The Thirteenth Tale

BONES

It was Christmas Eve; it was late; it was snowing hard. The first taxi driver and the second refused to take me so far out of town on such a night, but the third, indifferent of expression, must have been moved by the ardor of my request, for he shrugged his shoulders and let me in. "We'll give it a go," he warned gruffly.

We drove out of town and the snow continued to fall, piling up meticulously, flake by flake, on every inch of earth, every hedge top, every bough. After the last village, the last farmhouse, we found ourselves in a white landscape, the road indistinguishable at times from the flat land all about, and I shrank into my seat, expecting at any moment that the driver would give up and turn back. Only my clear directions reassured him that we were in fact on a road. I got out myself to open the first gate, then we found ourselves at the second set, the main gates of the house.

"I hope you'll find your way back all right," I said.

"Me? I'll be all right," he said with another shrug.

As I expected, the gates were locked. Not wanting the driver to think I was some kind of thief, I pretended to be looking for my keys in my bag while he turned the car. Only when he was some distance away did I grab hold of the bars of the gate and clamber over.

The kitchen door was not locked. I pulled off my boots, shook the snow off my coat and hung it up. I walked through the empty kitchen and made my way to Emmeline's quarters, where I knew Miss Winter would be. Full of accusations, full of questions, I stoked my rage; it was for Aurelius and for the woman whose bones had lain for sixty years in the burned-out ruins of Angelfield's library. For all my inward storming, my approach was silent; the carpet drank in the fury of my tread.

I did not knock but pushed the door open and went straight in.

The curtains were still closed. At Emmeline's bedside Miss Winter was sitting quietly. Startled by my entrance, she stared at me, an extraordinary shimmer in her eyes.

"Bones/" \ hissed at her. "They have found bones at Angelfield!"

I was all eyes, all ears, waiting on tenterhooks for an admission to emerge from her. Whether it was in word or expression or gesture did not matter. She would make it, and I would read it.

Except that there was something in the room trying to distract me from my scrutiny. "Bones?" said Miss Winter. She was paper-white and there was an ocean in her eyes, vast enough to drown all my fury.

"Oh," she said.

Oh. What richness of vibration a single syllable can contain. Fear. Despair. Sorrow and resignation. Relief, of a dark, unconsoling kind. And grief, deep and ancient.

And then the nagging distraction in the room swelled so urgently in my mind that there was no room for anything else. What was it? Something extraneous to my drama of the bones. Something that preceded my intrusion. For a faltering second I was confused, then all the insignificant things I had noticed without noticing came together. The atmosphere in the room. The closed curtains. The aqueous transparency of Miss Winter's eyes. The fact that the steel core that had always been her essence seemed to have simply gone from her.

My attention narrowed to one thing: Where was the slow tide of Emmeline 's breath? No sound came to my ears.

"No! She's-"

I fell to my knees by the bed and stared.

"Yes," Miss Winter said softly. "She's gone. It was a few minutes ago.»

I gazed at Emmeline's empty face. Nothing really had changed. Her scars were still angrily red; her lips had the same sideways slant; her eyes were still green. I touched her twisted patchwork hand, and her skin was warm. Was it true that she was gone? Absolutely, irrevocably gone? It seemed impossible that it should be so. Surely she had not deserted us completely? Surely there was something of her left behind to console us? Was there no spell, no talisman, no magic that would bring her back? Was there nothing I could say that would reach her?

It was the warmth in her hand that persuaded me she could hear me. It was the warmth in her hand that brought all the words into my chest, falling over each other in their impatience to fly into Emmeline's ear.

"Find my sister, Emmeline. Please find her. Tell her I'm waiting for her. Tell her-" My throat was too narrow for all the words and they broke against each other as they rose, choking, out of me. "Tell her I miss her! Tell her I'm lonely!" The words launched themselves impetuously, urgently from my lips. With fervor they flew across the space between us, chasing Emmeline. "Tell her I can't wait any longer! Tell her to corned

But I was too late. The divide had come down. Invisible. Irrevocable. Implacable.

My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

"Oh, my poor child." I felt the touch of Miss Winter's hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly.

Eventually I dried my eyes. There were only a few words left. Rattling around loose without their old companions. "She was my twin," I said. "She was here. Look."

I pulled at the jumper tucked into my skirt, revealed my torso to the light.

My scar. My half-moon. Pale silver-pink, a nacreous translucence. The line that divides. "This is where she was. We were joined here. And they separated us. And she died. She couldn't live without me." I felt the flutter of Miss Winter's fingers tracing the crescent on my skin, saw the tender sympathy in her face. "The thing is- " (the final words, the very last words, after this I need never say anything, ever again) "I don't think I can live without her."

