The Thirteenth Tale 作者：戴安娜·赛特菲尔德 （法国）

It was a long afternoon, and at the end of it one of the underhouse maids ran to the nursery. “He’s come out! The master’s come out!”

‘You can let her know that I understand.“

She began to talk while they lolled back against a tree. “So which is your beau, then?”

‘Nice weather for a picnic,“ she said, and her husband, in the way of husbands, did not see the connection.

But the child-widow was sleeping already. And as she dreamed in tier old bed, her escapade and herhusband already forgotten, her virgin’s name was restored to her. When she woke in the morning it would be as if her marriage had never been, and the babies themselves would appear to her not as her own children—she had not a single maternal bone in her body—

He complained, took a handful of her hair and ran his fingers over he nape of her neck, finding the bruises he had made last time. But she twisted away from him, ran upstairs and locked the door.

GARDENSI woke early. Too early. The monotonous fragment of a tune was scratching at my brain. With more than an hour to wait before Judith’s knock at the door with breakfast, I made myself a cup of cocoa, drank it scaldingly hot and went outdoors.

But the Missus knew that. Word of the marriage had reached her some months before, and news of the birth (she’d not needed to count the months on her fingers, but she did it anyway and pursed her lips). She knew of Roland’s death from pneumonia a few weeks ago; knew too how old Mr. and Mrs. March, devastated by the death of their only son and repelled by the fey insouciance of their new daughter-in-law, now quietly shunned Isabelle and her children, wishing only to grieve.

By enticement. Whispering promises of magic and surprise, Charlie , led Isabelle out of the side door, along one end of the knot garden, between the long borders, out through the topiary garden and along the beech avenue to the woods. There was a place Charlie knew. An old hovel, dank and windowless, a good place for secrets.

but as mere spirits of the house.

The invitation languished for a fortnight on the drawing room windowsill, and it might have remained there until the sun bleached the color out of the ink, had it not been for Isabelle. One afternoon, at a loss for something to do, she came down the stairs, puffed out her cheeks in boredom, picked the letter up and opened it.

Isabelle laughed. “Here,” she said, “take this.” And she handed him a heavy parcel wrapped up in cloth. She reached into the back of the carriage and took something out. “And this one.” He tucked it obediently under his arm. “Now, what I’d like most in the world is a very large brandy.”

A picnic? Charlie’s mind turned it over. It seemed strange. But he shrugged and forgot it.

At first he hardly understood what she had said. He felt a pulse beat his ears. His vision blurred. He closed his eyes, but inside his head there were volcanoes, meteorite strikes and explosions. When the flames died down and there was nothing left in his inner world but a silent, devastated landscape, he opened his eyes.

Her lips tightened in anger, but she concurred.

Bereaved, driven half mad with grief, George Angelfield sat all day in the library, eating nothing, seeing no one. And he spent his nights there, too, on the daybed, not sleeping but staring red-eyed at the moon. This went on for months. His pale cheeks became paler; he grew thin; tie stopped speaking. Specialists were called from London. The vicar came and left again. The dog pined away from want of affection, and when it died, George Angelfield barely noticed.

Charlie looked coldly at Sybilla, registered the disarrangement of her dress. She stared back at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

Charlie made to follow her, but she stopped him. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I really have to go.”

From that day on the Missus revised her expectations. Regular mealtimes and bathtimes, church on Sunday, two nice, normal children—all these dreams went out of the window. She had just one job now. To keep the girls safe.

At four o’clock in the morning he put the gun away, and took up instead the long needle that he had pilfered from the Missus’s sewing box a decade before and which had since seen much use. He pulled up his trouser leg, pushed his sock down and made a new puncture mark in his skin. His shoulders shook, but his hand was steady as on his shinbone he scored a single word: Isabelle.

‘Isabelle Angelfield was odd.“

In his hand was a lock of hair, with a bloodied clod of skin attached at one end. Isabelle was there, her back to the door, her hands behind her. One beautiful green eye was bloodshot; one cheek looked red and slightly swollen. A trickle of blood crept from her scalp, reached her eyebrow and was diverted away from her eye.

‘Voom!“ she said, and she smiled.

‘Then come to the deer park.“

Radiant, she unfolded her vast golden wings, as though to embrace me, and I was filled with joy. But when I approached I saw her eyes were blind and she could not see me. Then despair filled my heart.

The crowd gasped, and when she rose to the surface, water streaming from her form in ways that recalled the birth of Venus, they gasped again.

John-the-dig’s family had always been gardeners at Angelfield. In the old days, when the house had a head gardener and seven hands, his great-grandfather had rooted out a box hedge under a window and, so as not to be wasteful, he’d taken hundreds of cuttings a few inches long. He grew them on in a nursery bed, and when they reached ten inches, he planted them in the garden. He clipped some into low, sharp-edged hedges, let others grow shaggy, and when they were broad enough, took his shears to them and made spheres. Some, he could see, wanted to be pyramids, cones, top hats. To shape his green material, this man with the large, rough hands learned the patient, meticulous delicacy of a lacemaker. He created no animals, no human figures. Not for him the peacocks, lions, life-size men on bicycles that you saw in other gardens. The shapes that pleased him were either strictly geometric or bafflingly, bulgingly abstract.

Isabelle by this time was long gone. She had returned to her room for a few minutes and then left it again, taking the back stairs to the kitchen. Here she had given the Missus a strange, hard hug, which was quite unlike her, and then she slipped out of the side door and darted through the kitchen garden toward the garden door, set in a stone wall. The Missus’s sight had been fading for a very long time, but she had developed the ability to judge people’s movements by sensing vibrations in the air, and she had the impression that Isabelle hesitated, for the briefest of moments, before she closed the garden door behind her.

He couldn’t afford to make her cry in the presence of his father, and since she rarely left her father’s side, Charlie was faced with a difficulty. How to get her away?

She told me the story of Isabelle and Charlie.

The Missus could scold, but then she was only the Missus, and in this new, free life he could maim and wound to his heart’s content, in the certain knowledge that he would get away with it. Consistent adult behavior is said to be good for children, and consistent neglect certainly suited this child, for in these early years of his semi-orphanhood Charlie Angelfield was as happy as the day is long.

One morning toward the end of the summer, Isabelle turned the blank pages in her diary and counted the days. She closed the book and replaced it in the drawer thoughtfully. When she had decided, she went downstairs to her father’s study.

There were other large houses in the vicinity. Other more or less aristocratic families. Among them was a man who took great care of his money. He sought out the best advice, invested large sums where wisdom dictated and speculated small sums where the risk of loss was greater but the profit, in the case of success, high. The large sums he lost completely. The small ones went up—moderately. He found himself in a pickle. In addition he had a lazy, spendthrift son and a goggle-eyed, thick-ankled daughter. Something had to be done.

Babies make a lot of washing, and Merrily was a hardworking and devoted mother. Every day she was out in the garden, putting the washing out and taking it in. From the kitchen window, as she washed napkins and vests in the sink, she kept an eye on the fine perambulator outdoors in the sun. Every five minutes it seemed she was nipping outdoors to adjust the hood, tuck in an extra blanket or simply sing.

Until the incident of the perambulator.

‘I don’t know.“

The local families got upset about it. For every accusation made, there was someone who had seen the twins at the relevant time in another distant place; at least they had seen one of them; at least they thought they had. And then it came about that all the old ghost stories were remembered. No old house is without its stories; no old house is without its ghosts. And the very twinness of the girls had a spookiness about it. There was something not right about them, everyone agreed, and whether it was because of the girls themselves or for some other reason, there came to be a disinclination to approach the old house, as much among the adults as the children, for fear of what might be seen there.

‘Adeline and Emmeline,“ said Isabelle sleepily.

Normal? No. The girls were not and would never be normal. But, she reassured herself, things being as they were, the twins being twins, perhaps their strangeness was only natural.

