The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  The doctor listened closely and nodded. ‘It is a difficult case. Her behaviour causes you greater anxiety and you fear that the results of your efforts may be less successful than with her sister. And yet,’ his smile was charming, ‘forgive me Miss Barrow, if I do not see why you profess to be baffled by her. On the contrary, your account of her behaviour and mental state is more coherent than many a medical student might make, given the same evidence.’

  She eyed him levelly. ‘I have not yet come to the confusing part.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There are methods that have been successful with children like Adeline in the past. There are strategies of my own that I have some faith in, and would not hesitate to put into action were it not that…’

  Hester hesitated and this time the doctor was wise enough to wait for her to go on. When she spoke again it was slowly, and she weighed her words with care.

  ‘It is as though there is a mist in Adeline, a mist that separates her not only from humanity, but from herself. And sometimes the mist thins, and sometimes the mist clears, and another Adeline appears. And then the mist returns and she is as before.’

  Hester looked at the doctor, watching his reaction. He frowned, but above his frown, where his hair was receding, his skin was an unwrinkled pink. ‘What is she like during these periods?’

  ‘The outward signs are very small. For several weeks I was not aware of the phenomenon, and even then I waited some time before being sure enough to come to you.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘First of all there is her breathing. It changes sometimes, and I know that though she is pretending to be in a world of her own, she is listening to me. And her hands—’

  ‘Her hands?’

  ‘Usually they are splayed, tense, like this,’ Hester demonstrated, ‘but then sometimes I notice they relax, like this,’ and her own fingers relaxed into softness. ‘It is as if her involvement with the story has captured her attention and in doing so undermined her defences, so that she relaxes and forgets her show of rejection and defiance. I have worked with a great many difficult children, Doctor Maudsley. I have considerable expertise. And what I have seen amounts to this: against all the odds, there is a fermentation in her.’

  The doctor did not answer immediately but considered, and Hester seemed gratified at his application.

  ‘Is there any pattern to the emergence of these signs?’

  ‘Nothing I can be sure of as yet…But…’

  He put his head on one side, encouraging her to go on.

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but certain stories…’

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘Jane Eyre for instance. I told them a shortened version of the first part, over several days, and I certainly noticed it then. Dickens too. The historical tales and the moral tales have never had the same effect.’

  The doctor frowned. ‘And is it consistent? Does reading Jane Eyre always bring about the changes you have described?’

  ‘No. That is the difficulty.’

  ‘Hmm. So what do you mean to do?’

  ‘There are methods for managing selfish and resistant children such as Adeline. A strict regime now might be enough to keep her out of an institution later in life. However this regime, involving the imposition of strict routine and the removal of much that stimulates her, would be most detrimental to—’

  ‘To the child we see through the gaps in the mist?’

  ‘Precisely. In fact, for that child, nothing would be worse.’

  ‘And that child, the girl in the mist, what future could you foresee for her?’

  ‘It is a premature question. Suffice it to say that I cannot at present countenance her being lost. Who knows what she might become?’

  They sat in silence, gazing at the leafy geometry opposite and contemplating the problem Hester had set out while, unbeknown to them, the problem itself, well concealed by topiary, stared back at them through the gaps in the branches.

  Finally the doctor spoke. ‘There is no medical condition I know of that would cause mental effects of quite the kind you describe. However, that may be my own ignorance.’ He waited for her to protest; she didn’t. ‘H-hum. It would be sensible for me to give the child a thorough examination in order to establish her overall state of health, both mental and physical, as a first step.’

  ‘That is just what I was thinking,’ Hester replied. ‘Now…’ she rummaged in her pocket, ‘here are my notes. You will find descriptions of each instance I have witnessed, together with some preliminary analysis. Perhaps after the medical you might stay for half an hour to give me your first thoughts? We can decide on the appropriate next step then.’

  He looked at her in some amazement. She had stepped out of her role as governess, was behaving as though she were some fellow expert!

  Hester had caught herself out.

  She hesitated. Could she backtrack? Was it too late? She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘It’s not a dodecahedron,’ she told him, slyly. ‘It’s a tetrahedron.’

  The doctor rose from the bench and stepped towards the topiary shape. One, two, three, four…His lips moved as he counted.

  My heart stopped. Was he going to walk around the tree, making his tally of planes and corners? Was he going to trip over me?

  But he reached six and stopped. He knew she was right.

  Then there was a curious little moment when they just looked at each other. His face was uncertain. What was this woman? By what authority did she speak to him the way she did? She was just a dumpy, potato-faced, provincial governess. Wasn’t she?

  In silence she stared back at him, transfixed by the uncertainty glimmering in his face.

  The world seemed to tilt a fraction on its axis, and they each looked awkwardly away.

  ‘The medical,’ Hester began.

  ‘Wednesday afternoon, perhaps?’ proposed the doctor.

