The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

  ‘This is not your fault, you know. Don’t alarm yourself. The wailing and the nervous collapse – it is something I and Judith and the Doctor have seen many times before. If anyone is to blame it is me, for not letting you know sooner that she was here. I have a tendency to be over-protective. I was foolish not to tell you.’ She paused. ‘Do you intend to tell me whom it was you brought with you?’

  ‘Emmeline had a baby,’ I said. ‘That’s the person who came with me. The man in the brown suit.’ And having told what I knew, the questions I didn’t know the answer to came rushing to my lips, as though my own frankness might encourage her to be candid in return. ‘What is it Emmeline was looking for in the garden? She was trying to dig something up when I saw her there. She often does it: Maurice says it’s the work of foxes, but I know that is not the truth.’

  Miss Winter was silent and very still.

  ‘The dead go underground,’ I quoted. ‘That’s what she told me. Who does she think is buried? Is it her child? Hester? Who is she looking for underground?’

  Miss Winter uttered a murmur, and though it was faint, it instantly awakened the lost memory of the hoarse pronouncement launched at me by Emmeline in the garden. The very words! ‘Is that it?’ added Miss Winter. ‘Is that what she said?’

  I nodded.

  ‘In twin language?’

  I nodded again.

  Miss Winter looked at me with interest. ‘You are doing very well, Margaret. Better than I thought. The trouble is, the timing of this story is getting rather out of hand. We are getting ahead of ourselves.’ She paused, staring into her palm, then looked straight at me. ‘I said I meant to tell you the truth, Margaret. And I do. But before I can tell you, something must happen first. It is going to happen. But it has not happened yet.’

  ‘What—?’

  But before I could finish my question she shook her head. ‘Let us return to Lady Audley and her secret, shall we?’

  I read for another half hour or so, but my mind was not on the story, and I had the impression Miss Winter’s attention was wandering too. When Judith came to tap at the door at supper time, I closed the book and put it to one side, and as if there had been no interruption, as if it were a continuation of the discussion we had been having before, she said, ‘If you are not too tired, why don’t you come and see Emmeline this evening?’

  Sisters

  When it was time, I went to Emmeline’s quarters. It was the first time I had been there as an invited guest and the first thing I noticed, before I even entered the bedroom, was the thickness of the silence. I paused in the doorway – they had not noticed me yet – and realized it was their whispering. On the edge of inaudibility, the rub of breath over vocal cords made ripples in the air. Soft plosives that were gone before you could hear them, muffled sibilants that you might mistake for the sound of your own blood in your ears. Each time I thought it had stopped a hushed sussuration brushed against my ear like a moth alighting on my hair, then fluttered away again.

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Margaret.’ Miss Winter, her wheelchair positioned next to her sister, gestured to a chair on the other side of the bed. ‘How good of you.’

  I looked at Emmeline’s face on the pillow. The red and the white were the same red and white of scarring and burn damage that I had seen before; she had lost none of her well-fed plumpness; her hair was still the tangled skein of white. Listlessly her gaze wandered over the ceiling; she appeared indifferent to my presence. Where was the difference? For she was different. Some alteration had taken place in her, a change instantly visible to the eye, though too elusive to define. She had lost nothing of her strength, though. One arm extended outside the coverlet and in it she had Miss Winter’s hand in a firm grip.

  ‘How are you, Emmeline?’ I asked, nervously.

  ‘She is not well,’ said Miss Winter.

  Miss Winter too had changed in recent days. But in her disease was a distillation: the more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence. Every time I saw her she seemed diminished: thinner, frailer, more transparent, and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her centre was revealed.

  All the same, it was a very thin, weak hand that Emmeline was grasping in the clutch of her own heavy fist.

  ‘Would you like me to read?’ I asked.

  ‘By all means.’

  I read a chapter. Then, ‘She’s asleep,’ Miss Winter murmured. Emmeline’s eyes were closed; her breathing was deep and regular. She had released her grip on her sister’s hand, and Miss Winter was rubbing the life back into it. There were the beginnings of bruises on her fingers.

  Seeing the direction of my gaze, she drew her hands into her shawl. ‘I’m sorry about this interruption to our work,’ she said. ‘I had to send you away once before when Emmeline was ill. And now too I must spend my time with her, and our project must wait. But it won’t be long now. And there is Christmas coming. You will be wanting to leave us and be with your family. When you come back after the holiday we will see how things stand. I expect—’ it was the briefest of pauses – ‘we shall be able to work again by then.’

  I did not immediately understand her meaning. The words were ambiguous; it was her voice that gave it away. My eyes leapt to Emmeline’s sleeping face.

  ‘Do you mean…?’

  Miss Winter sighed. ‘Don’t be taken in by the fact that she seems so strong. She has been ill for a very long time. For years I assumed that I would live to see her depart before me. Then when I fell ill I was not so sure. And now it seems we are in a race to the finishing line.’

  So that’s what we were waiting for. The event without which the story could not end.

  Suddenly my throat was dry and my heart was frightened as a child’s.

  Dying. Emmeline was dying.

  ‘Is it my fault?’