‘That tickles,“ Sybilla murmured.

Isabelle Angelfield was odd.

It was late when I finished transcribing the story of Isabelle and Charlie. The sky was dark and the house was asleep. All of the afternoon and evening and for part of the night I had been bent over my desk, with the story retelling itself in my ears while my pencil scratched line after line, obeying its dictation. My pages were densely packed with script: Miss Winter’s own flood of words. From time to time my hand moved to the left and I scribbled a note in the left-hand margin, when her tone of voice or a gesture seemed to be part of the narrative itself.

‘You are Miss Winter’s biographer, I understand?“

How lonely they must be. How very lonely.

Thinking quickly, the girls saw there was only one way to go. They hung their sandals in the branches, put on their most excited faces and splashed into the water, uttering cries that they hoped would sound abandoned, while doing their utmost to prevent any excessive dampening of their hair.

Full of anger, Charlie looked for something to hit. But he had already broken everything that was breakable. The things that were left would do more harm to his knuckles than he could do to them. His fists slackened; he followed Isabelle out of the door and to the picnic.

In contrast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss Winter was all heat and fire, an exotic hothouse flower in a northern winter garden. She wore no sunglasses today, but her eyelids were colored purple, lined Cleopatra-style with kohl and fringed with the same heavy black lashes as yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before: along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter’s copper curls was a narrow margin of pure white.

Eventually she said it. “My baby’s gone.”

Frequent though they were, these instances of forgetfulness were fleeting. The shocked eyes, the bruised arms, the bloodied thighs were erased from memory the moment he turned away from them. Nothing could touch the great passion in his life: his feelings for Isabelle.

‘You’ve stopped,“ she complained.

‘No.“ She was severe.

Now I pushed the last sheet of paper from me, set down my pencil and clenched and stretched my aching fingers. For hours Miss Winter’s voice had conjured another world, raising the dead for me, and I had seen nothing but the puppet show her words had made. But when her voice fell still in my head, her image remained and I remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare indifferently.

‘Doesn’t George Angelfield have a son?“ asked the wife of the near-bankrupt. ”How old would he be now? Twenty-six?“

She’d have been a plain woman if it wasn’t for that laugh of hers. Her hair was a dirty color that was too dark to be blond, her chin was big and her eyes were small. But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed. Her eyes disappeared altogether above her fat moon cheeks, and suddenly, in their absence, you noticed her mouth. Plump cherry-colored lips and even white teeth— no one else in Angelfield had teeth to match hers—and a little pink tongue that was like a kitten’s. And the sound. That beautiful, rippling, unstoppable music that came gurgling out of her throat like spring-water from an underground stream. It was the sound of joy. He married her for it. And when she laughed his voice went soft, and he put his lips against her neck and said her name, Mary, over and over again. And the vibration of his voice on her skin tickled her and made her laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

He was at the door, on the steps, beside the car all in one moment, and Isabelle was there.

When the leaf ran down to her waist and beyond, Sybilla opened her yes.

They dragged the perambulator along the backs of the houses. It was harder than they had thought. For a start the pram was heavier than it appeared, and also they were pulling it along very uneven ground. The edge of the field was slightly banked, which tilted the pram at an angle. They could have put all four wheels on the level, but the newly turned earth was softer there, and the wheels sank into the clods of soil. Thistles and brambles snagged in the spokes and slowed them down, and it was a miracle that they kept going after the first twenty yards. But they were in their element. They pushed with all their might to get that pram home, gave it all their strength, and hardly seemed to feel the effort at all. They made their fingers bleed tearing the thistles away from the wheels, but on they went, Emmeline still crooning her love song to it, giving it a surreptitious stroke with her fingers from time to time, kissing it.

‘Hmm.“ He paused. ”Does it matter?“

‘And how do you tell them apart?“

His face was grave. The heavy line of his brow cast his eyes into shadow, while the rest of his face was distinguished by a numb stillness. He reached into his car for his case, slammed the door and went up the steps to ring the bell.

‘Would you come to the drawing room?“ she asked. ”Dr. Clifton is here. He would like a word with you.“

She gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it.

I was in the middle of writing up the story of Merrily and the perambulator when there came a knock at my door. It was not time for dinner, so I was surprised; Judith had never interrupted my work before.

She was wearing a summer dress that had belonged to their mother, made of a flimsy white material and trimmed with green. Instead of her usual tennis shoes with their frayed laces, she had put on a pair of green satin sandals a size too big—also their mother’s—and had attached a flower in her hair with a comb. She had lipstick on. His heart darkened. “Where are you going?” he asked.

The summer was full of picnics. And for Charlie, it was full of Sybillas. But for Isabelle there was only one Roland. Every day she slipped out of Charlie’s sight, escaped his grasp and disappeared on her bicycle. Charlie could never find out where the pair met, was too slow to follow her as she took flight, the bicycle wheels spinning beneath her, hair flying behind. Sometimes she would not return until darkness had fallen, sometimes not even then. When he scolded her, she laughed at him and turned her back as though he simply wasn’t there. He tried to hurt her, to maim her, but as she eluded him time after time, slipping through his fingers like water, he realized how much their games had been dependent on her willingness. However great his strength, her quickness and cleverness meant she got away from him every time. Like a boar enraged by a bee, he was powerless.

From that day on George Angelfield took personal charge of his daughter. He fed her, bathed her and the rest, moved her cot into his room in case she cried of loneliness in the night, fashioned a papoose so that he could take her riding, read to her (business letters, the sports pages and romantic novels), and shared all his thoughts and plans with her. He behaved, in short, as though Isabelle was a sensible, pleasant companion and not a wild and ignorant child.

‘Invitation,“ she said. ”To a picnic.“

Turning it over in her head, she thought she understood why it was. Twins, always together, always two. If it was normal in their world to be two, what would other people, who came not in twos but ones, seem like to them? We must seem like halves, the Missus mused. And she remembered a word, a strange word it had seemed at the time, that meant people who had lost parts of themselves. Amputees. That’s what we are to them. Amputees.

‘Since I have been here… ?“

‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!“

One each side of the old crib, they watched. Two half-moon sets of lashes, two puckered mouths, two downy scalps. Then one of the babies gave a little flutter of the eyelids and half opened one eye. The gardener and the Missus held their breath. But the eye closed again and the baby lapsed into sleep.

Their efforts were in vain. The men had eyes only for Isabelle.

‘Good day, Doctor.“

‘Why have you asked to see me?“

‘Only time,“ he said, without looking up from his work. He was kneeling over an area of churned-up soil, leveling it and pressing the earth around the roots of the plants.

In the meantime he had to vent his feelings somehow.

With unflinching, scientific clarity, he proceeded to his explanation. In a few words he told me the name of the illness that was killing her, the symptoms she suffered, the degree of her pain and the hours of the day at which it was most and least effectively masked by the drugs. He mentioned a number of other conditions she suffered from, serious enough in themselves to kill her, except that the other disease was going to get there first. And he set out, as far as he was able, the likely progression of the illness, the need to ration the increases in dosage in order to have something in reserve for later, when, as he put it, she would really need it.

Following the paths, I wandered from one section to another, but I could not fathom the layout. Hedges that looked solid viewed straight on, sometimes revealed a diagonal passageway when viewed obliquely. Shrubberies were easy to wander into and near-impossible to escape from. Fountains and statues that I thought I had left well behind me reappeared. I spent a lot of time stock-still, looking around me in perplexity and shaking my head. Nature had made a maze of itself and was setting out deliberately to thwart me.

‘I can’t tell you. Another person would have succumbed already. Miss Winter is made of strong stuff. And since you have been here—“ He broke off with the air of someone who finds himself inadvertently on the brink of breaking a confidence.

‘Darling Pa!“ She smiled at him.

