The thirteenth tale (26 page)

What to do? Running to the twins was pointless. She’d have had
to approach them across a long stretch of open field, and they would see her
and flee before she had covered half the distance. So she went to the doctor’s
house. At a run.

In no time she was there, hammering impatiently at the door. It
was Mrs. Maudsley who opened it, tight-lipped at the racket, but Hester had
more important things on her mind than apologies and pushed past her to the
door of the surgery. She entered without knocking.

The doctor looked up, startled to see his collaborator’s face
flushed with exertion, her hair, normally so neat, flying free from its grips.
She was out of breath. She wanted to speak but for the moment could not.

‘Whatever is it?“ he asked, rising from his seat and coming
around the desk to put his hands on her shoulders.

‘Adeline!“ she gasped. ”You’ve let her out!“

The doctor, puzzled, frowned. He turned Hester by the shoulders,
until she was facing the other end of the room.

There was Adeline.

Hester spun back around to the doctor. “But I’ve just seen her!
With Emmeline! On the edge of the woods beyond Oates’s field…” She began
vehemently enough, but her voice tailed off as she began to wonder.

‘Calm yourself, sit down, here, take a sip of water,“ the doctor
was saying.

‘She must have run off. How could she have got out? And come
back so quickly?“ Hester tried to make sense of it.

‘She has been here in this room this last two hours. Since
breakfast. She has not been unsupervised in all that time.“ He looked into
Hester’s eyes, stirred by her emotion. ”It must have been another child. From
the village,“ he suggested, maintaining his doctorly decorum.

‘But—“ Hester shook her head. ”It was Adeline’s clothes.
Adeline’s hair.“

Hester turned to look at Adeline again. Her open eyes were
indifferent to the world. She was wearing not the green dress Hester had seen a
few minutes before but a neat navy one, and her hair was not loose but braided.

The eyes Hester turned back to the doctor were full of
bewilderment. Her breathing would not steady. There was no rational explanation
for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was
totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. “I must
be mad,” she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. “I have
seen a ghost!”

Her eyes filled with tears.

It produced a strange sensation in the doctor to see his
collaborator reduced to such a state of disheveled emotion. And although it was
the scientist in him that had first admired Hester for her cool head and
reliable brain, it was the man, animal and instinctive, that responded to her
disintegration by putting his arms around her and placing his lips firmly upon
hers in a passionate embrace.

Hester did not resist.

Listening at doors is not bad manners when it is done in the
name of science, and the doctor’s wife was a keen scientist when it came to
studying her own husband. The kiss that so startled the doctor and Hester came
as no surprise at all to Mrs. Maudsley, who had been expecting something rather
like it for some time.

She flung the door open and in a rush of outraged righteousness
burst into the surgery.

‘I will thank you to leave this house instantly,“ she said to
Hester. ”You can send John in the brougham for the child.“

Then, to her husband, “I will speak to you later.”

The experiment was over. So were many other things.

John fetched Adeline. He saw neither the doctor nor his wife at
the house but learned from the maid about the events of the morning.

At home he put Adeline in her old bed, in the old room, and left
the door ajar.

Emmeline, wandering in the woods, raised her head, sniffed the
air and turned directly toward home. She came in the kitchen door, made
straight for the stairs, went up two steps at a time and strode unhesitatingly
to the old room. She closed the door behind her.

And Hester? No one saw her return to the house, and no one heard
her leave. But when the Missus knocked on her door the next morning, she found
the neat little room empty and Hester gone.

I emerged from the spell of the story and into Miss Winter’s
glazed and mirrored library.

‘Where did she go?“ I wondered.

Miss Winter eyed me with a slight frown. “I’ve no idea. What
does it matter?”

‘She must have gone somewhere.“

The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t
do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They
come, they go, and when they go they’re gone for good. That’s all there is to
it.”

I slid my pencil into the spiral binding of my notebook and
walked to the door, but when I got there, I turned back.

‘Where did she come from, then?“

‘For goodness’ sake! She was only a governess! She is
irrelevant, I tell you.“

‘She must have had references. A previous job. Or else a letter
of application with a home address. Perhaps she came from an agency?“

Miss Winter closed her eyes and a long-suffering expression
appeared on her face. “Mr. Lomax, the Angelfield family solicitor, will have
all the details I’m sure. Not that they’ll do you any good. It’s my story. I
should know. His office is in Market Street, Banbury. I will instruct him to
answer any inquiries you choose to make.”

I wrote to Mr. Lomax that night.

AFTER HESTER

The next morning, when Judith came with my breakfast tray, I
gave her the letter for Mr. Lomax, and she took a letter for me from her apron
pocket. I recognized my father’s handwriting.

My father’s letters were always a comfort, and this one was no
exception. He hoped I was well. Was my work progressing? He had read a very
strange and delightful nineteenth-century Danish novel that he would tell me
about when I returned. At auction he had come across a bundle of
eighteenth-century letters no one seemed to want. Might I be interested? He had
bought them in case. Private detectives? Well, perhaps, but would a
genealogical researcher not do the job just as well or perhaps better? There
was a fellow he knew who had all the right skills, and come to think of it, he
owed Father a favor—he sometimes came into the shop to use the almanacs. In
case I intended to pursue the matter, here was his address. Finally, as always,
those well meant but desiccated four words: Mother sends her love.

Did she really say it? I wondered. Father mentioning, I’ll write
to Margaret this afternoon, and she—casually? warmly?—Send her my love.

