, I pretended to be looking for my keys in my bag while he turned the car. Only when he was some distance away did I grab hold of the bars of the gate and clamber over.

  The kitchen door was not locked. I pulled my boots off, shook the snow off my coat and hung it up. I walked through the empty kitchen, and made my way to Emmeline’s quarters where I knew Miss Winter would be. Full of accusations, full of questions, I stoked my rage; it was for Aurelius and for the woman whose bones had lain for sixty years in the burnt-out ruins of Angelfield’s library. For all my inward storming, my approach was silent: the carpet drank in the fury of my tread.

  I did not knock, but pushed the door open and went straight in.

  The curtains were still closed. At Emmeline’s bedside Miss Winter was sitting quietly. Startled by my entrance, she stared at me, an extraordinary shimmer in her eyes.

  ‘Bones!’ I hissed at her. ‘They have found bones at Angelfield!’

  I was all eyes, all ears, waiting on tenterhooks for an admission to emerge from her. Whether it were in word or expression or gesture did not matter. She would make it, and I would read it.

  Except that there was something in the room trying to distract me from my scrutiny.

  ‘Bones?’ said Miss Winter. She was paper-white and there was an ocean in her eyes, vast enough to drown all my fury.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Oh. What richness of vibration a single syllable can contain. Fear. Despair. Sorrow and resignation. Relief, of a dark, unconsoling kind. And grief, deep and ancient.

  And then that nagging distraction in the room swelled so urgently in my mind that there was no room for anything else. What was it? Something extraneous to my drama of the bones. Something that preceded my intrusion. For a faltering second I was confused, then all the insignificant things I had noticed without noticing came together. The atmosphere in the room. The closed curtains. The aqueous transparency of Miss Winter’s eyes. The fact that the steel core that had always been her essence seemed to have simply gone from her.

  My attention narrowed to one thing: where was the slow tide of Emmeline’s breath? No sound came to my ears.

  ‘No! She’s—’

  I fell to my knees by the bed and stared.

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Winter said, softly. ‘She’s gone. It was a few minutes ago.’

  I gazed at Emmeline’s empty face. Nothing really had changed. Her scars were still angrily red; her lips had the same sideways slant; her eyes were still green. I touched her twisted patchwork hand, and her skin was warm. Was it true that she was gone? Absolutely, irrevocably gone? It seemed impossible that it should be so. Surely she had not deserted us completely? Surely there was something of her left behind to console us? Was there no spell, no talisman, no magic that would bring her back? Was there nothing I could say that would reach her?

  It was the warmth in her hand that persuaded me she could hear me. It was the warmth in her hand that brought all the words into my chest, falling over each other in their impatience to fly into Emmeline’s ear.

  ‘Find my sister, Emmeline. Please find her. Tell her I’m waiting for her. Tell her—’ My throat was too narrow for all the words and they broke against each other as they rose, choking, out of me. ‘Tell her I miss her! Tell her I’m lonely!’ The words launched themselves impetuously, urgently from my lips. With fervour they flew across the space between us, chasing Emmeline. ‘Tell her I can’t wait any longer! Tell her to come!’

  But I was too late. The divide had come down. Invisible. Irrevocable. Implacable.

  My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

  ‘Oh, my poor child.’ I felt the touch of Miss Winter’s hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly.

  Eventually I dried my eyes. There were only a few words left. Rattling around loose without their old companions. ‘She was my twin,’ I said. ‘She was here. Look.’

  I pulled at the jumper tucked into my skirt, revealed my torso to the light. My scar. My half-moon. Pale silver-pink, a nacreous translucence. The line that divides.

  ‘This is where she was. We were joined here. And they separated us. And she died. She couldn’t live without me.’

  I felt the flutter of Miss Winter’s fingers tracing the crescent on my skin, then the tender sympathy of her eyes.

  ‘The thing is—’ (the final words, the very last words, after this I need never say anything, ever again) ‘I don’t think I can live without her.’

  ‘Child.’ Miss Winter looked at me. Held me suspended in the compassion of her eyes.

  I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water.

  All the time Miss Winter held me in her long, green gaze.

  Then slowly, slowly, the sand resettled and the water returned to its quietness, slowly, slowly. And the bones resettled in the rusting hold.

  ‘You asked me once for my story,’ I said.

  ‘And you told me you didn’t have one.’

  ‘Now you know, I do have one.’

  ‘I never doubted it.’ She smiled a poor regretful smile. ‘When I invited you here I thought I knew your story already. I had read your essay about the Landier brothers. Such a good essay, it was. You knew so much about siblings. Insider knowledge, I thought. And the more I looked at your essay, the more I thought you must have a twin. And so I fixed upon you to be my biographer. Because if after all these years of tale-telling I was tempted to lie to you, you would find me out.’

  ‘I have found you out.’

  She nodded, tranquil, sad, unsurprised. ‘About time too. How much do you know?’

  ‘What you told me. Only a sub-plot, is how you put it. You told me the story of Isabelle and her twins, and I wasn’t paying attention. The sub-plot was Charlie and his rampages. You kept pointing me in the direction of Jane Eyre. The book about the outsider in the family. The motherless cousin. I don’t know who your mother was. And how you came to be at Angelfield without her.’

  Sadly she shook her head. ‘Anyone who might have known the answer to those questions is dead, Margaret.’

  ‘Can’t you remember?’

  ‘I
am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theatre: we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events. How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border there. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairytales appropriated by a mind hungry for story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that it is the truth.’

  ‘All children mythologize their birth.’

  ‘Quite. The only thing I can be sure of is what John-the-dig told me.’

  ‘And what did he tell you?’

  ‘That I appeared like a weed, between two strawberries.’

  She told me the story.

  Someone was getting at the strawberries. Not birds, because they pecked and left pitted berries. And not the twins because they trampled the plants and left footprints all over the plot. No, some light-footed thief was taking a berry here and a berry there. Neatly, without disturbing a thing. Another gardener wouldn’t even have noticed. The same day John noticed a pool of water under his garden tap. The tap was dripping. He gave it a turn, tightened it up. He scratched his head, and went about his business. But he kept an eye out.

  The next day he saw a figure in the strawberries. A little scarecrow, barely knee-high, in an overlarge hat that drooped down over its face. It ran off when it saw him. But the day after it was so determined to get its fruit that he had to yell and wave his arms to chase it off. Afterwards he thought that he couldn’t put a name to it. Who in the village had a mite that size, small and underfed? Who round here would let their child go stealing fruit from other people’s gardens? He was stumped for an answer.