‘Two babies. Honestly, Dig. At our age!“

By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters folded back, the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky. The garden, still wet from the night’s downpour, gleamed in the morning sun. The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier, damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes in place seemed no more solid than the glimmering threads of a spider’s web stretched across a garden path from branch to branch. The library itself, slighter, narrower seemingly than the night before, appeared as a mirage of books in the wet winter garden.

Suddenly it was clear what was going to happen.

By the time of his last years, the topiary garden was the only thing that mattered. He was always eager to be finished with his other work of the day; all he wanted was to be in “his” garden, running his hands over the surfaces of the shapes he had made, as he imagined the time, fifty, a hundred years hence, when his garden would have grown to maturity.

A noise filled the air.

Beneath the arch of their clasped hands, beneath the trembling line of their gaze, the babies were dreaming.

As the twins grew older, they explored farther and farther afield and soon knew all the farms and all the gardens on the estate. They had no sense of boundaries, no understanding of property, and so they went where they wished. They opened gates and didn’t always close them. They climbed over fences when they got in their way. They tried kitchen doors, and when they opened—usually they did, people didn’t lock doors much in Angelfield—they went inside. They helped themselves to anything tasty in the pantry, slept for an hour on the beds upstairs if they felt weary, took saucepans and spoons away with them to scare birds in the fields.

‘To my room.“

The Missus knew how children ought to be brought up: regular mealtimes, regular bedtimes, regular baths. Isabelle and Charlie had grown up overindulged and neglected at the same time, and it broke her heart to see how they turned out. Their neglect of the twins was her chance, she hoped, to break the pattern. She had a plan. Under their noses, in the heart of all their chaos, she meant to raise two normal, ordinary little girls. Three square meals a day, bedtime at six, church on Sunday.

A white arm extended from the crushed cavity of the black carriage and rested at a strange angle on the stony ground. On the hand were purple bramble stains and thistle scratches.

What happened during that walk? There were no witnesses to the events that took place in the forest. For want of witnesses there was no gossip. At least not at first. But one does not have to be a genius to deduce from later events what took place under the canopy of summer foliage that evening.

She took off her shoes, hung them in a tree and, arms outstretched, let herself fall into the water.

Sybilla reclosed her eyes.

Charlie was in the kitchen, tracing his footsteps, when he heard the sound of hooves and wheels approaching the house. Scowling, he went to the window. He wanted no visitors.

She hissed at him, “Charlie, I said no!”

‘You may leave on Monday. Three days. No more. Maurice will take you to the station.“

It is impossible to know whether or not these facts are connected.

‘What about Christian names?“

The girls settled themselves on a patch of soft ground. In the men’s absence they waited in the growing darkness, drowsy from champagne, breathing in the remains of the sun’s heat and with it the beginning of something darker, the forest and the night. The warmth of their bodies began to drive the moisture from their dresses, and as the folds of fabric dried, they detached themselves from the flesh beneath and tickled.

Perhaps she might have managed better if she’d been younger. Or if the girls had been one instead of two. But the Angelfield blood carried a code that no amount of nursery food and strict routine could rewrite. She didn’t want to see it; she tried not to see it for a long time, but in the end she realized. The twins were odd, there were no two ways about it. They were strange all through, right into their very hearts.

His hands grasped her shoulders and the shaking of his body was the shaking of her body.

But it was harder than she thought.

‘Come on,“ Charlie said roughly to his sister.

‘What’s his name?“ I had asked.

And when Sybilla asked her newfound friend, “How do you know?” Isabelle had the answer all ready: “Charlie.”

The girl smiled. It was a smile without malice. Without guilt. It was simply a smile of satisfaction at having noted something and correctly identified it. She had seen tears. She had been puzzled. But now she had found the answer to the puzzle. It was sadness.

‘Oh, Charlie, wake up, for goodness’ sake!“ and his sister took both his hands in hers and dragged him into a madcap dance around the room. She swirled him around and around and around, until the dizziness started to clear his head, and when they came to a halt she took his face in her hands and spoke to him. ”Roland’s dead, Charlie. It’s you and me now. Do you understand?“

Her father looked up. “Isabelle!” He was pleased to see her. Since she had taken to going out more he was especially gratified when she came to seek him out like this.

The butler made to go in, thinking to retrieve the infant, but the Missus raised her finger and hissed, “Don’t you dare!” He was so startled that he obeyed. The household servants gathered outside the library door, looking at one another, not knowing what to do. But the force of the Missus’s conviction held them paralyzed, and they did nothing.

Walking in Miss Winter’s garden, I met my sister.

Anyway, during the winter, while the twins kept to the gardens and the park, Merrily had a baby. The first warm days of spring found her in the garden, hanging out little clothes on a line. Behind her was a black perambulator. Heaven knows where it had come from; it wasn’t the usual kind of thing for a village girl to have; no doubt it was some second or thirdhand thing, bought cheap by the family (though no doubt seeming very dear) in order to mark the importance of this first child and grandchild. In any case, as Merrily bent for another little vest, another little chemise, and pegged them on the line, she was singing, like one of the birds that were singing, too, and her song seemed destined for the beautiful black perambulator. Its wheels were silver and very high, so although the carriage was large and black and rounded, the impression was of speed and weightlessness.

He stared at her.

In his room Charlie sat on the chair next to the window, sat there for hours, a silhouette against a rectangle of moonlight. At some point he opened a drawer and removed the gun he had obtained by extortion from a local poacher, and two or three times he raised it to his temple. Each time the force of gravity soon returned it to his lap.

The servants had stood about in the hall for hours, listening at the door and peeking through the keyhole. At first their master just sat there, looking at the baby, with a dull and perplexed expression on his face. The baby wriggled and gurgled. When George Angelfield was heard cooing and chuckling in response, the servants exchanged looks of astonishment, but they were more astonished later to hear lullabies. The baby slept and there was silence. Her father, the servants reported, did not once take his eyes from his daughter’s face. Then she awoke, hungry, and set to crying. Her shrieks rose in intensity and pitch until finally the door was flung open.

Charlie forgot his pain only momentarily with the Sybillas. For a time his sister prepared the way for him, then as she became more and more delighted with Roland, Charlie was left to make his own arrangements. He lacked his sister’s subtlety; there was an incident that could lave been a scandal, and a vexed Isabelle told him that if that was how he intended to go about things then he would have to choose a different sort of woman. He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn’t tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.

Miss Winter’s garden was something of a puzzle. The sheer size of it was overwhelming for a start. What I had taken at first sight to be the border of the garden-—the hedge of yew on the other side of the formal beds—

Charlie, indifferent to the scrutiny, was looking at Isabelle.

‘You are Miss Winter’s doctor, I suppose?“ I am.

One of the young men, the boldest, with fair hair and a loud laugh, kicked off his shoes, removed his tie and leapt into the lake with her. A riot of his friends followed. In no time at all, the young men were all in the water, diving, calling, shouting and outdoing one another in athleticism and splash.

his ill-tempered, lazy, selfish and pretty Mathilde. He had loved her more than he loved his horses, more even than his dog. As for their son, Charlie, a boy of nine, it never entered George’s head to wonder whether he loved him more or less than Mathilde, for the fact was, he never thought of Charlie at all.

‘You two go that way, and you others go that way.“

I didn’t know, but I knew his question was impertinent, so I didn’t answer it.

He caught a glint of something in her eye. “Is there something afoot?”

So used was she to hiding the truth that it had become atrophied in her. She made one false start, then another. But, like a gifted musician who, after years without playing, takes up her instrument again, she finally found her way.

When she found him, she raised him from the ground. He leaned heavily on her as she led him with tender care to the kitchen and sat him in a chair. She made tea, sweet and hot, and he stared, unseeing, into space. Without a word, holding the cup to his lips, she tilted sips of the scalding liquid into his mouth. At last his eyes sought hers, and when she saw the loss in them, she felt her own tears spring up.

