The Thirteenth Tale

  ‘Hester didn’t. Not scientific, you see. So, not believing in ghosts, she had a good deal of trouble when she saw one.’

  It was like this:

  One bright day Hester, having finished her duties in plenty of time, left the house early and decided to take the long way round to the doctor’s house. The sky was gloriously blue, the air fresh-smelling and clear, and she felt full of a powerful energy that she couldn’t put a name to, but that made her yearn for strenuous activity.

  The path around the fields took her up a slight incline which, though not much of a hill, gave her a fine view of the fields and land around. She was about half-way to the doctor’s, striding out vigorously, heartbeat raised but without the slightest sense of over-exertion, feeling quite probably that she could fly if she just put her mind to it, when she saw something that stopped her dead.

  In the distance, playing together in a field, were Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green.

  It was impossible.

  But no. Hester was scientific. She was seeing them, hence they were there. There must be an explanation. Adeline had escaped from the doctor’s house. Her torpor had left her as suddenly as it had come and, taking advantage of an open window or a set of keys left unattended, she had escaped before anyone had noticed her recovery. That was it.

  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 round 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 round to the doctor. ‘But I’ve just seen her! With Emmeline! On the edge of the woods beyond Oates’ 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 the 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 only be 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 dishevelled 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 learnt 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 towards 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 enquiries 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 favour: 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 imag
ine 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 which 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 their 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 any more? 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 only really made 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 that 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.

  On the first day of silence, and as if nothing had ever happened to interrupt it, the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay. Small things first: dirt began to seep from every crevice in every object in every room; surfaces secreted dust; windows covered themselves with the first fine layer of grime. All Hester’s changes had been superficial. They required daily attention to be maintained. And as the Missus’s cleaning schedules at first wavered then crashed, the real, permanent nature of the house began to reassert itself. The time came when you couldn’t pick anything up without feeling the old cling of grime on your fingers.

  Objects too went quickly back to their old ways. The keys were first to go walkabout. Overnight they slipped themselves out of locks and off keyrings, then they gathered together in dusty companionship in the cavity beneath a loose floorboard. Silver candlesticks, while they still had their gleam of Hester’s polish, made their way from the drawing room mantelpiece to Emmeline’s stash of treasure under the bed. Books left their library shelves and took themselves upstairs where they rested in corners and under sofas. Curtains took to drawing and closing themselves. Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about. A sofa inched forwards from its place against the wall; a chair shifted two feet to the left. All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.

  A roof in the process of being repaired gets worse before it gets better. Some of the holes left by the roofer were larger than the ones he had been
called in to mend. It was all right to lie on the floor of the attic and feel the sunshine on your face, but rain was another matter. The floorboards began to soften, then water dripped through into the rooms below. There were places you knew not to tread, where the floor sagged precariously beneath your feet. Soon, it would collapse and you would be able to see straight through into the room below. And how long before that room’s floor gave way and you would see into the library? And could the library floor give way? Would it one day be possible to stand in the cellars and look up through four floors of rooms to the sky?

  Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Once inside a house, it obeys the force of gravity indirectly. Inside walls and under floors it finds secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in unexpected directions; surfaces in the most unlikely places. All around the house were cloths to soak up the wet, but no one ever wrung them out; saucepans and bowls were placed here and there to catch drips, but they overflowed before anyone remembered to change them. The constant wetness brought the plaster off the walls and was eating into the mortar. In the attic, there were walls so unsteady that with one hand you could rock them like a loose tooth.

  And the twins in all of this?

  It was a serious wound that Hester and the doctor had inflicted. Of course things would never be the same again. The twins would always share a scar, and the effects of the separation would never be entirely eradicated. Yet they felt the scar differently. Adeline after all had fallen quickly into a state of fugue once she understood what Hester and the doctor were about. She lost herself almost at the moment she lost her twin, and had no recollection of the time passed away from her. As far as she knew, the blackness that had been interposed between losing her twin and finding her again might have been a year or a second. Not that it mattered now. For it was over, and she had come to life again.

  For Emmeline, things were different. She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anaesthetic, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain, but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief. In short, Emmeline adapted to her twin’s absence. She learned how to exist apart.