The Thirteenth Tale, Page 20

  Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.

  At the beginning there was only the delight of reunion. They were inseparable. Where one went, the other followed. In the topiary gardens they circled around the old trees, playing endless games of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, a repetition of their recent experience of loss and rediscovery that Adeline never seemed to tire of. For Emmeline the novelty began gradually to wear off. Some of the old antagonism crept in. Emmeline wanted to go one way, Adeline the other, so they fought. And as before, it was usually Emmeline who gave in. In her new, secret self, she minded this.

  Though Emmeline had once been fond of Hester, she didn’t miss her now. During the experiment her affection had waned. She knew after all that it was Hester who had separated her from her sister. And not only that, but Hester had been so taken up with her reports and her scientific consultations that, perhaps without realizing it, she had neglected Emmeline. During that time, finding herself in unaccustomed solitude, Emmeline had found ways of distracting herself from her sorrow. She discovered amusements and entertainments that she grew to enjoy for their own sake. Games that she did not expect to give up just because her sister was back.

  So it was that on the third day after the reunion, Emmeline abandoned the lost and found game in the topiary garden, and wandered off to the billiards room, where she kept a pack of cards. Lying on her stomach in the middle of the baize table, she began her game. It was a version of solitaire, but the simplest, most childish kind. Emmeline won every time; the game was designed so that she couldn’t fail. And every time she was delighted.

  Halfway through a game, she tilted her head. She couldn’t exactly hear it, but her inner ear, which was tuned constantly to her twin, told her Adeline was calling her. Emmeline ignored it. She was busy. She would see Adeline later. When she had finished her game.

  An hour later, when Adeline came storming into the room, eyes screwed tight with rage, there was nothing Emmeline could do to defend herself. Adeline clambered onto the table and, hysterical with fury, launched herself at Emmeline.

  Emmeline did not raise a finger to defend herself. Nor did she cry. She made not a sound, neither during the attack, nor when it was all over.

  When Adeline’s rage was spent, she stood for a few minutes watching her sister. Blood was seeping into the green baize. Playing cards were scattered everywhere. Curled into a ball, Emmeline’s shoulders were jerkily rising and falling with her breath.

  Adeline turned her back and walked away.

  Emmeline remained where she was, on the table, until John came to find her hours later. He took her to the Missus, who washed the blood out of her hair, put a compress on her eye, and treated her bruises with witchhazel.

  ‘This wouldn’t have happened when Hester was here,’ she commented. ‘I do wish I knew when she was coming back.’

  ‘She won’t be coming back,’ John said, trying to contain his annoyance. He didn’t like to see the child like this either.

  ‘But I don’t see why she would have gone like that. Without a word. Whatever can have happened? Some emergency, I suppose. With her family…’

  John shook his head. He’d heard this a dozen times, this idea the Missus clung to, that Hester would be coming back. The whole village knew she would not come back. The Maudsley’s servant had heard everything. She professed to have seen it too, and more besides, and by now it was impossible that there was a single adult in the village who did not know for a fact that the plain-faced governess had been carrying on an adulterous affair with the doctor.

  It was inevitable that one day rumours of Hester’s ‘behaviour’ (a village euphemism for misbehaviour) should reach the ears of the Missus. At first she was scandalized. She refused to entertain the idea that Hester – her Hester – could have done such a thing. But when she reported angrily to John what was being said, he only confirmed it. He had been at the doctor’s that day, he reminded her, collecting the child. He had heard it directly from the housemaid. On the very day it occurred. And besides, why would Hester have left so suddenly, without warning, if something out of the ordinary hadn’t occurred?

  ‘Her family,’ the Missus stammered. ‘An emergency…’

  ‘Where’s the letter, then? She’d have written, wouldn’t she, if she meant to come back? She’d have explained. Have you had a letter?’

  The Missus shook her head.

  ‘Well then,’ finished John, unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice, ‘she’s done something that she didn’t ought to, and she won’t be coming back. She’s gone for good. Take it from me.’

  The Missus went round and around it in her head. She didn’t know what to believe. The world had become a very confusing place.

  Gone!

  Only Charlie was unaffected. There were changes of course. The proper meals that under Hester’s regime had been placed outside his door at breakfast, lunch and dinner became occasional sandwiches, a cold chop and a tomato, a bowl of congealed scrambled egg, appearing at unpredictable intervals, whenever the Missus remembered. It didn’t make any difference to Charlie. If he felt hungry and it was there, he might eat a mouthful of yesterday’s chop, or a dry end of bread, but if it wasn’t there he wouldn’t, and his hunger didn’t bother him. He had a more powerful hunger to worry about. It was the essence of his life and something that Hester, in her arrival and in her departure, had not changed.

  Yet change did come for Charlie, though it had nothing to do with Hester.

  From time to time a letter would come to the house, and from time to time someone would open it. A few days after John-the-dig’s comment about there having been no letter from Hester, the Missus, finding herself in the hall, noticed a small pile of letters gathering dust on the mat under the letterbox. She opened them.