All the noise, all the commotion at the front of the house.

Across the wide lawn walked Isabelle.

was only a kind of inner wall that divided one part of the garden from another. And the garden was full of such divisions. There were hedges of hawthorne and privet and copper beech, stone walls covered with ivy, winter clematis and the bare, scrambling stems of rambling roses, and fences, neatly paneled or woven in willow.

Startled, the Missus blinked away the fog of her tears and stared.

Charlie did not die, though he didn’t understand why not. He wandered about the house. He made a trail of footprints in the dust and followed it every day, starting at the top of the house and working down. Attic bedrooms not used for years, servants’ rooms, family rooms, the study, the library, the music room, the drawing room, the kitchens. It was a restless, endless, hopeless search. At night he went out to roam the estate, his legs carrying him tirelessly forward, forward, forward. All the while he fingered the Missus’s needle in his pocket. His finger-tips were a bloody, scabby mess. He missed Isabelle.

‘But you should.“ Isabelle rolled on her side, took the feathery leaf of a fern and let it run over her lips. Then she let it run over the lips of her companion.

She felt the touch of a child’s hand on hers. “Missus sad,” the girl said. It was Emmeline.

By the time the boys returned, shoes and shawl in hand, Isabelle had achieved her purpose. Sybilla, a certain dishevelment apparent in her skirt and petticoat, regarded Charlie with an expression of warm interest.

‘My shoes! I left them in the tree!“ And she’d have sent Roland to fetch them, and Charlie, too, for a shawl of Sybilla’s or some other item.

Of course all amputees hanker after the state of twinness. Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soul mate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair. The Missus was no different from anyone else in this respect. And she had her other half: John-the-dig.

Isabelle would have found some pretext for sending the men away.

‘Yes,“ the Missus whispered. ”We are sad.“

Then there was the vexed issue of food. At mealtimes, more often than not, the children simply could not be found. Emmeline adored eating, but her love of food never translated itself into the discipline of meals. Her hunger could not be accommodated by three meals a day; it was a ravenous, capricious thing. Ten, twenty, fifty times a day, it struck, making urgent demands for food, and when it had been satisfied with a few mouthfuls of something, it departed and food became an irrelevance again. Emmeline’s plumpness was maintained by a pocket constantly full of bread and raisins, a portable feast that she would take a bite from whenever and wherever she fancied. She came to the table only to replenish these pockets before wandering off to loll by the fire or lie in a field somewhere.

Charlie did not follow his sister into the water. He stood, a little farther off, and watched. With his red hair and his pallor, he was a man made for rain and indoor pursuits. His face had gone pink in the sun, and his eyes stung as the sweat from his brow ran into them. But he hardly blinked. He could not bear to take his eyes off Isabelle.

His name was John-the-dig, John Digence to those who didn’t know him. Never a great one for writing, once the school years were past (and they were soon past, for there were not many of them), he took to leaving off the last letters of his surname to save time. The first three letters seemed more than adequate: Did they not say who he was, what he did, more succinctly, more accurately, even, than his full name? And so he used to sign himself John Dig, and to the children he became John-the-dig.

Stunned, Charlie followed Isabelle into the house and to the study. She made straight for the drinks cupboard and took out glasses and a bottle. She poured a generous slug into a glass and drank it in one go, showing the whiteness of her throat, then she refilled her own glass and the second, which she held out to her brother. He stood there, paralyzed and speechless, his hands full with the tightly wrapped bundles. Isabelle’s laughter resounded about his ears again and it was like being too close to an enormous church bell. His head started to spin and tears sprang to his eyes. “Put them down,” Isabelle instructed. “We’ll drink a toast.” He took the glass and inhaled the spirit fumes. “To the future!” He swallowed the brandy in one gulp and coughed at its unfamiliar burn.

The realization came to her one day in winter. For once both girls were indoors; Adeline had been induced by Emmeline to stay in the warmth, by the fire, out of the rain. Ordinarily the Missus lived in a blur of fog; on this day she was blessed by an unexpected clearing in her vision, a new sharpness of hearing, and as she passed the door of the drawing room she caught a fragment of their noise and stopped. Sounds flew backward and forward between them, like tennis balls in some game; sounds that made them smile or laugh or send each other malicious glances. Their voices rose in squeals and swooped down in whispers. From any distance you’d have thought it the lively, free-flowing chatter of ordinary children. But her heart sank. It was no language she had ever heard. Not English, and not the French that she had got used to when George’s Mathilde was alive and that Charlie still used with Isabelle. John was right. They didn’t talk properly.

The game was over. It was time to go home.

‘Good day, Miss Lea.“

‘My story is not only mine; it is the story of Angelfield. Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself. George and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle’s children, Emmeline and Adeline. Their house, their fortunes, their Fears. And their ghost. One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?“

‘Taken! From the garden! In the perambulator!“

Waking, I curled into a ball until the stinging heat on my torso had subsided.

Afterward he sat for hours, twisting the auburn hair that he had found in his hand, twisting and twisting, tighter and tighter around his finger, until it dug deep into his skin, until it was so matted that it could not be unwound. And finally, when the sensation of pain had at last completed its slow journey from his finger to his consciousness, he cried.

When he told her, she was quite hysterical. The Missus, roused from the kitchen by the shrill cries, put her to bed in her old room, and when at last she was quiet again, asked, “These babies… what are they called?”

‘How do you manage not to get lost?“ I wanted to know. ”Is there a trick to it?“

‘Have you thought how similar Isabelle and Sybilla are?“ Isabelle said carelessly. Charlie glared. ”The sounds of the names, I mean. Almost interchangeable, wouldn’t you say?“ She sent a sharp glance at her brother, forcing him to understand. ”Roland and I are going to walk a bit farther. But Sybilla’s tired. You stay with her.“ Isabelle took Roland’s arm.

‘I don’t really have a beau,“ Sybilla admitted.

Charlie was bewildered. But he dug the wire into his arm because he wanted it, and he laughed through the pain.

The garden gave onto fields at the back; a hedge divided the two spaces. Merrily did not know that from behind the hedge two pairs of green eyes were fixed on the perambulator.

‘Run and fetch her husband, somebody.“

Our interview over, he held the door as I left, and as I passed him, he addressed me once more, in an unexpected whisper. “The thirteenth tale… ? I don’t suppose…”

She neared the group. It parted for her as the sea parted for Moses, and she walked straight through it to the lake edge. She stood on a flat rock that jutted out over the water. Someone came toward her with a glass and a bottle, but she waved them away. The sun was bright, it had been a long walk and it would take more than champagne to cool her down.

A young man at the edge of the crowd caught sight of movement up near the house. A girl in a strange outfit accompanied by a lump of a man. There was something about her.

Adeline, shrieking with pleasure as the pram hurtled downhill, shaking her bones and rattling her senses.

‘To the picnic.“

No. Someone had done this.

** *Life went on for the Angelfields, sans parties, sans hunt meetings, sans housemaids and sans most of the things that people of their class took for granted in those days. They turned their backs on their neighbors, allowed their estate to be managed by the tenants, and depended on the goodwill and honesty of the Missus and the gardener for those day-today transactions with the world that were necessary for survival.

In the years after George Angelfield lost his wife, when the number of staff diminished so dramatically, John-the-dig stayed on. Gardeners left and were not replaced. When he was still a young man he became, by default, head gardener, though he was also the only gardener. The workload was enormous; his employer took no interest; he worked without thanks. There were other jobs, other gardens. He would have been offered any job he had applied for—you only had to see him to trust him. But he never left Angelfield. How could he? Working in the topiary garden, putting his shears into their leather sheath when the light began to fade, he didn’t need to reflect that the trees he was pruning were the very same trees that his great-grandfather had planted, that the routines and motions of his work were the same ones that three generations of his family had done before him. All this was too deeply known to require thought. He could take it for granted. Like his trees, he was rooted to Angelfield.

