The thirteenth tale (53 page)

I diverged from the gravel pathway to cross the snow-covered
lawn toward the old deer park and the woods. The dark branches were heavy with
snow, which sometimes fell in soft swathes at my passing. I came at last to the
vantage point on the slope. You can see everything from there. The church and
its graveyard, the wreaths of flowers bright against the snow. The lodge gates,
chalk-white against the blue sky. The coach house, denuded of its shroud of
thorns. Only the house had gone, and it had gone completely. The men in their
yellow hats had reduced the past to a blank page. We had reached tipping point.
It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today
perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The
past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

I took the envelope from my bag. I had been waiting. For the
right time. The right place.

The letters on the envelope were curiously misformed. The uneven
strokes either faded into nothing or else were engraved into the paper. There
was no sense of flow: Each letter gave the impression of having been completed
individually, at great cost, the next undertaken as a new and daunting
enterprise. It was like the hand of a child or a very old person. It was
addressed to Miss Margaret Lea.

I slit open the flap. I drew out the contents. And I sat on a
felled tree to read it, because I never read standing up.

Dear Margaret,

Here is the piece I told you about.

I have tried to finish it, and find that I cannot. And so this
story that the world has made so much fuss about must do as it is. It is a
flimsy thing: something of nothing. Do with it what you will.

As for titles, the one that springs to my mind is “Cinderella’s
Child, ” but I know quite enough about readers to understand that whatever I
might choose to call it, it will only ever go by one title in the world, and it
won’t be mine.

There was no signature. No name.

But there was a story.

It was the story of Cinderella, like I’d never read it before.
Laconic, hard and angry. Miss Winter’s sentences were shards of glass,
brilliant and lethal.

Picture this, the story begins. A boy and a girl; one rich, one
poor. Most often it’s the girl who’s got no gold and that’s how it is in the
story I’m telling. There didn’t have to be a ball. A walk in the woods was
enough for these two to stumble into each other’s paths. Once upon a time there
was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is
about me of those other times. Our girl’s pumpkin is just a pumpkin, and she
crawls home after midnight, blood on her petticoats, violated. There will be a
footman at the door with moleskin slippers tomorrow. She knows that already.
She’s not stupid. She is pregnant, though.

In the rest of the story, Cinderella gives birth to a girl,
raises her in poverty and filth, abandons her after a few years in the grounds
of the house owned by her violator. The story ends abruptly.

Halfway along a path in a garden she has never been to before,
cold and hungry, the child suddenly realises she is alone. Behind her is the
garden door that leads into the forest. It remains ajar. Is her mother behind
it still? Ahead of her is a shed that, to her child’s mind, has the look of a
little house. A place she might shelter. Who knows, there might even be
something to eat.

The garden door? Or the little house?

Door? Or house?

The child hesitates.

She hesitates…

And the story ends there.

Miss Winter’s earliest memory? Or just a story? The story
invented by an imaginative child to fill the space where her mother ought to
have been?

The thirteenth tale. The final, the famous, the unfinished
story.

I read the story and grieved.

Gradually my thoughts turned away from Miss Winter and to
myself. She might not be perfect, but at least I had a mother. Was it too late
to make something of ourselves? But that was another story.

I put the envelope in my bag, stood up and brushed the bark dust
from my trousers before heading back to the road.

I was engaged to write the story of Miss Winter’s life, and I
have done it. There is really nothing more I need do in order to fulfill the
terms of the contract. One copy of this document is to be deposited with Mr.
Lomax, who will store it in a bank vault and then arrange for a large amount of
money to be paid to me. Apparently he doesn’t even have to check that the pages
I give him are not blank.

‘She trusted you,“ he told me.

Clearly she did trust me. Her intentions in the contract that I
never read or signed are quite unmistakable. She wanted to tell me the story
before she died; she wanted me to make a record of it. What I did with it after
that was my business. I have told the solicitor about my intentions regarding
Tom and Emma, and we have made an appointment to formalize my wishes in a will
just in case. And that ought to be the end of it.

But I don’t feel I am quite done. I don’t know who or how many
people will eventually read this, but no matter how few they are, no matter how
distant in time from this moment, I feel a responsibility toward them. And
although I have told them all there is to know about Adeline and Emmeline and
the ghost-child, I realize that for some that will not be quite enough. I know
what it is like to finish a book and find oneself wondering, a day or a week
later, what happened to the butcher or who got the diamonds, or whether or not
the dowager was ever reconciled with her niece. I can imagine readers pondering
what became of Judith and Maurice, whether anyone kept up the glorious garden,
who came to live in the house.

And so, in case you are wondering, let me tell you. Judith and
Maurice stayed on. The house was not sold; provision had been made in Miss
Winter’s will for the house and garden to be converted into a kind of literary
museum. Of course it is the garden that has real value (“an unsuspected gem,”
an early horticultural review has called it), but Miss Winter realized that it
was her reputation for storytelling more than her gardening skill that would
draw the crowds. And so there are to be tours of the rooms, a teashop, and a
bookshop. Coaches that bring tourists to the Bronte museum can come afterward
to “Vida Winter’s Secret Garden.” Judith will continue as housekeeper, and
Maurice as head gardener. Their first job, before the conversion can begin, is
to clear Emmeline’s rooms. These will not be visited, for there will be nothing
to see.

