The thirteenth tale (47 page)

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 come only 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
subplot.“ 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 a 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 subplot: 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.

As I sat 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 had
been staring out 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
ardor 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 shrank 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 off my boots, 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 burned-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 was 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 the nagging distraction in the room swelled so urgently
in my mind that there was no room for anything else. What was it? Some-ting
extraneous to my drama of the bones. Something that preceded y 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 Miss Winter’s eyes. The fact that the steel
core that had always been r 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 fervor they flew across the space between us, chasing Emmeline.
”Tell her I can’t wait any longer! Tell her to cornel“

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, saw the tender sympathy in her face.

‘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 subplot, is how you put it. You told
me the story of Isabelle and her twins, and I wasn’t paying attention. The
subplot 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 theater; 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 are all sorts of phantasmagoria that
inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales 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. Afterward he
thought he couldn’t put a name to it. Who in the village had a mite that size,
small and underfed? Who around here would let their child go stealing fruit
from other people’s gardens? He was stumped for an answer.