  ‘Wednesday afternoon.’

  And the world returned to its proper axis.

  They walked back towards the house, and at the turn in the path the doctor took his leave.

  Behind the yew the little spy bit her nails and wondered.

  Five Notes

  A scratchy veil of fatigue irritated my eyes. My mind was paper thin. I had been working all day and half the night, and now I was afraid to go to sleep.

  Was my mind playing tricks on me? It seemed that I could hear a tune. Well, hardly a tune. Just five lost notes. I opened the window to be sure. Yes. There was definitely sound coming from the garden.

  Words I can understand. Give me a torn or damaged fragment of text and I can divine what must have come before and what must come after. Or if not, I can at least reduce the number of possibilities to the most likely option. But music is not my language. Were these five notes the opening of a lullaby? Or the dying fall of a lament? It was impossible to say. With no beginning and no ending to frame them, no melody to hold them in place, whatever it was that bound them together seemed precariously insecure. Every time the first note struck up its call there was a moment of anxiety while it waited to find out whether its companion was still there, or had drifted off, lost for good, blown away by the wind. And so with the third and the fourth. And with the fifth, no resolution, only the feeling that sooner or later the fragile bonds that linked this random set of notes would give way as the links with the rest of the tune had given way, and even this last, empty fragment would be gone for good, scattered to the wind like the last leaves from a winter tree.

  Stubbornly mute whenever my conscious mind called upon them to perform, the notes came to me out of nowhere when I was not thinking of them. Lost in my work in the evening, I would become aware that they had been repeating themselves in my mind for some time. Or else in bed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, I would hear them in the distance, singing their indistinct, meaningless song to me.

  But now I really heard it. A single note first, its companions drowned in the rain that rapped at the window. It was nothin
g, I told myself, and prepared to go back to sleep. But then, in a lull in the rainstorm, three notes raised themselves above the water.

  The night was very thick. So black was the sky that only the sound of the rain allowed me to picture the garden. That percussion was the rain on the windows. The soft, random squalls were fresh rain on the lawn. The trickling sound was water coming down gutters and into drains. Drip – drip – drip. Water falling from leaves to the ground. Behind all this, beneath it, between it, if I was not mad or dreaming, came the five notes. La la la la la.

  I pulled on boots and a coat and went outside into the blackness.

  I could not see my hand in front of my face. Nothing to hear but the squelch of my boots on the lawn. And then I caught a trace of it. A harsh, unmusical sound; not an instrument, but an atonal, discordant human voice.

  Slowly and with frequent stops I tracked the notes. I went down the long borders, and turned into the garden with the pond – at least, I think that is where I went. Then I mistook my way, blundered across soft soil where I thought a path should be, and ended up not beside the yew as I expected, but in a patch of knee-high shrubs with thorns that caught at my clothes. From then on I gave up trying to work out where I was, took my bearings from my ears alone, followed the notes like Ariane’s thread through a labyrinth I had ceased to recognize. It sounded at irregular intervals, and each time I would head towards it, until the silence stopped me and I paused, waiting for a new clue. How long did I stumble after it in the dark? Was it a quarter of an hour? Half an hour? All I know is that at the end of that time I found myself back at the very door by which I had left the house. I had come – or been led – full circle.

  The silence was very final. The notes had died, and in their place, the rain started again.

  Instead of going in, I sat on the bench, rested my head on my crossed arms, feeling the rain tap on my back, my neck, my hair.

  It began to seem a foolish thing to have gone chasing about the garden after something so insubstantial, and I managed to persuade myself, almost, that I had heard nothing but the creation of my own imagination. Then my thoughts turned in other directions. I wondered when my father would send me advice about searching for Hester. I thought about Angelfield, and frowned: what would Aurelius do when the house was demolished? Thinking about Angelfield made me think of the ghost, and that made me think of my own ghost, the photograph I had taken of her, lost in a blur of white. I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

  And then my spine sent me an alarm.

  A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

  I jerked up and looked around.

  The darkness was total. There was nothing and no one to see. Everything, even the great oak, had been swallowed up in the darkness and the world had shrunk to the eyes that were watching me and the wild frenzy of my heart.

  Not Miss Winter. Not here. Not at this time of night.

  Then who?

  I felt it before I felt it. The touch against my side – the here and gone again—

  It was the cat, Shadow.

  Again he nudged me, another cheek rub against my ribs, and a miaow, rather tardily, to announce himself. I reached out my hand and stroked him, while my heart attempted to find a rhythm. The cat purred.

  ‘You’re all wet,’ I told him. ‘Come on, silly. It’s no night to be out.’

  He followed me to my room, licked himself dry while I wrapped my hair in a towel, and we fell asleep together on the bed. For once – perhaps it was the cat’s protection – my dreams kept well away.

