The thirteenth tale (50 page)

Something woke me. Like a cat I was alert before I ever had my
eyes open. I didn’t move, kept my breathing regular, and watched Adeline from
between my lashes.

She bent over the cot, lifted the baby and was on her way out of
the room. I could have called out to stop her. But I didn’t. If I had cried
out, she would have postponed her plan, whereas by letting her go on with it, I
could find out what she intended and put a stop to it once and for all. The baby
stirred in her arms. He was thinking about waking up. He didn’t like to be in
anyone’s arms but Emmeline’s, and a baby is not taken in by a twin.

I followed her downstairs to the library and peeped through the
door that she had left ajar. The baby was on the desk, next to the pile of
books that were never reshelved because I reread them so frequently. Next to
their neat rectangle I saw movement in the folds of the baby’s blanket. I heard
his muffled half grunts. He was awake.

Kneeling by the fireside was Adeline. She took coals from the
scuttle, logs from their place by the hearth, and deposited them haphazardly in
the fireplace. She did not know how to make a proper fire. I had learned from
the Missus the correct arrangement of paper, kindling, coals and logs;
Adeline’s fires were wild and random affairs that ought not to burn at all.

The realization of what she intended slowly unfolded in me. She
would not succeed, would she? There was only a shadow of warmth in the ashes,
not enough to relight coals or logs, and I never left kindling or matches in
reach. Hers was a mad fire; it couldn’t catch; I knew it couldn’t. But I could
not reassure myself. Her desire for flames was all the kindling she needed. All
she had to do was look at something for it to spark. The incendiary magic she
possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly
enough.

In horror I watched her place the baby on the coals, still
wrapped in his blanket.

Then she looked about the room. What was she after? When she
made for the door and opened it, I jumped back into the shadows. But she had
not discovered my spying. It was something else she was after. She turned into
the passage under the stairs and disappeared.

I ran to the fireplace and removed the baby from the pyre. I
trapped his blanket quickly around a moth-eaten bolster from the chaise lounge
and put it on the coals in his place. But there was no time to flee. I heard
steps on the stone flags, a dragging noise that was the sound of a petrol can
scraping on the floor, and the door opened just as I stepped back into one of
the library bays.

Hush, I prayed silently, don’t cry now, and I held the infant
close to my body so he would not miss the warmth of his blanket.

Back at the fireplace, head on one side, Adeline surveyed her
fire. What was wrong? Had she noticed the change? But it appeared not. She
looked around the room. What was it she wanted?

The baby stirred, a jerk of the arms, a kick of the legs, a
tensing of e backbone that is so often the precursor to a wail. I resettled
him, :ad heavy on my shoulder; I felt his breath on my neck. Don’t cry. ease
don’t cry. He was still again, and I watched.

My books. On the desk. The ones I couldn’t pass without opening
at random, for the pleasure of a few words, a quick hello. How incongruous to
see them in her hands. Adeline and books? It looked all wrong. Even when she
opened the cover, I thought for one long, bizarre moment that she was going to
read—

She tore out pages by the fistful. She scattered them all over
the desk; some slid off, onto the floor. When she had done with the ripping,
she grabbed handfuls of them and screwed them into loose balls. Fast! She was a
whirlwind! My neat little volumes, suddenly a paper mountain. To think a book
could have so much paper in it! I wanted to cry out, but what? All the words,
the beautiful words, pulled apart and crumpled up, and I, in the shadows,
speechless.

She gathered an armful and released it onto the top of the white
blanket in the fireplace. Three times I watched her turn from the desk to the
fireplace, her arms full of pages, until the hearth was heaped high with
torn-up books. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White… Balls of paper
toppled from the height of the pyre, some rolled as far as the carpet, joining
those that she had dropped en route.

One came to a stop at my feet, and silently I dropped down to
retrieve it.

Oh! The outrageous sensation of crumpled paper; words gone wild,
flying in all directions, senseless. My heart broke.

Anger swept me up; it carried me like a piece of flotsam, unable
to see or breathe; it roared like an ocean in my head. I might have cried out,
leaped like a mad thing from my hiding place and struck her, but I had
Emmeline’s treasure in my arms, and so I stood by and watched, trembling,
weeping in silence, as her sister desecrated the treasure that was mine.

At last she was satisfied with her pyre. Yet whichever way you
looked at it, the mountain in the hearth was madness itself. It’s all upside
down, the Missus would have said; it’ll never light—you want the paper at the
bottom. But even if she had built it properly, it would make no difference. She
couldn’t light it: She had no matches. And even if she had been able to obtain
matches, still she would not achieve her purpose, for the boy, her intended
victim, was in my arms. And the greatest madness of all: Supposing I hadn’t
been there to stop her? Supposing I hadn’t rescued the infant and she had
burned him alive? How could she ever imagine that burning her sister’s child
would restore her sister to her?

It was the fire of a madwoman.

In my arms the baby stirred and opened his mouth to mewl. What
to do? Behind Adeline’s back I softly retreated, then fled to the kitchen.

I must get the baby to a place of safety, then deal with Adeline
later. My mind was working furiously, proposing plan after plan. Emmeline will
have no love left for her sister when she realizes what she tried to do. It
will be she and I now. We will tell the police that Adeline killed
John-the-dig, and they will take her away. No! We will tell Adeline that unless
she leaves Angelfield we will tell the police… No! And then suddenly I have it!
We will leave Angelfield. Yes! Emmeline and I will leave, with the baby, and we
will start a new life, without Adeline, without Angelfield, but together.

And it all seems so simple I wonder I never thought of it
before.

