The Thirteenth Tale

  But Hester did keep the children under control and out of sight and had he given it any thought he would have been grateful for this. Under Hester’s reign there was no cause for hostile neighbours to come complaining about the twins, no imperative to visit the kitchen and have a sandwich made by the Missus, above all, no need to leave, even for a minute, that realm of the imagination which he inhabited with Isabelle, only with Isabelle, always with Isabelle. What he gave up in territory, he gained in freedom. He never heard Hester; he never saw her; the thought of her never once entered his head. She was entirely satisfactory.

  Hester had triumphed. She might have looked like a potato, but there was nothing that girl couldn’t do, once she put her mind to it.

  Miss Winter paused, her eyes set fixedly on the corner of the room, where her past presented itself to her with more reality than the present and me. At the corners of her mouth and eyes flickered half-expressions of sorrow and distress. Aware of the thinness of the thread that connected her to her past, I was anxious not to break it, but equally anxious for her not to stop her story.

  The pause lengthened.

  ‘And you?’ I prompted softly, ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me?’ She blinked vaguely. ‘Oh, I liked her. That was the trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  She blinked again, shuffled in her seat and looked at me with a new, sharp gaze. She had cut the thread.

  ‘I think that’s enough for today. You can go now.’

  The Box of Lives

  With the story of Hester I fell quickly back into my routine. In the mornings I listened to Miss Winter tell me her story, hardly bothering now with my notebook. Later in my room, with my reams of paper, my twelve red pencils and my trusty sharpener, I transcribed what I had memorized. As the words flowed from the point of my pencil onto the page, they conjured up Miss Winter’s voice in my ear; later, when I read aloud what I had written I felt my face rearranging itself into her expressions. My left hand rose and fell in mimicry of her emphatic gestures, while my right lay, as though maimed, in my lap. The words turned to pictures in my head. Hester, clean and neat and surrounded by a silvery gleam, an all-body halo that grew broader all the time, encompassing first her room, then the house, then its inhabitants. The Missus transformed from a slow-moving figure in darkness to one whose eyes darted about, bright with seeing. And Emmeline, under the spell of Hester’s shiny aura, allowing herself to be changed from a dirty, malnourished vagabond into a clean, affectionate and plump little girl. Hester cast her light even into the topiary garden where it shone onto the ravaged branches of the yews and brought forth fresh, green growth. There was Charlie of course, lumbering in the darkness outside the circle, heard but not seen. And John-the-dig, the strangely named gardener, brooding on its perimeter, reluctant to be drawn into the light. And Adeline, the mysterious and dark-hearted Adeline.

  For all my biographical projects I have kept a box of lives. A box of index cards containing the details – name, occupation, dates, place of residence and any other piece of information that seems relevant – of all the significant people in the life of my subject. I never quite know what to make of my boxes of lives. Depending on my mood they either strike me as a memorial to gladden the dead (‘Look!’ I imagine them saying as they peer through the glass at me, ‘She’s writing us down on her cards! And to think we’ve been dead two hundred years!’) or, when the glass is very dark and I feel quite stranded and alone this side of it, they seem like little cardboard tombstones, inanimate and cold, and the box itself is as dead as the cemetery. Miss Winter’s cast of characters was very small, and as I shuffled them in my hands their sparse flimsiness dismayed me. I was being given a story, but as far as information went I was still far short of what I needed.

  I took a blank card and began to write.

  Hester Barrow

  Governess

  Angelfield House

  Born:?

  Died:?

  I stopped. Thought. Did a few sums on my fingers. The girls had been only thirteen. And Hester was not old. With all that verve she couldn’t be. Had she been thirty? What if she were only twenty-five? A mere twelve years older than the girls themselves…Was it possible? I wondered. Miss Winter, in her seventies, was dying. But that didn’t necessarily mean a person older than her would be dead. What were the chances?

  There was only one thing to do.

  I added another note to the card, and underlined it.

  FIND HER.

  Was it because I had decided to look for Hester that I saw her that night in a dream?

  A plain figure in a neatly belted dressing gown, on the galleried landing, shaking her head and pursing her lips at the fire-stained walls, the jagged, broken floorboards and the ivy winding its way up the stone staircase. In the middle of all this chaos, how lucid everything was close to her. How soothing. I approached, drawn to her like a moth. But when I entered her magic circle, nothing happened. I was still in darkness. Hester’s quick eyes darted here and there, taking in everything, and came to rest on a figure standing behind my back. My twin, or so I understood in the dream. But when her eyes passed over me it was without seeing.

  I woke, a familiar hot chill in my side, and re-examined the images from my dream to understand the source of my terror. There was nothing frightening in Hester herself. Nothing unnerving in the smooth passage of her eyes over and through my face. It was not what I saw in the dream, but what I was that had me trembling in my bed. If Hester did not see me, then it must be because I was a ghost. And if I was a ghost, then I was dead. How could it be otherwise?

