The Thirteenth Tale

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 favor-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 sendsherlove.

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 imagine 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 hasone, I am pleased to make your acquaintance-and even more pleased to be of assistance. The legal decree ofdecease is just what you imagine it tobe: apresumption in law of the death ofa person whose whereabouts have been unknownfor such a lengthof time and in such circumstances that death is the only reasonable assumption. Its main function is to enable the estate of a missing person tobe passed into the hands of his inheritors.

I have undertaken the necessaryresearches and traced the documents relating to thecaseyou are particularly interested in. Your Mr. Angelfield was apparently a man of reclusive habits, and the date and circumstances of his disappearanceappear 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 tobe duly carried out. The estate was of some significant value, though diminished somewhat by a fire that left the house itself uninhabitable. But you will see all thisforyourself 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. Thisiscommon in situations where the beneficiary is unablefor some reason (illness or other incapacity, for instance) totake care of his own affairs.

It was with a most particular attention that I noted the signature of the other beneficiary. It was almost illegible, but I managedto 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 inspiredyour interest in the case?

Fear not! I am a man of the greatest discretion! Tellyour father togive me agood 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 lis tened 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 anymore? 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 really made only 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-yearold. 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 who 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 of 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 forward 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 had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, 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.

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-yousee-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. Emmeline was curled into a ball, and her 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 witch hazel.

"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 Maudsleys' 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 rumors of Hester's "behavior" (a village euphemism for misbehavior) 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.