  ‘Your fault? How should it be your fault?’ Miss Winter shook her head. ‘That night had nothing to do with it.’ She gave me one of her old, sharp looks that understood more than I meant to reveal. ‘Why does this upset you, Margaret? My sister is a stranger to you. And it is hardly compassion for me that distresses you so, is it? Tell me, Margaret: what is the matter?’

  In part she was wrong. I did feel compassion for her. For I believed I knew what Miss Winter was going through. She was about to join me in the ranks of the amputees. Bereaved twins are half-souls. The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most. Though she was often short-tempered and contrary, I had grown to like Miss Winter. In particular I liked the child she had once been, the child who emerged more and more frequently nowadays. With her cropped hair, her naked face, her frail hands denuded of their heavy stones, she seemed to grow more child-like every day. To my mind it was this child that was losing her sister, and this is where Miss Winter’s sorrow met my own. Her drama was going to be played out here in this house, in the coming days, and it was the very same drama that had shaped my life, though it had taken place for me in the days before I could remember.

  I watched Emmeline’s face on the pillow. She was approaching the divide that already separated me from my sister. Soon she would cross it and be lost to us, a new arrival in that other place. I was filled with the absurd desire to whisper in her ear, a message for my sister, entrusted to one who might see her soon. Only what to say?

  I felt Miss Winter’s curious gaze upon my face. I restrained my folly.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘Days. A week, perhaps. Not long.’

  I sat up late that night with Miss Winter. I was there again at the side of Emmeline’s bed the next day, too. We sat, reading aloud or in silence for long periods, with only Doctor Clifton coming to interrupt our vigil. He seemed to take my presence there as a natural thing, included me in the same grave smile he bestowed on Miss Winter as he spoke gently about Emmeline’s decline. And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at a
ny page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn’t matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline’s breathing.

  Then the day faded and tomorrow would be Christmas Eve, the day of my departure. In a way I did not want to leave. The hush of this house, the splendid solitariness offered by its garden, were all I wanted of the world at present. The shop and my father seemed very small and far away, my mother – as ever – more distant still. As for Christmas…In our house the festive season followed too close upon my birthday for my mother to be able to bear the celebration of the birth of some other woman’s child, no matter how long ago. I thought of my father, opening the Christmas cards from my parents’ few friends, arranging over the fireplace the innocuous Santas, snow scenes and robins and putting aside the ones that showed the Madonna. Every year he collected a secret pile of them: jewel-coloured images of the mother gazing in rapture at her single, complete, perfect infant, the infant gazing back at her, the two of them making a blissful circle of love and wholeness. Every year they went in the bin, the lot of them.

  Miss Winter, I knew, would not object if I asked to stay. She might even be glad to have a companion in the days ahead. But I did not ask. I could not. I had seen Emmeline’s decline. As she had weakened, so the hand on my heart had squeezed more tightly, and my growing anguish told me that the end was not far off. It was cowardly of me, but when Christmas came, it was an opportunity to escape, and I took it.

  In the evening I went to my room and did my packing, then went back to Emmeline’s quarters to say goodbye to Miss Winter. All the sisters’ whispers had fluttered away; the dimness hung heavier, stiller than before. Miss Winter had a book in her lap, but if she had been reading, she could see to read no longer; instead her eyes watched in sadness her sister’s face. In her bed, Emmeline lay immobile, the covers rising and falling gently with her breath. Her eyes were closed and she looked deeply asleep.

  ‘Margaret,’ Miss Winter murmured, indicating a chair. She seemed pleased that I had come. Together we waited for the light to fade, listening to the tide of Emmeline’s breath.

  Between us, in the sick bed, Emmeline’s breath rolled in and out, in a smooth, imperturbable rhythm, soothing like the sound of waves on a seashore.

  Miss Winter did not speak, and I too was silent, composing in my mind impossible messages I might send to my sister via this imminent traveller to that other world. With every exhalation, the room seemed filled with a deeper and more enduring sorrow.

  Against the window, a dark silhouette, Miss Winter stirred.

  ‘You should have this,’ she said, and a movement in the darkness told me she was holding something out to me across the bed.

  My fingers closed on a rectangular leather object, with a metal lock. Some sort of book.

  ‘From Emmeline’s treasure box. It will not be needed any more. Go away. Read it. When you come back we will talk.’

  Book in hand, I crossed the room to the door, feeling my way by the furniture in my path. Behind me was the tide of Emmeline’s breath rolling in and out.

  A Diary and a Train

  Hester’s diary was damaged. The key was missing, the clasp so rusted that it left orange stains on your fingers. The first three pages were stuck together where the glue from the inner cover had melted into them. On every page the last word dissolved into a brownish tide mark as if the diary had been exposed to dirt and damp together. A few pages had been torn; along the ripped edges was a tantalizing list of fragments: abn, cr, ta, est. Worst of all, it seemed that the diary had at some point been submerged in water. The pages undulated; when closed, the diary splayed to more than its intended thickness.