There was nothing particularly cold, particularly inhuman about their gaze. It was just the way children look at inanimate moving objects. But it froze the Missus to the core. For it was exactly the same as the way they looked at her, when she scolded, chided or exhorted.

I was not sure what to make of this. Before I could examine my thoughts, the doctor was continuing. “I understand you are going away…”

‘It is only that she wants you to understand that time is of the essence.“

With the coming of the baby Isabelle, all this changed. Mamma was gone, and Papa as good as, too busy with his little Isabelle to concern himself with hysterical reports from housemaids about mice roasted with the Sunday joint or pins pressed by malicious hands deep into the soap. Charlie was free to do as he pleased, and what pleased him was removing floorboards at the top of the attic stairs and watching the housemaids tumble down and sprain their ankles.

And then, still not expecting to be heeded, “Why did you do it? Oh, why did you do it? You have broken his heart.”

They had a name for it. It was the voom.

I heard the door open. Neither he nor Judith spoke a word, and he disappeared inside the house.

He was a colorful man. Blue eyes like pieces of blue glass with the sun behind. White hair that grew straight up on top of his head, like plants reaching for the sun. And cheeks that went bright pink with exertion when he was digging. No one could dig like him. He had a special way of gardening, with the phases of the moon: planting when the moon was waxing, measuring time by its cycles. In the evening, he pored over tables of figures, calculating the best time for everything. His great-grandfather gardened like that, and his grandfather and his father. They maintained the knowledge.

‘Good. Now, where’s Pa?“

‘Oh Dig! I know. I know.“

Turning a corner, I came across the reticent, bearded man who had driven me from the station. “Maurice is what they call me,” he said, reluctantly introducing himself.

Sybilla, roused unwillingly from her incomplete rapture, was slow catch on. “For the tickling,” Isabelle had to explain. “It’s much better with a beau.”

From the somewhat thick ankle the green plume found its way to a distinctly chunky knee. An adenoidal murmur escaped from between Sybilla’s lips, though she did not stir until the fronds came to the very top of her legs, and she did not sigh until Isabelle replaced the greenery with her own tender fingers.

Charlie could get his own way with Isabelle at home—sometimes— by hurting her, but in public he didn’t dare, and so he buckled under.

Isabelle stood up and went to the door. “Where are you going?”

George Angelfield never saw anyone, hence he was never offered financial tips. When his lawyer sent him recommendations, he ignored them, and when his bank sent him letters, he did not write back. As a consequence of this, the Angelfield money, instead of expending itself chasing one deal after another, lounged in its bank vault and grew fat.

They were not a couple in the traditional sense. They were not married; they were not even lovers. A dozen or fifteen years older than he, she was not old enough to be his mother, quite, but was older than he would have expected for a wife. At the time they met, she was of an age when she no longer expected to marry anyone. While he, a man in his prime, expected to marry, but somehow never did. Besides, once he was working with the Missus, drinking tea with her every morning and sitting at the kitchen table to eat her food every evening, he fell out of the habit of seeking the company of young women. With a bit more imagination they might have been able to leap the bounds of their own expectations; they might have recognized their feelings for what they were: love of the deepest and most respectful kind. In another day, another culture, he might have asked her to be his wife and she might have said yes. At the very least, one can imagine that some Friday night after their fish and mash, after their fruit pie and custard, he might have taken her hand—or she his—and they might have led each other in bashful silence to one or other of their beds. But the thought never entered their heads. So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.

Emmeline knelt. Inside the crushed cavity of the carriage, all was dark.

That night I had a dream.

Her sister was quite different. Adeline was made like a piece of wire with knots for knees and elbows. Her fuel was not the same as that of other mortals. Meals were not for her. No one ever saw her eat; like the wheel of perpetual motion she was a closed circuit, running on energy provided from some miraculous inner source. But the wheel that spins eternally is a myth, and when the Missus noticed in the morning an empty plate where there had been a slice of gammon the night before, or a loaf of bread with a chunk missing, she guessed where they had gone and sighed. Why wouldn’t her girls eat food off a plate, like normal children?

He noticed that she had changed her clothes. “What do you look like that for?” he said. “You look stupid.”

A familiar figure stepped down from the car—and his heart stood still.

The shock of understanding froze her there in the doorway. And as sometimes happens, one illumination opened the door to another. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed and, as always, the mechanism under glass sent a little bird out of a cage to flap a mechanical circuit before reentering the cage on the other side. As soon as the girls heard the first chime, they looked up at the clock. Two pairs of wide green eyes watched, unblinking, as the bird labored around the inside of the bell, wings up, wings down, wings up, wings down.

When he raised his eyes from the babies, he saw the tears that misted her round brown eyes.

If anyone missed the servants it was Charlie. Without them he was lost for subjects for his experiments. When he was scouting around for someone to hurt, his eye fell, as it was bound sooner or later to do, on his sister.

He pulled her harder.

At her normal pace and in her normal manner, the Missus came downstairs to hear what had happened.

He was aghast at himself and at her. He turned away from her in silence and she left the room.

The Missus closed the door and went downstairs. This was a breakthrough. It was communication, and it was the beginning, perhaps, of something greater than that. Was it possible that one day the girl might understand?

It is a tribute to her goodness that she didn’t find them monstrous. Instead, she felt sorry for them.

‘You haven’t even seen them, have you?“ she asked.

‘So soon? I thought we might go for a walk. With Roland and Sybilla.“ She smiled graciously at Roland’s sister, and Sybilla, surprised at the unexpected kindness, beamed back.

‘But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you thinking. What are the sources? Where does the informationcome from? Well, where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants, of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I earned it all directly from her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she sat cleaning the silverware, and seem o forget my presence as she spoke. She frowned as she remembered village rumors and local gossip. Events and conversations and scenes rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over the kitchen table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas unsuitable for a child—unsuitable in particular for me—then suddenly she would remember I was there, break off her account mid-sentence and start rubbing the cutlery vigorously, as if to erase the past altogether. But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children. I pieced the story together another way. When the Missus talked with the gardener over their morning tea, I learned to interpret the sudden silences that punctuated seemingly innocent conversations. Without appearing to notice anything, I saw the silent glances that certain words provoked between them. And when they thought they were alone and could talk privately… they were not in fact alone. In this way I understood the story of my origins. And later, when the Missus was no longer the woman she used to be, when age confused her and released her tongue, then her meanderings confirmed the story I had spent years divining. It is this story—the one that came to me in hints, glances and silences—I am going to translate into words for you now.“

At first the pram went slowly. The ground was rough, and the slope, up here, was slight. But then the pram picked up speed. The black carriage flashed in the late sun as the wheels turned. Faster and faster, until the spokes became a blur and then not even a blur. The incline became steeper, and the bumps in the ground caused the pram to shake from side to side and threaten to take off.

She gestured at her library shelves.

‘I haven’t,“ said Isabelle. ”It’s just that you can’t feel it through our dress.“ And she pulled up the hem of Sybilla’s dress and played the fronds along her ankles. ”Better?“

As I entered the room, the man I had already seen arriving at the house rose to his feet. I am no good at shaking hands, so I was glad when he seemed to decide not to offer me his, but it left us at a loss to find some other way to start.

When Charlie approached her, Isabelle had a young man’s jacket arranged around her shoulders and the young man himself in the palm of her hand. Not far off a girl loitered, uncertain whether her presence was wanted. Though she was plump, plain and female, the resemblance she nonetheless bore to the young man made it clear she was his sister.