With the future glowing so brightly it seems realer than the
present, I put the page from Jane Eyre in the game bag as well, for
safekeeping, and a spoon that is on the kitchen table. We will need that, en
route to our new life.

Now where? Somewhere not far from the house, where there is
nothing to hurt him, where he will be warm enough for the few minutes it will
take me to come back to the house and fetch Emmeline and persuade her to
follow…

Not the coach house. Adeline sometimes goes there. The church.
That is a place she never goes.

I run down the drive, through the lych-gate and into the church.
In the front rows are small tapestry cushions for kneeling. I arrange them into
a bed and lay the baby on them in his canvas papoose.

Now, back to the house.

I am almost there when my future shatters. Shards of glass
flying through the air, one breaking window then another, and a sinister,
living light prowling in the library. The empty window frame shows me liquid
fire spraying the room, petrol cans bursting in the heat. And two figures.

Emmeline!

I run. The odor of fire catches my nostrils even in the entrance
hall, though the stone floor and walls are cool—the fire has no hold here. But
at the door of the library I stop. Flames chase each other up the curtains;
bookshelves are ablaze; the fireplace itself is an inferno. In the center of
the room, the twins. For a moment, in all the noise and heat of the fire, I
stop dead. Amazed. For Emmeline, the passive, docile Emmeline, is returning
blow for blow, kick for kick, bite for bite. She has never retaliated against
her sister before, but now she is doing it. For her child.

Around them, above their heads, one burst of light after another
as the petrol cans explode and fire rains down upon the room.

I open my mouth to call to Emmeline that the baby is safe, but
the first breath I draw in is nothing but heat, and I choke.

I hop over fire, step around it, dodge the fire that falls on me
from above, brush fire away with my hands, beat out the fire that grows in my
clothes. When I reach the sisters I cannot see them, but reach blindly through
the smoke. My touch startles them and they draw apart instantly. There is a
moment when I see Emmeline, see her clearly, and she sees me. I grip her hand
and pull her, through the flames, through the fire, and we reach the door. But
when she realizes what I am doing—leading her away from the fire to safety—she
stops. I tug at her.

‘He’s safe.“ My words come in a croak, but they are clear
enough.

Why doesn’t she understand?

I try again. “The baby. I have saved him.”

Surely she has heard me? Inexplicably she resists my tug, and
her hand slips from mine. Where is she? I can see only blackness.

I stumble forward into the flames, collide with her form, grasp
her and pull.

Still she won’t stay with me, turns once more into the room.
Why?

She is bound to her sister. She is bound.

Blind and with my lungs burning, I follow her into the smoke. I
will break the bond.

Eyes closed against the heat, I plunge into the library, arms
ahead of me, searching. When my hands reach her in the smoke, I do not let her
go. I will not have her die. I will save her. And though she resists, I drag
her ferociously to the door and out of it.

The door is made of oak. It is heavy. It doesn’t burn easily. I
push it shut behind us, and the latch engages.

Beside me, she steps forward, about to open it again. It is
something stronger than fire that pulls her into that room.

The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester,
is hot. ft burns my palm as I turn it. Nothing else hurts me that night, but
the key sears my palm and I smell my flesh as it chars. Emmeline puts out a
land to clutch the key and open it again. The metal burns her, and as she feels
the shock of it, I pull her hand away.

A great cry fills my head. Is it human? Or is it the sound of
the fire itself? I don’t even know whether it is coming from inside the room or
outside with me. From a guttural start it gathers strength as it rises, reaches
a shrill peak of intensity, and when I think it must be at the end of its
breath, it continues, impossibly low, impossibly long, boundless sound that
fills the world and engulfs it and contains it.

And then the sound is gone and there is only the roar of the
fire.

Outdoors. Rain. The grass is soaked. We sink to the ground; we
roll in the wet grass to damp our smoldering clothes and hair, feel the cool
wet on our scorched flesh. On our backs we rest there, flat against the earth.
I open my mouth and drink the rain. It falls on my face, cools my eyes, and I
can see again. Never has there been a sky like it, deep indigo with fast-moving
slate-black clouds, the rain coming down in blade edges of silver, and every so
often a plume, a spray of bright orange from the house, a fountain of fire. A
bolt of lightning cracks the sky in two, then again, and again.

The baby. I must tell Emmeline about the baby. She will be happy
that I have saved him. It will make things all right.

I turn to her and open my mouth to speak. Her face—

Her poor beautiful face is black and red, all smoke and blood
and fire.

Her eyes, her green gaze, ravaged, unseeing, unknowing.

I look at her face and cannot find my beloved in it.

‘Emmeline?“ I whisper. ”Emmeline?“

She does not reply.

I feel my heart die. What have I done? Have I… ? Is it possible
that… ?

I cannot bear to know.

I cannot bear not to know.

‘Adeline?“ My voice is a broken thing.

But she—this person, this someone, this one or the other, this
might or might not be, this darling, this monster, this I don’t know who she
is—does not reply.

People are coming. Running up the drive, voices calling urgently
in the night.

I rise to a crouch and scuttle away. Keeping low. Hiding. They
reach the girl on the grass, and when I am sure they have found her I leave
them to it. In the church I put the satchel over my shoulder, clutching the
baby in his papoose to my side, and set off.

It is quiet in the woods. The rain, slowed by the canopy of
leaves, falls softly on the undergrowth. The child whimpers, then sleeps. My
feet carry me to a small house on the other edge of the woods. I know the
house. I have seen it often during my haunting years. A woman lives there,
alone. Spying her through the window knitting or baking, I have always thought
she looks nice, and when I read about kindly grandmothers and fairy godmothers
in my books, I supply them with her face.