  It was this submersion that was going to cause me the greatest difficulty. When one glanced at a page, it was clear that it was script. Not any old script either, but Hester’s. Here were her firm ascenders, her balanced, fluid loops; here were her comfortable slant, her economic yet functional gaps. But on a closer look, the words were blurred and faded. Was this line an l or a t? Was this curve an a or an e? Or an s, even? Was this configuration to be read as bet or lost?

  It was going to be quite a puzzle. Although I subsequently made a transcript of the diary, on that day the holiday train was too crowded to permit pencil and paper. I hunched in my window seat, diary close to my nose, and pored over the pages, applying myself to the task of deciphering. I managed one word in three at first, then as I was drawn into the flow of her meaning, the words began to come halfway to meet me, rewarding my efforts with generous revelations, until I was able to turn the pages with something like the speed of reading. In that train, the day before Christmas, Hester came to life.

  I will not test your patience by reproducing Hester’s diary here as it came to me: fragmented and broken. In the spirit of Hester herself, I have mended and tidied and put in order. I have banished chaos and clutter. I have replaced doubt with certainty, shadows with clarity, lacunae with substance. In doing so, I may have occasionally put words into her page that she never wrote, but I can promise that if I have made mistakes it is only in the small things; where it matters I have squinted and scrutinized until I am as sure as sure can be that I have distinguished her original meaning.

  I do not give the entire diary, but only an edited selection of passages. My choice has been dictated firstly by questions of relevance to my purpose, which is to tell the story of Miss Winter, and secondly by my desire to give an accurate impression of Hester’s life at Angelfield.

  Angelfield House is decent enough at a distance, although it faces the wrong way and the windows are badly positioned, but on approaching, one sees instantly the state of dilapidation it has been allowed to fall into. Sections of the stonework are dangerously weathered. Window frames are rotting. And it did look as though parts of the roof are storm damaged. I shall make it a priority to check the ceilings in the attic rooms.

  The housekeeper welcomed me at the door. Though she tries to hide it, I understood immediately that she has difficulty in seeing and hearing. Given her great age, this is no surprise. It also explains the filthy state of the house – but I suppose the Angelfield family does not want to throw her out after a lifetime’s service in the house. I can approve their loyalty, though I fail to see why she cannot be helped by younger, stronger hands.

  Mrs Dunne told me about the household. The family has been living here with what most would consider a greatly reduced staff for years now, and it has come to be accepted as part of the way of the house. Quite why it should be so, I have not yet ascertained, but what I do know is that there is, outside the family proper, only Mrs Dunne, and a gardener called John Digence. There are deer (though there is no hunting any more), but the man who looks after them is never seen around the house; he takes instruction from the same solicitor who engaged me, and who acts as a kind of estate manager – so far as there is any estate management. It is Mrs Dunne herself who deals with the regular household finances. I supposed that Charles Angelfield looked over the books and the receipts each week, but Mrs Dunne only laughed and asked if I thought she had the sight to go making lists of figures in a book. I cannot help but think this highly unorthodox. Not that I think Mrs Dunne untrust-worthy. From what I have seen she gives every indication of being a good hearted, honest woman, and it is my hope that when I come to know her better I shall be able to ascribe her reticence entirely to deafness. I made a note to demonstrate to Mr Angelfield the advantages of keeping accurate records, and thought that I might offer to undertake the job myself if he was too busy to do it.

  Pondering this, I began to think it time I met my employer, and could not have been more surprised when Mrs Dunne told me he spends his entire day in the old nursery and that
it is not his habit to leave it. After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. A great pity! Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted?

  Mrs Dunne gave me tea (which I pretended to drink out of politeness, but later threw into the sink for I had no faith in the cleanliness of the teacup, having seen the state of the kitchen) and told me a little about herself. She is in her eighties, never married, and has lived here all her life. Naturally enough our talk then turned to the family. Mrs Dunne knew the mother of the twins as a girl and young woman. She confirmed what I had already understood: that it is the recent departure of the mother to an asylum for the sick of mind which precipitated my engagement. She gave me such a contorted account of the events that precipitated the mother’s committal that I could not make out whether the woman had or had not attacked the doctor’s wife with a violin. It hardly matters: clearly there is a family history of disturbance in the brain, and I confess, my heart beat a little faster when I had it confirmed. What satisfaction is there, for a governess, in being given the direction of minds which already run in smooth and untrammelled lines? What challenge in maintaining ordered thinking in children whose minds are already neat and tidy? I am not only ready for this job, I have spent years longing for it. Here, I shall finally find out what my methods are worth!

  I enquired after the father’s family – for though Mr March is deceased and the children never knew him, still, his blood is theirs and has an impact on their natures. Mrs Dunne was able to tell me very little, though. Instead she began a series of anecdotes about the mother and the uncle which, if I am to read between the lines (as I’m sure she meant me to) contained hints of something scandalous…Of course, what she suggests is not at all likely, not in England at least, and I suspect her of being somewhat fanciful. The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it needs to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything. Left to wander its own way, it tends to lead into silliness. Perhaps it is age that makes her mind wander, for she seems a kind thing in other ways, and not the sort to invent gossip for the sake of it. In any case, I immediately put the topic firmly from my mind.