  I rose and went into the bathroom to rinse my fear away. Avoiding the mirror, I looked instead at my hands in the water, but the sight filled me with horror. At the same time as they existed here, I knew they existed on the other side too, where they were dead. And the eyes that saw them, my eyes, were dead in that other place too. And my mind that was thinking these thoughts – was it not also dead? A profound horror took hold of me. What kind of an unnatural creature was I? What abomination of nature is it that divides a person between two bodies before birth, and then kills one of them? And what am I that is left? Half-dead, exiled in the world of the living by day, while at night, my soul cleaves to its twin in a shadowy limbo.

  I lit an early fire, made cocoa, then wrapped myself in dressing gown and blankets to write a letter to my father. How was the shop, and how was Mother, and how was he, and how, I wondered, would one go about finding someone? Did private detectives exist in reality or only in books? I told him what little I knew about Hester. Could a search be set in motion with so little information to go on? Would a private detective take on a job like the one I had in mind? If not, who might?

  I reread the letter. Brisk and sensible, it betrayed nothing of my fear. Dawn was breaking. The trembling had stopped. Soon Judith would be here with breakfast.

  The Eye in the Yew

  There was nothing the new governess couldn’t do if she put her mind to it.

  That’s how it seemed at first, anyway.

  But after a time difficulties did begin to emerge. The first thing was her argument with the Missus. Hester, having tidied and cleaned rooms and left them locked behind her, was put out to discover them unlocked again. She called the Missus to her. ‘What need is there,’ she asked, ‘for rooms to be left open when they are not in use? You can see what happens: the girls go in as they please and make chaos where there was order before. It makes unnecessary work for you and for me.’

  The Missus seemed entirely to concur, and Hester left the interview quite satisfied. But a week later, once again, she found doors open that should have been locked, and with a frown called the Missus once again. This time she would accept no vague promises, but was determined to get to the heart of the matter.

  ‘It’s the air,’ explained the Missus. ‘Without the air moving about a house gets dreadful damp.’

  Hester gave the Missus a succinct lecture in simple terms about air circu
lation and damp and sent her away, certain that this time she had solved the difficulty.

  A week later she noticed again that doors were unlocked. This time she did not call the Missus. Instead she reflected. There was more to this problem of door locking than met the eye. She resolved that she would study the Missus, discover by observation what lay behind the unlocking of doors.

  The second problem involved John-the-dig. His suspicion of her had not escaped her notice, but she was not put off. She was a stranger in the house, and it was up to her to demonstrate that she was there for the good of all and not to cause trouble. In time, she knew, she would win him over. Yet though he seemed to get used to her presence, his suspicion was unexpectedly slow to fade. And then one day suspicion flared into something else. She had approached him over something quite banal. In our garden she had seen – or so she maintained – a child from the village who should have been at school. ‘Who is the child?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who are its parents?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ John told her, with a surliness that took her aback.

  ‘I don’t say it is,’ she responded calmly, ‘but the child should be in school. I’m sure you’ll agree with me on that. If you will just tell me who it is, then I will speak to the parents and the schoolmistress about it.’

  John-the-dig shrugged his shoulders and made to leave, but she was not a woman who would be put off in this manner. She darted round him, stood in front of him, and repeated her demand. Why should she not? It was an entirely reasonable one and she was making it in a civil fashion. Whatever reason would the man have to refuse?

  But refuse he did. ‘Children from the village do not come up here,’ was his only response.

  ‘This one did,’ she went on.

  ‘They stay away out of fear.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Whatever do they have to be afraid of here? The child was in a wide-brimmed hat, and a man’s trousers cut down to fit. His appearance was quite distinctive. You must know who he is.’

  ‘I have seen no such child,’ came the answer, dismissively, and once again John made to leave.

  Hester was nothing if not persistent. ‘But you must have seen him—’

  ‘It takes a certain kind of mind, miss, to see things that aren’t there. Me, I’m a sensible fellow. Where there is nothing to see, I see nothing. If I were you, miss, I would do the same. Good day to you.’

  With that he left, and this time Hester made no attempt to block him. She simply stood, shaking her head in bewilderment and wondering what on earth had got into the man. Angelfield, it seemed, was a house full of puzzles. Still, there was nothing she liked more than mental exercise. She would soon get to the bottom of things.

  Hester’s gifts of insight and intelligence were quite extraordinary. Yet counterbalancing these talents was the fact that she did not know quite who she was up against. Take for instance her habit of leaving the twins to their own devices for short periods while she followed her own agenda elsewhere. She watched the twins closely first, evaluating their moods, weighing up their fatigue, the closeness to mealtimes, their patterns of energy and rest. When the results of this analysis told her the twins were set for an hour of quiet, indoor lolling, she would leave them unattended. On one of these occasions she had a special purpose in mind. The doctor had come and she wanted a particular word with him. A private word.

  Foolish Hester. There is no privacy where there are children.

  She met him at the front door. ‘It is a nice day. Shall we walk in the garden?’

  They set off towards the topiary garden, unaware that they were being followed.