But eventually the inconvenience of the incursions won ground over the thrill of ghost talk, and the women grew angry. On several occasions they cornered the girls red-handed and shouted. Anger pulled their faces all out of shape, and their mouths opened and closed so quickly, it made the girls laugh. The women didn’t understand why the girls were laughing. They didn’t know it was the speed and jumble of the words pouring from their own mouths that had bewildered the twins. They thought it was pure devilment and shouted even more. For a time the twins stayed to watch the spectacle of the villagers’ anger, then they turned their backs and walked off.

At last they came to the end of the fields and the house was in sight. But instead of making directly for it they turned toward the slopes of the deer park. They wanted to play. When they had pushed the pram to the top of the longest slope with their indefatigable energy, they set it in position. They lifted out the baby and put it on the ground, and Adeline heaved herself into the carriage. Chin on knees, holding on to the sides, she was white-faced. At a signal from her eyes, Emmeline gave the pram the most powerful push she could manage.

In the dark, my fingers closed around a ghost pencil and twitched in response to the questions that penetrated my drowsiness. I wondered about the secret tattoo Charlie bore inside his body, his sister’s name etched onto his bone. How long would the inscription have remained? Could a living bone mend itself? Or was it with him till he died? In his coffin, underground, as his flesh rotted away from the bone, was the name Isabelle revealed to the darkness? Roland March, the dead husband, so soon forgotten… Isabelle and Charlie. Charlie and Isabelle. Who was the twins’ father? And behind my thoughts, the scar on Miss Winter’s palm rose into view. The letter Q for question, seared into human flesh.

And if, and if, and if. Such thinking is pointless. Isabelle was as Isabelle was, and that is all there is to say about the matter.

He grabbed her by the arm, dug his fingers in and pulled her toward the library.

MERRILY AND THE PERAMBULATORMiss Winter’s house was so isolated, and the life of its inhabitants so solitary, that I was surprised during my first week there to hear a vehicle arriving on the gravel at the front of the house. Peering from the library window, I saw the door of a large black car swing open and caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man. He disappeared into the porch and I heard the brief ring of the bell.

But when, two and a half decades later, Isabelle left home for the second time, people in the village looked back and remembered the endlessness of the rain on the day of her birth. Some remembered as if it was yesterday that the doctor was late, delayed by the floods caused by the river having burst its banks. Others recalled beyond the shadow of a doubt that the cord had been wrapped round the baby’s neck, almost strangling her before she could be born. Yes, it was a difficult birth, all right, for on the stroke of six, just as the baby was born and the doctor rang the bell, hadn’t the mother passed away, out of this world and into the next? So if the weather had been fine, and the doctor had been earlier, and if the cord had not deprived the child of oxygen, and if the mother had not died…

I ignored her question. “Three true things that I could check. You gave me your word.”

How many hours later was it that he found himself with her again? It seemed an eternity. Enlivened by Isabelle’s presence the picnic went on much longer than anybody had expected, and yet it seemed to the other guests to have passed in a flash, and they would all have stayed longer if they could. The party broke up with consoling thoughts of other picnics to come, a round of promised invitations and damp kisses.

What Charlie was after was a victim, and his sister, walking behind him, smaller, younger and weaker, must have seemed ideal. But she was odd and she was clever, and things did not turn out exactly as he expected. Charlie pulled his sister’s sleeve up and drew a piece of wire, orange with rust, along the white inside of her forearm. She stared at the red beads of blood that were welling up along the livid line, then turned her gaze upon him. Her green eyes were wide with surprise and something like pleasure. When she put out her hand for the wire he gave it to her automatically. She pulled up her other sleeve, punctured the skin and with application drew the wire down almost to her wrist. Her cut was deeper than the one he had given her, and the blood rose up at once and trickled. She gave a sigh of satisfaction as she looked at it and then licked the blood away. Then she offered the wire back to him and motioned to him to pull up his sleeve.

Housekeeper and gardener, each with a hand on the crib, watched, until the Missus turned a glad and tender face to the gardener and spoke again.

Instead of a victim Charlie had found himself the strangest of conspirators.

‘If she is telling me the truth, then I am her biographer. Otherwise I am just an amanuensis.“

At his death, his shears passed into the hands of his son and, decades later, his grandson. Then, when this grandson died, it was John-the-dig, who had finished his apprenticeship at a large garden some thirty miles away, who came home to take on the job that had to be his. Although he was only the undergardener, the topiary had been his responsibility from the very beginning. How could it be otherwise? He picked up the shears, their wooden handles worn to shape by his father’s hand, and felt his fingers fit the grooves. He was home.

George Angelfield’s adoration of his daughter persisted through all the trials a child can inflict on a parent. When she started to talk, he discovered her to be preternaturally gifted, a veritable Oracle, and he began to consult her on everything, until the household came to be run according to the caprices of a three-year-old child.

And then a growing hubbub: “What is it? What’s happened?”

‘How long?“ I asked, when his explanation came to an end.

He frowned.

Her voice seemed to slip away from her, and she stopped, surprised. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious.

Miss Winter cleared her throat, preparing to start.

The child spoke again. “John-the-dig sad.”

Perhaps it was her looks that made her father love her. Charlie, the neglected older child, nine years Isabelle’s senior, was his father’s son: a lumpen, pasty, carrot-topped boy, with heavy feet and a slow expression. But Isabelle inherited her looks from both her parents. The ginger hair shared by her father and brother was burnished in the girl child to a rich, glossy auburn. In her, the pale Angelfield complexion was stretched over fine French bones. She had the better chin from the father’s side, and the better mouth from the mother’s. She had Mathilde’s slanting eyes and long lashes, but when they lifted, it was to reveal the astonishing emerald irises that were the emblem of the Angelfields. She was, physically at least, perfection itself.

Charlie was absent that day and did not return home until midnight. Finding Isabelle’s room empty he wandered through the house, knowing by some sixth sense that disaster had struck. Not finding his sister, he went to his father’s study. One look at the gray-faced man told him everything. Father and son regarded each other for a moment, but the fact that their loss was shared did not unite them. There was nothing they could do for each other.

‘Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.“

By the time Isabelle was five the household had shrunk to George Angelfield, the two children, the Missus, the gardener and the gamekeeper. The dog was dead, and the cats, fearful of Charlie, kept outdoors, taking refuge in the garden shed when the weather turned cold. If George Angelfield noticed their isolation, their domestic squalor, he did not regret it. He had Isabelle; he was happy.

And if not the son for their Sybilla, then why not the girl for Roland? thought the wife. She must be reaching a marriageable age by now. And the father was known to dote on her: She would not come empty-handed.

George Angelfield forgot about the world, and for a time the world forgot about him. And then they remembered him. It was to do with money.

Merrily emerged one day from under the back porch with a basket of washing under one arm, and the perambulator wasn’t there. She halted abruptly. Her mouth opened and her hands came up to her cheeks; the basket tumbled into the flower bed, tipping collars and socks onto the wallflowers. Merrily never looked once toward the fence and the brambles. She turned her head left and right as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, left and right, left and right, left and right, all the time with the panic building up inside her, and in the end she let out a shriek, a high-pitched noise that rose into the blue sky as if it could rend it in two.

‘It is Miss Winter, actually, who has asked me to see you. She wants me to make sure you are fully aware of her state of health.“ I see.

‘No!“

It came again, the abrupt loss of voice.

His rough hand reached out across the crib. She wiped her foolishness away and, smiling, put her small, plump hand in his. He felt the wetness of her tears pressed against his own fingers.

They don’t realize that I am alive, she thought. They don’t know that anyone is alive but themselves.

Before she put the twins to bed the Missus dressed the cuts on their hands from the saw and the shears. “Don’t touch the things in John’s shed,” she grumbled. “They’re sharp; they’ll hurt you.”

The twins did not appear that afternoon, and the Missus did not go to find them. When they turned up in the evening, John was still in his chair, white and haggard. He flinched at the sight of them. Curious and indifferent, their green eyes passed over his face just as they had passed over the drawing room clock.