"Child." Miss Winter looked at me. Held me suspended in the compassion of her eyes.

I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water.

All the time Miss Winter held me in her long green gaze.

Then slowly, slowly, the sand resettled and the water returned to its quietness, slowly, slowly. And the bones resettled in the rusting hold. "You asked me once for my story," I said. "And you told me you didn't have one." "Now you know, I do have one." "I never doubted it." She smiled a poor regretful smile. "When I invited you here I thought I knew your story already. I had read your essay about the Landier brothers. Such a good essay, it was. You knew so much about siblings. Insider knowledge, I thought. And the more I looked at your essay, the more I thought you must have a twin. And so I fixed upon you to be my biographer. Because if after all these years of tale telling I was tempted to lie to you, you would find me out."

"I have found you out."

She nodded, tranquil, sad, unsurprised. "About time, too. How much do you know?"

"What you told me. Only a subplot, is how you put it. You told me the story of Isabelle and her twins, and I wasn't paying attention. The subplot was Charlie and his rampages. You kept pointing me in the direction of Jane Eyre. The book about the outsider in the family. The motherless cousin. I don't know who your mother was. And how you came to be at Angelfield without her."

Sadly she shook her head. "Anyone who might have known the answer to those questions is dead, Margaret."

"Can't you remember?"

"I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events. How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that it is the truth."

"All childrenmythologi^e their birth."

"Quite. The only thing I can be sure of is what John-the-dig told me."

"And what did he tell you?"

"That I appeared like a weed between two strawberries."

She told me the story.

Someone was getting at the strawberries. Not birds, because they pecked and left pitted berries. And not the twins, because they trampled the plants and left footprints all over the plot. No, some light-footed thief was taking a berry here and a berry there. Neatly, without disturbing a thing. Another gardener wouldn't even have noticed. The same day John noticed a pool of water under his garden tap. The tap was dripping. He gave it a turn, tightened it up. He scratched his head, and went about his business. But he kept an eye out.

The next day he saw a figure in the strawberries. A little scarecrow, barely knee-high, in an overlarge hat that drooped down over its face. It ran off when it saw him. But the day after it was so determined to get its fruit that he had to yell and wave his arms to chase it off. Afterward he thought he couldn't put a name to it. Who in the village had a mite that size, small and underfed? Who around here would let their child go stealing fruit from other people's gardens? He was stumped for an answer.

And someone had been in the potting shed. He hadn't left the old newspapers in that state, had he? And those crates-they'd been put away tidy; he knew they had.

For once he put on the padlock before he went home.

Passing by the garden tap, he noticed it dripping again. Gave it a firm half turn without even thinking about it. Then, putting his weight into it, another quarter turn. That should do it.

In the night he awoke, uneasy in his mind for reasons he couldn't account for. Where would you sleep, he found himself wondering, if you couldn't get into the potting shed and make yourself a bed with newspapers in a crate? And where would you get water if the tap was turned off so tight you couldn't move it? Chiding himself for his midnight foolishness, he opened the window to feel the temperature. Too late for frosts. Cool for the time of year, though. And how much colder if you were hungry? And how much darker if you were a child?

He shook his head and closed the window. No one would abandona child in his garden, would they? Of course they wouldn't. Nevertheless, before five he was up and out of bed. He took his walk around the garden early, surveying his vegetables, the topiary garden, planning his work for the day. All morning he kept an eye out for a floppy hat in the fruit bushes. But there was nothing to be seen.

"What's the matter with you?" said the Missus when he sat in silence at her kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.

"Nothing," he said.

He drained his cup and went back to the garden. He stood and scanned the fruit bushes with anxious eyes. Nothing. At lunchtime he ate half a sandwich, discovered he had no appetite and left the other half on an upturned flowerpot by the garden tap. Telling himself he was a fool, he put a biscuit next to it. He turned the tap on. It took quite an effort even for him. He let the water fall, noisily, into a tin watering can, emptied it into the nearest bed and refilled it. The thunder of splashing water resounded around the vegetable garden. He took care not to look up and around.

Then he took himself a little way off, knelt on the grass, his back to the tap, and started brushing off some old pots. It was an important job; it had to be done; you could spread disease if you didn't clean your pots properly between planting.

Behind him, the squeak of the tap.

He didn't turn instantly. He finished the pot he was doing, brush, brush, brush.

Then he was quick. On his feet, over to the tap, faster than a fox.

But there was no need for such haste.

