The Thirteenth Tale

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS?

The next time I saw her, Miss Winter looked different. She closed her eyes wearily, and it took her longer than usual to conjure the past and begin to speak. While she gathered the threads, I watched her and noticed that she had left off her false eyelashes. There was the habitual purple eye shadow, the sweeping line of black. But without the spider lashes, she had the unexpected appearance of a child who had been playing in her mother's makeup box.

Things weren't as Hester and the doctor expected. They were prepared for an Adeline who would rant and rage and kick and fight. As for Emmeline, they were counting on her affection for Hester to reconcile her to her twin's sudden absence. They were expecting, in short, the same girls they had before, only separate where they had been together. And so, initially, they were surprised by the twins' collapse into a pair of lifeless rag dolls.

Not quite lifeless. The blood continued to circulate, sluggishly, in their veins. They swallowed the soup that was spooned into their mouths by in one house the Missus, in the other the doctor's wife. But swallowing is a reflex, and they had no appetite. Their eyes, open during the day, were unseeing, and at night, though their eyes closed, they had not the tranquillity of sleep. They were apart; they were alone; they were in a kind of limbo. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

Did the scientists doubt themselves? Stop and wonder whether they were doing the right thing? Did the lolling, unconscious figures of the twins cast a shadow over their beautiful project? They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.

The doctor carried out tests. Hester observed. And they met every day, to compare notes. To discuss what at first they optimistically called progress. Behind the doctor's desk, or in the Angelfield library, they sat together, heads bent over papers on which were recorded every detail of the girls' lives. Behavior, diet, sleep. They puzzled over absent appetites, the propensity to sleep all the time-that sleep which was not sleep. They proposed theories to account for the changes in the twins. The experiment was not going as well as they had expected, had begun in fact disastrously, but the two scientists skirted around the possibility that they might be doing harm, preferring to retain the belief that together they could work a miracle.

The doctor derived great satisfaction from the novelty of working for the first time in decades with a scientific mind of the highest order. He marveled at his protegee's ability to grasp a principle one minute and to apply it with professional originality and insight the next. Before long he admitted to himself that she was more a colleague than a protégée. And Hester was thrilled to find that at long last her mind was adequately nourished and challenged. She came out of their daily meetings aglow with excitement and pleasure. So their blindness was only natural. How could they be expected to understand that what was doing them such good could be doing such great harm to the children in their care? Unless perhaps, in the evenings, each sitting in solitude to write up the day's notes, they might individually have raised their eyes to the unmoving, dead-eyed child in a chair in the corner and felt a doubt cross their minds. Perhaps. But if they did, they did not record it in their notes, did not mention it to the other.

So dependent did the pair become on their joint undertaking that they quite failed to see that the grand project was making no progress at all. Emmeline and Adeline were all but catatonic, and the girl in the mist was nowhere to be seen. Undeterred by their lack of findings, the scientists continued their work: They made tables and charts, proposed theories and developed elaborate experiments to test them. With each failure they told themselves that they had eliminated something from the field of examination and went on to the next big idea.

The doctor's wife and the Missus were involved, but at one remove. The physical care of the girls was their responsibility. They spooned soup into the unresisting mouths of their charges three times a day. They dressed the twins, bathed them, did their laundry, brushed their hair. Each woman had her reasons for disapproving of the project; each had her reasons for keeping mum about her thoughts. As for John-thedig, he was outside it all. His opinion was sought by no one, not that that stopped him making his daily pronouncement to the Missus in the kitchen: "No good will come of it. I'm telling you. No good at all."

There came a moment when they might have had to give up. All their plans had come to nothing, and though they racked their brains, they were lost for a new trick to try. At precisely this point Hester detected small signs of improvement in Emmeline. The girl had turned her head toward a window. She was found clutching some shiny bauble and would not be separated from it. By listening outside doors (which is not bad manners, incidentally, when it is done in the name of science) Hester discovered that when left alone the child was whispering to herself in the old twin language.

"She is soothing herself," she told the doctor, "by imagining the presence of her sister."

The doctor began a regime of leaving Adeline alone for periods of several hours and listening outside the door, notepad and pen in hand. He heard nothing.

Hester and the doctor advised themselves of the need for patience in the more severe case of Adeline, while they congratulated themselves on the improvements in Emmeline. Brightly they noted Emmeline's increased appetite, her willingness to sit up, the first few steps she took of her own accord. Soon she was wandering around the house and garden again with something of her old purposelessness. Oh yes, Hester and the doctor agreed, the experiment was really going somewhere now! Whether they stopped to consider that what they termed "improvements" were only Emmeline returning to the habits she already displayed before the experiment began is hard to judge.

It wasn't all plain sailing with Emmeline. There was a dreadful day when she followed her nose to the cupboard filled with the rags her sister used to wear. She held them to her face, inhaled the stale, animal odor and then, in delight, arrayed herself in them. It was awkward, but worse was to come. Dressed in this fashion, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and, taking her reflection for her sister, ran headlong into it. The crash was loud enough to bring the Missus running, and she found Emmeline weeping beside the mirror, crying not for her own pain but for her poor sister, who had broken into several pieces and was bleeding.

Hester took the clothes away from her and instructed John to burn them. As an extra precaution, she ordered the Missus to turn all the mirrors to the wall. Emmeline was perplexed, but there were no more incidents of the kind.

She would not speak. For all the solitary whispering that went on behind closed doors, always in the old twin language, Emmeline could not be induced to speak a single word of English to the Missus or to Hester. This was something to confer about. Hester and the doctor held a lengthy meeting in the library, at the end of which they concluded that there was no cause for worry. Emmeline could talk, and she would, given time. The refusal to speak, the incident with the mirror-they were disappointments, of course, but science has its disappointments. And look at the progress! Why, wasn't Emmeline strong enough to be allowed outside? And she spent less time these days loitering at the roadside, at the invisible boundary beyond which she dared not step, staring in the direction of the doctor's house. Things were going as well as could be expected.

Progress? It was not what they had hoped at the outset. It was not much at all compared to the results Hester had achieved with the girl when she first arrived. But it was all they had and they made the most of it. Perhaps they were secretly relieved. For what would have been the result of a definitive success? It would have eliminated all reason for their continued collaboration. And though they were blind to the fact, they would not have wanted that.

They would never have ended the experiment of their own accord. Never. It was going to take something else, something external, to put a stop to it. Something that came quite out of the blue.

"What was it?"

Though it was the end of our time, though she had the drawn, gray-white look that she got when the time for her medication grew near, though it was forbidden to ask questions, I couldn't help myself.

Despite her pain, there was a green gleam of mischief in her eyes as she leaned forward confidingly.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Margaret?"

Do I believe in ghosts? What could I say? I nodded.

Satisfied, Miss Winter sat back in her chair, and I had the not unfamiliar impression of having given away more than I thought. "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 that, though not much of a hill, gave her a fine view of the fields and land around. She was about halfway to the doctor's, striding out vigorously, heartbeat raised but without the slightest sense of overexertion, 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 around 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 around to the doctor. "But I've just seen her! With Emmeline! On the edge of the woods beyond Oates's 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 a 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 be only 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 disheveled 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 learned 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 toward 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 inquiries you choose to make."

I wrote to Mr. Lomax that night.