No. I couldn’t imagine it. It would be my father’s addition.
Written without her knowledge. Why did he bother? To please me? To make it
true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect
us? It was an impossible task. My mother and I were like two continents moving
slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly
extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

A letter had come for me at the shop; my father enclosed it with
his own. It was from the law professor Father had recommended to me.

Dear Miss Lea,

I was not aware Ivan Lea even had a daughter, but now I know he
has one, I am pleased to make your acquaintance—and even more pleased to be of
assistance. The legal decree of decease is just what you imagine it to be: a
presumption in law of the death of a person whose whereabouts have been unknown
for such a length of time and in such circumstances that death is the only
reasonable assumption. Its main function is to enable the estate of a missing
person to be passed into the hands of his inheritors.

I have undertaken the necessary researches and traced the
documents relating to the case you are particularly interested in. Your Mr.
Angelfield was apparently a man of reclusive habits, and the date and
circumstances of his disappearance appear not to be known. However, the
painstaking and sympathetic work carried out by one Mr. Lomax on behalf of the
inheritors (two nieces) enabled the relevant formalities to be duly carried
out. The estate was of some significant value, though diminished somewhat by a
fire that left the house itself uninhabitable. But you will see all this for
yourself in the copy I have made you of the relevant documents.

You will see that the solicitor himself has signed on behalf of
one of the beneficiaries. This is common in situations where the beneficiary is
unable for some reason (illness or other incapacity, for instance) to take care
of his own affairs.

It was with a most particular attention that I noted the
signature of the other beneficiary. It was almost illegible, but I managed to
work it out in the end. Have I stumbled across one of the best-kept secrets of
the day? But perhaps you knew it already? Is this what inspired your interest
in the case?

Fear not! I am a man of the greatest discretion! Tell your
father to give me a good discount on the Justitiae Naturalis Principia, and I
will say not a word to anyone!

Your servant,

William Henry Cadwalladr

I turned straight to the end of the neat copy Professor
Cadwalladr had made. Here was space for the signatures of Charlie’s nieces. As
he said, Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived
the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for.
Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline
March.

Proof.

Vida Winter was Adeline March.

She was telling the truth.

With this in mind, I went to my appointment in the library, and
listened and scribbled in my little book as Miss Winter recounted the aftermath
of Hester’s departure.

Adeline and Emmeline spent the first night and the first day in
their room, in bed, arms wrapped around each other and gazing into each other’s
eyes. There was a tacit agreement between the Missus and John-the-dig to treat
them as though they were convalescent, and, in a way, they were. An injury had
been done to them. So they lay in bed, nose to nose, gazing cross-eyed at each
other. Without a word. Without a smile. Blinking in unison. And with the
transfusion that took place via that twenty-four-hour-long gaze, the connection
that had been broken, healed. And like any wound that heals, it left its scar.

Meanwhile the Missus was in a state of confusion over what had
happened to Hester. John, reluctant to disillusion her about the governess,
said nothing, but his silence only encouraged her to wonder aloud. “I suppose
she’ll have told the doctor where she’s gone,” she concluded miserably. “I’ll
have to find out from him when she’s coming back.”

Then John had to speak, and he spoke roughly. “Don’t you go
asking him where she’s gone! Don’t ask him anything at all. Besides, we won’t
be seeing him around the place no more.”

The Missus turned away from him, frowning. What was the matter
with everyone? Why was Hester not there? Why was John all upset? And the
doctor—he who had been the household’s constant visitor— why should he not be
coming anymore? Things were happening that were beyond her comprehension. More
and more often these days, and for longer and longer periods, she had the sense
that something had gone wrong with the world. More than once she seemed to wake
up in her head to find that whole hours had passed by without leaving a trace
in her memory. Things that clearly made sense to other people didn’t always
make sense to her. And when she asked questions to try and understand it, a
queer look came into people’s eyes, which they quickly covered up. Yes.
Something odd was happening, and Hester’s unexplained absence was only part of
it.

John, though he regretted the unhappiness of the Missus, was
relieved that Hester had gone. The departure of the governess seemed to take a
great burden from him. He came more freely into the house, and in the evenings
spent longer hours with the Missus in the kitchen. To his way of thinking,
losing Hester was no loss at all. She had really made only one improvement to
his life—by encouraging him to take up work again in the topiary garden—and she
had done it so subtly, so discreetly, that it was a simple matter for him to
reorganize his mind until it told him that the decision had been entirely his
own. When it became clear that she had gone for good, he brought his boots from
the shed and sat polishing them by the stove, legs up on the table, for who was
there to stop him now?

In the nursery Charlie’s rage and fury seemed to have deserted
him, leaving in their place a woeful fatigue. You could sometimes hear his
slow, dragging steps across the floor, and sometimes, ear to the door, you
heard him crying with the exhausted sobs of a wretched two-year-old. Could it
be that in some deeply mysterious though still scientific way, Hester had
influenced him through locked doors and kept the worst of his despair at bay?
It did not seem impossible.

It was not only people who reacted to Hester’s absence. The
house responded to it instantly. The first thing was the new quiet. There was
no tap-tap-tap of Hester’s feet trotting up and down stairs and along
corridors. Then the thumps and knocks of the workmen on the roof came to a
halt, too. The roofer, discovering that Hester was not there, had the
well-founded suspicion that with no one to put his invoices under Charlie’s
nose, he would not be paid for his work. He packed up his tools and left, came
back once for his ladders, was never seen again.