The child, frightened, tried to flee but stumbled. Picking itself up, it limped on a few more steps, then stumbled again. John caught it up, lifted it-the weight of a cat, no more-turned it to face him, and the hat fell off.

Little chap was a bag of bones. Starving. Eyes gone crusty, hair black with dirt, and smelly. Two hot red spots for cheeks. He put a hand to the child's forehead and it was burning up. Back in the potting shed he saw its feet. No shoes, scabby and swollen, pus oozing through the dirt. A thorn or something, deep inside. The child trembled. Fever, pain, starvation, fear. If he found an animal in that state, John thought, he 'd get his gun and put it out of its misery.

He locked it in the shed and went to fetch the Missus. She came. She peered, right up close, got a whiff and stepped back. "No, no, I don't know whose he is. Perhaps if we cleaned him up a bit?"

"Dunk him in the water butt, you mean?"

"Water butt indeed! I'll go and fill the tub in the kitchen."

They peeled the stinking rags away from the child. "They're for the bonfire," the Missus said, and tossed them out into the yard. The dirt went all the way down to the skin; the child was encrusted. The first tub of water turned instantly black. In order to empty and refill the tub, they lifted the child out, and it stood, wavering, on its better foot. Naked and dripping, streaked with rivulets of gray-brown water, all ribs and elbows.

They looked at the child; at each other; at the child again. "John, I may be poor of sight, but tell me, are you not seeing what I'm not seeing?"

Aye.

"Little chap indeed! It's a little maid."

They boiled kettle after kettle, scrubbed at skin and hair with soap, brushed hardened dirt out from under the nails. Once she was clean they sterilized tweezers, pulled the thorn from the foot-she flinched but didn't cry out-and they dressed and bandaged the wound. They gently rubbed warmed castor oil into the crust around the eyes. They put calamine lotion onto the flea bites, petroleum jelly onto the chapped, split lips. They combed tangles out of long, matted hair. They pressed cool flannels against her forehead and her burning cheeks. At last they wrapped her in a clean towel and sat her at the kitchen table, where the Missus spooned soup into her mouth and John peeled her an apple.

Gulping down the soup, grabbing at the apple slices, she couldn't get it down fast enough. The Missus cut a slice of bread and spread it with butter. The child ate it ravenously.

They watched her. The eyes, cleared of their crust, were slivers of emerald green. The hair was drying to a bright red-gold. The cheek bones jutted wide and sharp in the hungry face.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" said John.

"Aye."

"Will we tell him?"

"No."

"But she does belong here."

"Aye."

They thought for a moment or two.

"What about a doctor?"

The pink spots in the child's face were not so bright. The Missus put a hand to the forehead. Still hot, but better. "We'll see how she goes tonight. Get the doctor in the morning."

"If needs be."

"Aye. If needs be."

"And so it was settled," Miss Winter said. "I stayed."

"What was your name?"

"The Missus tried to call me Mary, but it didn't stick. John called me Shadow, because I stuck to him like a shadow. He taught me to read, you know, with seed catalogs in the shed, but I soon discovered the library. Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent."

I thought about it all for a while in silence. The ghost child. No mother. No name. The child whose very existence was a secret. It was impossible not to feel compassion. And yet…

"What about Aurelius? You knew what it was like to grow up without a mother! Why did he have to be abandoned? The bones they found at Angelfield… I know it must have been Adeline who killed John-the-dig, but what happened to her afterward? Tell me, what happened the night of the fire?"

We were talking in the dark, and I couldn't see the expression on Miss Winter's face, but she seemed to shiver as she glanced at the figure in the bed.

"Pull the sheet over her face, would you? I will tell you about the baby. I will tell you about the fire. But first, perhaps you could call Judith? She does not know yet. She will need to call Dr. Clifton. There are things that need to be done."

When she came, Judith's first care was for the living. She took one look at Miss Winter's pallor and insisted on putting her to bed and seeing to her medication before anything. Together we wheeled her to her rooms; Judith helped her into her nightgown; I made a hot-water bottle and folded the bed down.

"I'll telephone Dr. Clifton now," Judith said. "Will you stay with Miss Winter?" But it was only a few minutes later that she reappeared in the bedroom doorway and beckoned me into the anteroom.

"I couldn't speak to him," she told me in a whisper. "It's the telephone. The snow has brought the line down."

We were cut off.

I thought of the policeman's telephone number on the piece of paper in my bag and was relieved.

We arranged that I would stay with Miss Winter for the first shift, so that Judith could go to Emmeline's room and do what needed to be done there. She would relieve me later, when Miss Winter's next medication was due.

It was going to be a long night.