  ‘You have worked a miracle, Miss Barrow,’ the doctor began. ‘Emmeline is transformed.’

  ‘No,’ said Hester.

  ‘Yes, I assure you. My expectations have been more than fulfilled. I am very impressed.’

  Hester bowed her head and turned her body fractionally away from him. Taking her response for modesty, he fell silent, thinking her overwhelmed by his professions of esteem. The newly clipped yew gave him something to admire while the governess recovered her sang-froid. It’s just as well he was engrossed in its geometric lines, else he might have caught her wry look and realized his error.

  Her protesting, ‘No,’ was far from being the feminine simpering that the doctor took it for. It was a straightforward statement of fact. Of course Emmeline was transformed. Given the presence of Hester, how could it have been otherwise? There was nothing miraculous about it. That is what she meant by her No.

  Yet she was not surprised by the condescension in the doctor’s comment. It was not a world in which signs of genius were likely to be noticed in governesses, but nonetheless I think she was disappointed. The doctor was the one person at Angelfield, she thought, who might have understood her. But he did not understand her.

  She turned towards the doctor and found herself facing his back. He stood, hands in pocket, the line of his shoulders straight, looking up to where the yew tree ended and the sky began. His neat hair was greying, and there was a perfect circle of pink scalp an inch and a half wide on the top of his head.

  ‘John is making good the damage that the twins did,’ Hester said.

  ‘What made them do it?’

  ‘In Emmeline’s case that is an easy question to answer. Adeline made her do it. As for what made Adeline do it, that is a harder question altogether. I doubt she knows herself. Most of the time she is governed by impulses that appear to have no conscious element. Whatever the reason, the result was devastating for John. His family has tended this garden for generations.’

  ‘Heartless. All the more shocking coming from a child.’

  Unseen by the doctor, she pulled another face. Clearly he did not know much about children. ‘Heartless indeed. Though children are capable of great cruelty. Only we do not like to think it of them.’

  Slowly they began to walk between the topiary shapes, admiring the yews while speaking of Hester’s work. Keeping a safe distance, but always within earshot a little spy followed them, moving from the protection of one yew to another. Left and right they moved; sometimes they turned to double back on themselves; it was a game of angles, an elaborate dance.

  ‘You are satisfied with the results of your efforts with Emmeline, I imagine, Miss Barrow?’

  ‘Yes. With another year or so of my attention I see no reason why Emmeline should not give up unruliness for good, and become permanently the sweet girl she knows how to be at her best. She will not be clever, but still, I see no reason why she should not one day lead a satisfying life separately from her sister. Perhaps she might even marry. All men do not seek intelligence in a wife and Emmeline is very affectionate.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘With Adeline it is a different matter entirely.’

  They came to a standstill, next to a leafy obelisk with a gash cut into its side part of the way up. The governess peered at the brown inner branches and touched one of the new twigs with its bright green leaves that was growing from the old wood towards the light. She sighed.

  ‘Adeline puzzles me, Doctor Maudsley. I would value your medical opinion.’

  The doctor gave a courteous half bow. ‘By all means. What is it that is troubling you?’

  ‘I have never known such a confusing child.’ She paused. ‘Forgive my slowness, but there is no succinct way to explain the strangeness I have noticed in her.’

  ‘Then take your time. I am in no rush.’

  The doctor indicated a low bench, at the back of which a hedge of box had been trained into an elaborately curlicued arch, the kind that frequently forms the headboard of a highly crafted bedstead. They sat and found themselves facing the good side of one of the garden’s largest geometrical pieces. ‘A dodecahedron, look.’

  Hester disregarded his comment and began her explanation.

  ‘Adeline is a hostile and aggressive child. She resents my presence in the house and resists all my efforts to impose order. Her eating is erratic; she re
fuses food until she is half-starving and only then will she eat, but the merest morsel. She has to be bathed by force, and, despite her thinness it takes two people to hold her in the water. Any warmth I show her is met by utter indifference. She seems incapable of all the normal range of human emotion, and, I speak frankly to you, Doctor Maudsley, I have wondered whether she has it in her to return to the fold of common humanity.’

  ‘Is she intelligent?’

  ‘She is wily. She is cunning. But she cannot be stimulated to take an interest in anything beyond the realm of her own wishes, desires and appetites.’

  ‘And in the classroom?’

  ‘You appreciate of course that with girls like these the classroom is not what it might be for normal children. There is no arithmetic, no Latin, no geography. Still, in the interests of order and routine, the children are made to attend for two hours, twice a day, and I educate them by telling stories.’

  ‘Does she appreciate these lessons?’

  ‘If only I knew how to answer that question! She is quite wild, Doctor Maudsley. She has to be trapped in the room by trickery or sometimes I have to get John to bring her by force. She will do anything to avoid it, flailing her arms or else holding her whole body rigid to make it awkward to carry her through the door. Seating her behind a desk is practically impossible. More often than not John is obliged to simply leave her on the floor. She will neither look at me nor listen to me in the classroom, but retreats to some inner world of her own.’