  One from Charlie’s banker: was he interested in an investment opportunity?

  The second was an invoice from the builders for the work done on the roof.

  Was the third from Hester?

  No. The third was from the asylum. Isabelle was dead.

  The Missus stared at the letter. Dead! Isabelle! Could it be true? Influenza, the letter said.

  Charlie would have to be told, but the Missus quailed at the prospect. Better talk to Dig first, she resolved, putting the letters aside. But later, when John was sitting at his place at the kitchen table and she was topping up his cup with fresh tea, there remained no trace of the letter in her mind. It had joined those other, increasingly frequent lost moments, lived and felt but unrecorded and then lost. Nevertheless, a few days later, passing through the hall with a tray of burnt toast and bacon, she mechanically put the letters on the tray with the food, though she had no memory at all of their contents.

  And then the days passed and nothing seemed to happen at all, except that the dust got thicker, and the grime accumulated on the window panes, and the playing cards crept further and further from their box in the drawing room, and it became easier and easier to forget that there had ever been a Hester.

  It was John-the-dig who realized in the silence of the days that something had happened.

  He was an outdoors man, and not domesticated. Nevertheless he knew that there comes a time when cups cannot be made to do for one more cup of tea without being first washed, and he knew moreover that a plate that has held raw meat cannot be used straight after for cooked. He saw how things were going with the Missus; he was no fool. So when the pile of dirty plates and cups piled up, he would set to and do the washing up. It was an odd thing to see him at the sink in his wellington boots and his cap, so clumsy with the cloth and china where he was so adroit with his terracotta pots and tender plants. And it came to his attention that the number of cups and plates was diminishing. Soon there would not be enough. Where was the missing crockery? He thought instantly of the Missus making her haphazard way upstairs with a plate for Master Charlie. Had he ever see
n her return an empty plate to the kitchen? No.

  He went upstairs. Outside the locked door plates and cups were arranged in a long queue. The food, untouched by Charlie, was providing a fine feast for the flies that buzzed over it, and there was an powerful, unpleasant smell. How many days had the Missus been leaving food here without noticing that the previous day’s was still untouched? He totted up the number of plates and cups, and frowned. That is when he knew.

  He did not knock at the door. What was the point? He had to go to his shed for a piece of timber strong enough to use as a battering ram. The noise of it against the oak, the creaking and smashing as metal hinges tore away from wood, were enough to bring us all, even the Missus, to the door.

  When the battered door fell open, half broken off its hinges, we could hear buzzing flies, and a terrible stench billowed out, knocking Emmeline and the Missus back a few steps. Even John put his hand to his mouth and turned a shade whiter. ‘Stay back,’ he ordered as he entered the room. A few paces behind, I followed him.

  We stepped gingerly through the debris of rotting food on the floor of the old nursery stirring clouds of flies up into the air as we passed. Charlie had been living like an animal. Dirty plates covered with mould were on the floor, on the mantelpiece, on chairs and on the table. The bedroom door was ajar. With the end of the battering ram he still had in his hand, John nudged the door cautiously, and a startled rat came scurrying out over our feet. It was a gruesome scene. More flies, more decomposing food, and worse: the man had been ill. A pile of dried, fly-spotted vomit encrusted the rug on the floor. On the table by the bed was a heap of bloody handkerchiefs and the Missus’s old darning needle.

  The bed was empty. Just crumpled, filthy sheets stained with blood and other human vileness.

  We did not speak. We tried not to breathe, and when, of necessity, we inhaled through our mouths, the sick, repugnant air caught in our throats and made us retch. Yet we had not had the worst of it. There was one more room. John had to steel himself to open the door to the bathroom. Even before the door was fully open we sensed the horror of it. Before it snagged in my nostrils, my skin seemed to smell it, and a cold sweat bloomed all over my body. The toilet was bad enough. The lid was down but could not quite contain the overflowing mess it was supposed to cover. But that was nothing. For in the bath – John took a sharp step back, and would have stepped on me if I had not, at the same moment, taken two steps back myself – in the bath was a dark swill of bodily effluence, the stink of which sent John and I racing to the door, back through the rat droppings and the flies, out into the corridor, down the stairs, and out of doors.

  I was sick. On the green grass, my pile of yellow vomit looked fresh and clean and sweet.

  ‘All right,’ said John, and he patted my back with a hand that was still trembling.

  The Missus, having followed at her own hurried shuffle, approached us across the lawn, questions all over her face. What could we tell her?

  We had found Charlie’s blood. We had found Charlie’s shit, Charlie’s piss and Charlie’s vomit. But Charlie himself?

  ‘He’s not there,’ we told her. ‘He’s gone.’

  I returned to my room, thinking about the story. It was curious in more than one respect. There was Charlie’s disappearance, of course, which was an interesting turn of events. It left me thinking about the almanacs and that curious abbreviation: ldd. But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

  In my room, on a tray next to the ham sandwiches, I found a large brown envelope.