Later that day, Miss Winter told me the story of Merrily and the perambulator.

I was tired. A strange bed in a strange place, and I had woken with a dull, atonic tune ringing in my head. “Start where you like,” I said.

Money talks. Word got out.

He nodded.

‘She has said nothing about it,“ I said. ”Though even if she had, I would not be at liberty to tell you.“

I saw him again the next day. I was in the garden, perhaps ten feet from the front porch, when I heard the crackle of tires on gravel. I stood still, retreated inside myself. To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see. The man did not see me.

‘Look.“ Isabelle turned to the parcels he had placed on the study desk, pulled the soft wrapping away, and stood back so that he could see. Slowly he turned his head and looked. The parcels were babies. Two babies. Twins. He blinked. Registered dimly that some kind of response was called for, but didn’t know what he was supposed to say or do.

At nine o’clock the next morning Miss Winter sent for me and I went to her in the library.

The way they talked, for instance. She would see them through the kitchen window, a blurred pair of forms whose mouths appeared to be moving nineteen to the dozen. As they approached the house, she caught fragments of the buzz of speech. And then they came in. Silent. “Speak up!” she was always telling them. But she was going deaf and they were shy; their chat was for themselves, not for others. “Don’t be silly,” she told Dig when he told her the girls couldn’t speak properly. “There’s no stopping them, when they get going.”

‘That one can be Adeline,“ the Missus whispered. She took a striped tea towel from a drawer and cut strips from it. She plaited the strips into two lengths, tied the red one around the wrist of the baby who had stirred, the white one around the wrist of the baby who had not.

There was a woman in the village called Mary Jameson. She was the wife of Fred Jameson, one of the farm laborers, and she lived with her husband and his parents in one of the cottages. The couple were newly-weds, and before her marriage the woman had been called Mary Leigh, which explains the name the twins invented for her in their own language: They called her Merrily, and it was a good name for her. Sometimes she would go and meet her husband from the fields and they would sit in the shelter of a hedge at the end of the day, while he had a cigarette. He was a tall brown man with big feet and he used to put his arm around her waist and tickle her and blow down the front of her dress to make her laugh. She tried not to laugh, to tease him, but she wanted to laugh really, and eventually she always did.

When it became apparent to George Angelfield that Isabelle was gone, he went into his library and locked the door. He refused food, he refused visitors. There were only the vicar and the doctor to come calling now, and both of them got short shrift. “Tell your God he can go to hell!” and “Let a wounded animal die in peace, won’t you!” was the limit of their welcome.

‘I need my books…“

‘Not sure?“

The household adapted to the unusual state of affairs. They lived with the unspoken agreement to behave as though it were entirely normal for a father to dote on his baby daughter. It was not to be considered unmanly, ungentlemanly or ridiculous that he kept her constantly by him.

Charlie lived like this through September, October, November, December, January and February, and at the beginning of March, Isabelle returned.

‘Miss Lea, you seem to think that we have all the time in the world. Perhaps you do, but let me remind you, I am a busy woman. I do not want to hear any more talk of going away. Let that be the end of it.“

Isabelle knew what she wanted. Time alone with Roland. But to get it, she had to be rid of her brother.

One of the wheels struck against a piece of rock sticking out from the soil. There was a spark as metal screeched against stone, and the pram suddenly was speeding not downhill but through the air, flying into the sun, wheels upward. It traced a serene curve against the blue of the sky, until the moment when the ground heaved up violently to snatch it, and there came the sickening sound of something breaking. After the echo of Adeline’s exhilaration reverberating in the sky, everything was suddenly very quiet.

He turned to Sybilla.

And once the words were out they sprang into action. Mr. Griffin jumped over three fences in a flash, took Merrily by the arm and led her around to the front of her house, saying, “Gone? Where’s he gone?” Granny Stokes disappeared from her back porch and a second later her voice floated in the air from the front garden, calling out for help.

When he didn’t come in for lunch, the Missus, worried, went to find him. Reaching the topiary garden she raised a hand to her mouth in horror, then, gripping her apron, walked on with a new urgency.

He looked at me and seemed to wonder, then made up his mind. “Since you have been here, she seems to be managing a little better. She says it is the anesthetic qualities of storytelling.”

What were his feelings that day, when he went into his garden and found it ravaged? Great gashes in the sides of the yews, exposing the brown wood of their hearts. The mop-heads decapitated, their spherical tops lying at their feet. The perfect balance of the pyramids now lopsided, the cones hacked about, the top hats chopped into and left in tatters. He stared at the long branches, still green, still fresh, that were strewn on the lawn. Their slow shriveling, their curling desiccation, their dying was yet to come.

‘Which one is which?“ he asked.

The name of the Missus was Mrs. Dunne, but to the children of the family she had always been the Missus, and she had been in the house it seemed forever. This was a rarity: Staff came and went quickly at Angelfield, and since departures were slightly more frequent than arrivals, he day came when she was the only indoors servant remaining. Technically the housekeeper, in reality she did everything. She scrubbed pots and laid fires like an underhousemaid; when it was time to make a meal he was cook and when it was time to serve it she was butler. Yet by the time the twins were born she was growing old. Her hearing was poor, her sight poorer, and although she didn’t like to admit it, there was much she couldn’t manage.

As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself. Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter’s story, plotting its landscape, measuring its contours and, on tiptoe at its borers, peering at the mysteries beyond its bounds.

‘What’s that?“ said Charlie.

Visitors were rare, and as the household descended from eccentricity into chaos, they became rarer. Then the servants began to complain among themselves. The butler had left before the child was two. Cook put up for a year longer with the irregular mealtimes that the child demanded, then the day came when she, too, handed in her notice. When she left she took the kitchen girl with her, and in the end it was left to the Missus to ensure the provision of cake and jelly at odd hours. The housemaids felt under no obligation to occupy themselves with chores: Not unreasonably they believed that their small salaries barely compensated them for the cuts and bruises, sprained ankles and stomach upsets they incurred owing to Charlie’s sadistic experiments. They left and were replaced by a succession of temporary help, none of whom lasted long. Finally even the temporary help was dispensed with.

‘March,“ Isabelle responded.

There stood my grandfather with his baby in his arms.

‘I’m not sure.“

Once in a while, placatory, she gave in to his entreaties. For an hour or two she lent herself to his will, allowing him to enjoy the illusion that she was back for good and that everything between them was as it always had been. But it was an illusion, as Charlie soon learned, and her renewed absence after these interludes was all the more agonizing.

‘I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born… Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

A few days later they returned and called the gardener to break the door down. George Angelfield was dead. A brief examination was enough to establish that the man had died from septicemia, caused by the circle of human hair that was deeply embedded in the flesh of his ring finger.

‘I’m afraid I must. I was only expecting to be here for a few days initially, and I’ve been here for over a week. I don’t have enough things with me for a prolonged stay.“

Mr. Griffin looked up from his vegetable plot and came to the fence, three doors down. Next door old Granny Stokes frowned at the kitchen sink and came out onto her porch. Astounded, they looked at Merrily, wondering whether their laughing neighbor was really capable of making such a sound, and she looked wildly back at them, dumbstruck, as though her cry had used up a lifetime’s supply of words.

Maurice, I could tell, did not welcome my presence in the garden. I didn’t mind, being of a solitary nature myself. After that I made a point, whenever I saw him, of taking a path in the opposite direction, and I think he shared my discretion, for once or twice, catching a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, I glanced up to see Maurice backing out of an entrance or making a sudden, divergent turn. In this way we successfully left each other in peace. There was ample room for us to avoid each other without any sense of constraint.

Seeing his servants standing idly about, he glared at them and his voice boomed out: “Is a baby left to starve in this house?”