  The next day was dull and grey. After my regular interview, I took myself for a walk in the garden. I tried in the dismal light of early afternoon to retrace the path I had taken by dead of night. The beginning was easy enough: down the long borders and into the garden with the pond. But after that I lost my track. My memory of stepping across the soft wet soil of a flowerbed had me stumped, for every bed and border was pristinely raked and in order. Still, I made a few haphazard guesses, one or two random decisions and took myself on a roughly circular route that might or might not have mirrored, in part at least, my nighttime stroll.

  I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you count the fact that I came across Maurice, and for once he spoke to me. He was kneeling over a section of churned up soil, straightening and smoothing and putting right. He felt me come onto the lawn behind him, and looked up. ‘Damn foxes,’ he growled. And turned back to his work.

  I returned to the house and began transcribing my notes from the morning’s interview.

  The Experiment

  The day of the medical examination came and Doctor Maudsley presented himself at the house. As usual Charlie was not there to welcome the visitor. Hester had informed him of the doctor’s visit in her usual way (a letter left outside his rooms on a tray), and having heard no more about it, assumed quite correctly that he took no interest in the matter.

  The patient was in one of her sullen but unresisting moods. She allowed herself to be led into the room where the examination took place, and submitted to being poked and prodded. Invited to open her mouth and stick out her tongue, she would not, but at least when the doctor stuck his fingers in her mouth and physically separated upper from lower jaw to peer in, she did not bite him. Her eyes slid away from him and his instruments; she seemed scarcely aware of him and his examination. She could not be induced to speak a single word.

  Doctor Maudsley found his patient to be underweight and to have lice; otherwise she was physically healthy in every respect. Her psychological state however was more difficult to determine. Was the child, as John-the-dig implied, mentally deficient? Or was the girl’s behaviour caused by parental neglect and lack of discipline? This was the view of the Missus who, publicly at least, was inclined always to absolve the twins.

  These were not the only opinions the doctor had in mind when he examined the wild twin. The previous night in his own house, pipe in mouth, hand on fireplace, he had been musing aloud about the case (he enjoyed having his wife listen to him; it inspired him to greater eloquence), enumerating the instances of misbehaviour he had heard of. There had been the thieving from villagers’ cottages, the destruction of the topiary garden, the violence wrought upon Emmeline, the fascination with matches. He had been pondering the possible explanations, when the soft voice of his wife broke in. ‘You don’t think she is simply wicked?’

  For a moment he was too surprised at being interrupted to answer.

  ‘It’s only a suggestion,’ she said, with a wave of the hand as if to discount her words. She had spoken mildly, but that hardly mattered. The fact that she had spoken at all was enough to give her words an edge.

  And then there was Hester.

  ‘What you must bear in mind,’ she had told him, ‘is that in the absence of any strong parental attachment, and with no strong guidance from any other quarter, the child’s development to date has been wholly shaped by the experience of twinness. Her sister is the one fixed and permanent point in her consciousness, therefore her entire worldview will have been formed through the prism of their relationship.’

  She was quite right, of course. He had no idea what book she had got it out of, but she must have read it closely, for she elaborated on the idea very sensibly. As he listened he had been rather struck by her queer little voice. Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read. And when she paused for breath at the end of a sentence, she would give him a quick look – he had found it disconcerting the first time, though now he thought it rather droll – to let him know whether he was allowed to speak or whether she intended to go on speaking herself.

  ‘I must do some more research,’ he told Hester when they met to discuss the patie
nt after the examination. ‘And I shall certainly look very closely at the significance of her being a twin.’

  Hester nodded. ‘The way I look at it is this,’ she said. ‘In a number of ways, you could view the twins as having divided a set of characteristics between them. Where an ordinary, healthy person will feel a whole range of different emotions, display a great variety of behaviours, the twins, you might say, have divided the range of emotions and behaviours into two and taken one set each. One twin is wild and given to physical rages; the other is indolent and passive. One prefers cleanliness; the other craves dirt. One has an endless appetite for food, the other can starve herself for days. Now, if this polarity – we can argue later about how consciously it has been adopted – is crucial to Adeline’s sense of identity, it is unsurprising, is it not, if she suppresses within herself everything that in her view falls on Emmeline’s side of the boundary?’ The question was rhetorical; she did not indicate to the doctor that he might speak, but drew in a measured breath and continued. ‘Now consider the qualities in the girl in the mist. She listens to stories, is capable of understanding and being moved by a language which is not twin language. This suggests a willingness to engage with other people. But of the twins, who is it that has been allocated the job of engaging with others? Emmeline! And so Adeline must repress this part of her humanity.’

  Hester turned her head to the doctor and gave him the look that meant it was his turn to speak.

  ‘It’s a curious idea,’ he answered, cautiously. ‘I should have thought the opposite, wouldn’t you? That being twins you could expect them to be more alike than dissimilar?’

  ‘But we know from observation that that isn’t the case,’ she countered briskly.