  Mr Lomax, the solicitor, had replied to my letter by return of post. Attached to his brief but kindly note were copies of Hester’s contract, which I glanced at and put aside, a letter of recommendation from a Lady Blake in Naples, who wrote positively of Hester’s gifts, and, most interesting of all, a letter accepting the offer of employment, written by the miracle worker herself.

  Dear Doctor Maudsley,

  Thank you for the offer of work you have kindly made to me.

  I shall be pleased to take up the post at Angelfield on the 19th April as you suggest.

  I have made enquiries and gather that the trains run only to Banbury. Perhaps you would advise me how I can best make my way to Angelfield from there. I shall arrive at Banbury Station at half past ten.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hester Barrow

  There was firmness in Hester’s sturdy capitals, consistency in the slant of the letters, a sense of smooth flow in the loops of the g’s and the y’s. The letter size was moderate: small enough for economy of ink and paper, and large enough for clarity. There were no embellishments. No elaborate curls, flounces or flourishes. The beauty of the orthography came from the sense of order, balance and proportion that governed each and every letter. It was a good, clean hand. It was Hester herself, made word.

  In the top right-hand corner was an address in London.

  Good, I thought. I can find you now.

  I reached for paper and before I began my transcription, wrote a letter to the genealogist Father had recommended. It was a longish letter: I had to introduce myself, for he would doubtless be unaware Mr Lea even had a daughter; I had to touch lightly on the matter of the almanacs to justify my claim on his time; I had to enumerate everything I knew about Hester: Naples, London, Angelfield. But the gist of my letter was simple. Find her.

  After Charlie

  Miss Winter did not comment on my communications with her solicitor, though I am certain she was informed, just as I am certain the documents I requested would never have been sent to me without her consent. I wondered whether she might consider it cheating, whether this was the ‘jumping about in the story’ she so disapproved of, but on the day I received the set of letters from Mr Lomax and sent my request for help to the genealogist, she said not a word, but only picked up her story where she had left it as though none of these postal exchanges of information were happening.

  Charlie was the second loss. The third if you count Isabelle, though to all practical purposes we had lost her two years before, and so she hardly counts.

  John was more affected by Charlie’s disappearance than by Hester’s. Charlie might have been a recluse, an eccentric, a hermit, but he was the master of the house. Four times a year, at the sixth or seventh time of asking, he would scrawl his mark on a paper and the bank would release funds to keep the household ticking over. And now he was gone. What would become of the household? What would they do for money?

  John had a few dreadful days. He insisted on cleaning up the nursery quarters – ‘It’ll make us all ill, otherwise,’ – and when he could bear the smell no longer, sat on the steps outside, drawing in the clean air like a man saved from drowning. In the evening he took long baths, using up a whole bar of soap, scrubbing his skin till it glowed pink. He even soaped the inside of his nostrils.

  And he cooked. We’d noticed how the Missus lost track of herself halfway through preparing a meal. The vegetables would boil to a mush, then burn on the bottom of the pan. The house was never without the smell of carbonized food. Then one day we found John in the kitchen. The hands that we knew dirty, pulling potatoes from the ground were now rinsing the yellow skinned vegetables in water, peeling them, rattling pan lids at the stove. We ate good meat or fish with plenty of vegetables, drank strong, hot tea. The Missus sat in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, with no apparent sense that these used to be her tasks. After the washing up, when night fell, the two of them sat talking over the kitchen table. His concerns were always the same. What would they do? How could they survive? What would become of us all?

  ‘Don’t worry, he’ll come out,’ the Missus said.

  Come out? John sighed and shook his head. He’d heard this before. ‘He’s not there, Missus. He’s gone, have you forgotten already?’

  ‘Gone!’ She shook her head and laughed as if he’d made a joke.

  At the moment she first learned the fac
t of Charlie’s departure it had brushed her consciousness momentarily, but had not found a place to settle there. The passages, corridors and stairwells in her mind, that connected her thoughts but also held them apart, had been undermined. Picking up one end of a trail of thought, she followed it through holes in walls, slipped into tunnels that opened up beneath her feet, came to vague, semi-puzzled halts: wasn’t there something…? Hadn’t she been…? Thinking of Charlie locked in the nursery, crazed with grief for love of his dead sister, she fell through a trap-door in time, without even realizing it, into the thought of his father, newly bereaved, locked in the library to grieve for his lost wife.

  ‘I know how to get him out of there,’ she said, with a wink. ‘I’ll take the infant to him. That’ll do the trick. In fact, I’ll go and look in on the baby now.’

  John didn’t explain to her again that Isabelle had died, for it would only bring on grief-stricken surprise, and a demand to know how and why. ‘An asylum?’ she would exclaim, astonished. ‘But why didn’t anyone tell me Miss Isabelle was in an asylum? To think of the girl’s poor father! How he dotes on her! It will be the death of him.’ And she would lose herself for hours in the shattered corridors of the past, grieving over tragedies long gone as though they had happened only yesterday, and heedless of today’s sorrows. John had been through it half a dozen times, and hadn’t the heart to go through it again.