The Thirteenth Tale

ARRIVAL

I left home on an ordinary winter day, and for miles my train ran under a gauzy white sky. Then I changed trains, and the clouds massed. They grew thicker and darker, more and more bloated, as I traveled north. At any moment I expected to hear the first scattering of drops on the windowpane. Yet the rain did not come.

At Harrogate, Miss Winter's driver, a dark-haired, bearded man, was disinclined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of conversation left me free to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind. I had never been north before. My researches had taken me to London and, once or twice, across the channel to libraries and archives in Paris. Yorkshire was a county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once we left the town behind, there were few signs of the contemporary world, and it was possible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into the countryside. The villages were quaint, with their churches and pubs and stone cottages; then, the farther we went, the smaller the villages became and the greater the distance between them until isolated farmhouses were the only interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses behind and it grew dark. The car's headlamps showed me swathes of a colorless, undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.

"Is this the moors?" I asked.

"It is," the driver said, and I leaned closer to the window, but all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.

At an unmarked junction we turned off the road and bumped along for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another mile.

Miss Winter's house lay between two slow rises in the darkness, almost-hills that seemed to merge into each other and that revealed the presence of a valley and a house only at the last turn of the drive. The sky by now was blooming shades of purple, indigo and gunpowder, and the house beneath it crouched long and low and very dark. The driver opened the car door for me, and I stepped out to see that he had already unloaded my case and was ready to pull away, leaving me alone in front of an unlit porch. Barred shutters blacked out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors.

I rang the bell. Its clang was oddly muted in the damp air. While I waited I watched the sky. Cold crept through the soles of my shoes, and I rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.

About to ring for a third time, I was caught by surprise when with no sound at all the door was opened.

The woman in the doorway smiled professionally and apologized for keeping me waiting. At first sight she seemed very ordinary. Her short, neat hair was the same palish shade as her skin, and her eyes were neither blue nor gray nor green. Yet it was less the absence of color than a lack of expression that made her plain. With some warmth of emotion in them, her eyes could, I suspected, have gleamed with life; and it seemed to me, as she matched my scrutiny glance for glance, that she maintained her inexpressivity only by deliberate effort.

"Good evening," I said. "I am Margaret Lea."

"The biographer. We've been expecting you."

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

She ushered me in and closed the door behind me. The key turned in the lock without a sound and there was not a squeak as the well-oiled bolts were slid noiselessly into place.

Standing there in my coat in the hallway, I experienced for the first time the most profound oddity of the place. Miss Winter's house was entirely silent.

The woman told me her name was Judith, and that she was the housekeeper. She asked about my journey and mentioned the hours of meals and the best times to get hot water. Her mouth opened and closed; as soon as her words fell from her lips they were smothered by the blanket of silence that descended and extinguished them. The same silence swallowed our footfalls, and muffled the opening and closing of doors as she showed me, one after another, the dining room, the drawing room, the music room.

There was no magic behind the silence-it was the soft-furnishings that did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there were upholstered footstools, chaise longues and armchairs; tapestries hung on the walls and were used as throws over upholstered furniture. Every floor was carpeted, every carpet overlaid with rugs. The damask that draped the windows also baffled the walls. Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this wool and velvet absorbed sound, with one difference: Where blotting paper takes up only excess ink, the fabric of the house seemed to suck in the very essence of the words we spoke.

I followed the housekeeper. We turned left and right, and right and left, went up and down stairs until I was thoroughly confused. I quickly lost all sense of how the convoluted interior of the house corresponded with its outer plainness. The house had been altered over time, I supposed, added to here and there; probably we were in some wing or extension invisible from the front. "You'll get the hang of it," the housekeeper mouthed, seeing my face, and I understood her as if I were lip-reading. Finally we turned from a half-landing and came to a halt. She unlocked a door that opened into a sitting room. There were three more doors leading off it. "Bathroom," she said, opening one of the doors, "bedroom," opening another, "and study." The rooms were as padded with cushions and curtains and hangings as the rest of the house.

"Will you take your meals in the dining room, or here?" she asked, indicating the small table and a single chair by the window.

I did not know whether meals in the dining room meant eating with my hostess, and unsure of my status in the house (was I a guest or an employee?), I hesitated, wondering whether it was politer to accept or to refuse. Divining the cause of my uncertainty, the housekeeper added, as though having to overcome a habit of reticence, "Miss Winter always eats alone."

"Then if it's all the same to you, I'll eat here."

"I'll bring you soup and sandwiches straightaway, shall I? You must be hungry after the train. You've things to make your tea and coffee just here." She opened a cupboard in the corner of the bedroom to reveal a kettle, the other paraphernalia for drinks making and even a tiny fridge. "It will save you from running up and down to the kitchen," she added, and threw in an abashed smile, by way of apology, I thought, for not wanting me in her kitchen.

She left me to my unpacking.

In the bedroom it was the work of a minute to unpack my few clothes, my books and my toiletries. I pushed the tea and coffee things to one side and replaced them with the packet of cocoa I had brought from home. Then I had just enough time to test the high antique bed- it was so lavishly covered with cushions that there could be any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it-before the housekeeper returned with a tray.

"Miss Winter invites you to meet her in the library at eight o'clock." She did her best to make it sound like an invitation, but I understood, as I was no doubt meant to, that it was a command.