But what about Charlie, the baby’s brother? He was a slow-witted boy whose mind turned in circles around his few obsessions and preoccupations, but who could not be prevailed upon to learn new ideas or think logically. He ignored the baby and welcomed the changes her arrival introduced to the household. Before Isabelle there had been two parents to whom the Missus might report instances of bad behavior, two parents whose reactions were impossible to foresee. His mother had been an inconsistent disciplinarian; sometimes having him spanked for bad behavior, at other times merely laughing. His father, although stern, was distracted, and the punishments he intended were frequently forgotten. Catching sight of the boy, though, he would have the vague sense that there might be some misdemeanor to correct, and he would spank the child, thinking that if it wasn’t actually owed it would do in advance for next time. This taught the boy a good lesson: He stayed out of the way of his father.

The young people at the lakeside made a pretty picture from a distance, in their summer frocks and white shirts. The glasses they held were filled with a liquid that sparkled in the sunlight, and the grass at their feet looked soft enough to go barefoot. In reality, the picnickers were sweltering beneath their clothes, the champagne was warm, and if anyone had thought to take their shoes off they would have had to walk through goose droppings. Still, they were willing to feign jollity, in the hope that their pretense would encourage the real thing.

Her eyes traveled to a corner of the ceiling and she smiled. Without lifting her gaze from the dark corner, she told him she was leaving.

An hour later, hearing her come down the stairs, he went to the doorway. “Come to the library with me,” he asked her.

‘Is that why she has asked you to speak to me?“

In the end the Missus got fed up with it all. She picked up baby Isabelle from the crib in the nursery and took her downstairs. She strode past the butler, ignoring his protestations, and went into the library without knocking. Up to the desk she marched, and she plumped the baby down in George Angelfield’s arms without a word. Then she turned her back and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

‘To whom?“ To you.

At the back everything was quiet. Merrily’s washing bobbed about in the lazy sunshine, Mr. Griffin’s spade rested tranquilly in the well-turned soil, Emmeline caressed the silver spokes in blind, quiet ecstasy and Adeline kicked her out of the way so that they could get the thing moving.

‘A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really your own but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me, for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In act, when I was born I was no more than a subplot.

Emmeline ran down the hill. The wheel facing the sky was buckled and half wrenched off; the other was still turning, slowly, all its urgency lost.

He let her go. When she said no like that, he knew it meant no. He had found that out in the past. She could be in a bad temper for days.

I bit my lip and for a moment felt cowed. But I rallied. “Remember our agreement? Three true things? I need to do some checking.”

Later that day I went to Miss Winter and she told me more about the household at Angelfield.

“No.”

The infant, a white scrap of fury, was motherless. And at the beginning, to all intents and purposes, it looked like she’d be fatherless, too. For her father, George Angelfield, fell into a decline. He locked himself in the library and refused point-blank to come out. This might seem excessive; ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield was an odd fellow, and there it was. He had loved his wife—

‘You remember our agreement,“ she began, as I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire. ”Beginnings, middles and endings, all in the correct order. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions.“

She opened the door to the kitchen and went in to rejoin John in his despair.

Merrily was not the only one who was devoted to the perambulator. Emmeline and Adeline were besotted.

‘Maurice can take you to town to buy whatever you need.“

She turned her back on him and opened the front door.

‘No.“

In his otherwise impassive face I caught a flash of the feverish impatience of the reader.

And she turned from the doorway and shuffled away.

She hesitated. “You don’t believe me?”

His eyes cooled and a tremor ran from his mouth to the corner of his nose.

When he turned back to where Isabelle had been, she was already gone. Only her laughter came back to him from the darkness, her laughter and the low rumble of Roland’s voice. He would get his own back later. He would. Time and time again she would pay for this.

But there was movement. A pair of green eyes staring back.

When their husbands came home from the fields, the women would complain, say something had to be done, and the men would say, “You’re forgetting they’re the children of the big house.” And the women said in return, “Big house or no, children didn’t ought to be allowed to run riot the way them two girls do. It’s not right. Something’s got to be done.” And the men would sit quiet over their plates of potato and meat and shake their heads and nothing would be done.

‘Of course,“ she said, very matter-of-fact, ”it’s a beau you need really.“

It would have been something like this:

‘Shadow,“ she absently replied.

The babies slept, too. In the kitchen, the Missus and the gardener Dent over their smooth, pale faces and talked in low voices.

For a start there was the fighting. Adeline would fly at her sister, fists and feet flailing, yanking at hair and landing blows wherever she could. She chased her sister wielding red-hot coals in the fire tongs. The Missus hardly knew what worried her more: Adeline’s persistent and merciless aggression, or Emmeline’s constant, ungrudging acceptance of it. For Emmeline, though she pleaded with her sister to stop tormenting her, never once retaliated. Instead, she bowed her head passively and waited for the blows that rained down on her shoulders and back to stop. The Missus had never once known Emmeline to raise a hand against Adeline. She had the goodness of two children in her, and Adeline the wickedness of two. In a way, the Missus thought, it made sense.

Stunned, with a trembling that seemed to pass from his heart to his legs and into the ground beneath his feet, he tried to understand what had happened. Was it some bolt from the sky that had picked out his garden for destruction? But what freak storm is it that strikes in silence?

Turning a corner he found the proof: abandoned on the dewy grass, blades agape, the large shears and next to them the saw.

Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.

This plunge into the water was another thing people remembered years later, after she left home for the second time. They remembered, and shook their heads in a mix of pity and condemnation. The girl had had it in her all that time. But on the day it was put down to sheer high spirits, and people were grateful to her. Single-handedly Isabelle brought the whole party to life.

He failed to respond to his companion’s joke; the companion looked to see what had caught his attention and fell silent in turn. A group of young women, eternally alert to the doings of young men even when the young men are behind their backs, turned to see what had caused the sudden silence. And there followed a sort of ripple effect, whereby the entire party turned to face the newcomers, and seeing them, were struck dumb.

At last in bed, I turned out the light and closed my eyes. I could still feel the place on the pad of my finger where the pencil had made a groove in my skin. In my right shoulder, a knot from writing was not yet ready to untie itself. Though it was dark, and though my eyes were closed, all I could see was a sheet of paper, lines of my own handwriting with wide margins. The right-hand margin drew my attention. Unmarked, pristine, it glowed white, made my eyes sting. It was the column I reserved for my own comments, notes and questions.

Isabelle’s sharp eyes did not once leave the face of the older girl, and the moment the girl’s eyelids gave the first hint of a flicker, she drew her hand away.

Aside from the story itself, Miss Winter spoke little in our meetings. In the early days I used to say “How are you?” on arriving in the library, but she said only, “Fine. How are you?” with a bad-tempered edge to her voice as though I was a fool for asking. I never answered her question, and she didn’t expect me to, so the exchanges soon came to an end. I would sidle in, exactly a minute early, take my place in the chair on the other side of the fire and take my notebook out of my bag. Then, with no preamble at all, she would pick up her story wherever she had left off. The end of these sessions was not governed by the clock. Sometimes Miss Winter would speak until she reached a natural break at the end of an episode. She would pronounce the last words, and the cessation of her voice had a finality about it that was unmistakable. It was followed by a silence as unambiguous as the white space at the end of a chapter. I would make a last note in my book, close the cover, gather my things together and take my leave. At other times, though, she would break off unexpectedly, in the middle of a scene, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and I would look up to see her white face tightly drawn into a mask of endurance. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked, the first time I saw her like this. But she just closed her eyes and gestured for me to go. When she finished telling me the story of Merrily and the perambulator, I put my pencil and notebook into my bag and, standing up, said, “I shall be going away for a few days.”

Isabelle did it again. Sybilla smiled, eyes half shut, and did not stop her when Isabelle ran the soft leaf down her neck and around the neckline of her dress, paying special attention to the swell of the breasts. Sybilla emitted a semi-nasal giggle.

What had he done?