And Hester. Now, this will surprise you; it certainly surprised
me. I had a letter from Emmanuel Drake. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten
all about him. Slowly and methodically he continued his searches, and against
all odds, late in the day, he found her. “It was the Italian connection that
threw me off track,” his letter explained, “when your governess had gone the
other way entirely—to America!” For three years Hester had worked as clerical
assistant to an academic neurologist, and when the time was up, guess who came
to join her? Dr. Maudsley! His wife died (nothing more sinister than the flu, I
did check), and within days of the funeral he was on the boat. It was love.
They are both deceased now, but after a long and happy life together. They had
four children, one of whom has written to me, and I have sent the original of
his mother’s diary to him to keep. I doubt he will be able to make out much
more than one word in ten; if he asks me for elucidation, I will tell him that
his mother knew his father here in England, during the time of his father’s
first marriage, but if he does not ask, I will keep my silence. In his letter
to me, he enclosed a list of his parents’ joint publications. They researched
and wrote dozens of highly regarded articles (none on twins, I think they knew
when to call it a day) and published them jointly: Dr. E. and Mrs. H. J.
Maudsley.

H. J.? Hester had a middle name: Josephine.

What else will you want to know? Who looked after the cat? Well,
Shadow came to live with me at the bookshop. He sits on the shelves, anywhere
he can find a space between the books, and when customers come across him
there, he returns their stares with placid equanimity. From time to time he
will sit in the window, but not for long. He is baffled by the street, the
vehicles, the passersby, the buildings opposite. I have shown him the shortcut
via the alley to the river, but he scorns to use it.

‘What do you expect?“ my father says. ”A river is no use to a
Yorkshire cat. It is the moors he is looking for.“

I think he is right. Full of expectation, Shadow jumps up to the
window, looks out, then turns on me a long, disappointed stare.

I don’t like to think that he is homesick.

Dr. Clifton came to my father’s shop—he happened to be visiting
the town, he said, and remembering that my father had a bookshop here, he
thought it worthwhile to call in, though it was something of a long shot, to
see if we had a particular volume on eighteenth-century medicine he was
interested in. As it happened, we did have one, and he and my father chatted
amiably about it at length, until well after closing time. To make up for
keeping us so late he invited us out for a meal. It was very pleasant, and
since he was still in town for another night, my father invited him the next
evening for a meal with the family. In the kitchen my mother told me he was “a
very nice man, Margaret. Very nice.” The next afternoon was his last. We went
for a walk by the river, but this time it was just the two of us, Father being
too busy writing letters to be able to accompany us. I told him the story of
the ghost of Angelfield. He listened closely, and when I had finished, we
continued to walk, slowly and in silence.

‘I remember seeing that treasure box,“ he said eventually. ”How
did it come to escape the fire?“

I stopped in my tracks, wondering. “You know, I never thought to
ask.”

‘You’ll never know now, will you?“

He took my arm and we walked on.

Anyway, returning to my subject, which is Shadow and his
homesickness, when Dr. Clifton visited my father’s shop and saw the cat’s
sadness he proposed to give Shadow a home with him. Shadow would be very happy
back in Yorkshire, I have no doubt. But this offer, kind as it is, has plunged
me into a state of painful perplexity. For I am not sure I can bear to be
parted from him. He, I am sure, would bear my absence with the same composure
with which he accepts Miss Winter’s disappearance, for he is a cat; but being
human, I have grown fond of him and would prefer if at all possible to keep him
near me.

In a letter I betrayed something of these thoughts to Dr.
Clifton; he replies that perhaps we might both go and stay, Shadow and I, for a
holiday. He invites us for a month, in the spring. Anything, he says, may
happen in a month, and by the end of it he thinks it possible that we may have
thought of some way out of the dilemma that suits us all. I cannot help but
think Shadow will get his happy ending yet.

And that is all.

POSTSCRIPTUM

Or nearly all. One thinks something is finished, and then
suddenly it isn’t, quite.

I have had a visitor.

It was Shadow who was first to notice. I was humming as I packed
for our holiday, suitcase open on the bed. Shadow was stepping in and out of
it, toying with the idea of making himself a nest on my socks and cardigans,
when suddenly he stopped, all intent, and stared toward the door behind me.

She came not as a golden angel, nor as the cloaked specter of
death. She was like me: a tallish, thin, brown-haired woman you would not
notice if she passed you in the street.

There were a hundred, a thousand things I thought I would want
to ask her, but I was so overcome I could hardly even speak her name. She
stepped toward me, put her arms around me and pressed me to her side.

‘Moira,“ I managed to whisper, ”I was beginning to think you
weren’t real.“

But she was real. Her cheek against mine, her arm across my
shoulders, my hand at her waist. Scar to scar we touched, and all my questions
faded as I felt her blood flow with mine, her heart beat with mine. It was a
moment of wonderment, great and calm; and I knew that I remembered this
feeling. It had been locked in me, closed away, and now she had come and
released it. This blissful circuitry. This oneness that had once been ordinary
and was today, now that I had recovered it, miraculous.

She came and we were together.

I understood that she had come to say good-bye. That next time
we met it would be me who went to her. But this next meeting wouldn’t be for a
very long time. There was no rush. She could wait and so could I.

I felt the touch of her fingers on my face as I brushed away her
tears, then, in joy, our fingers found each other and entwined. Her breath on
my cheek, her face in my hair, I buried my nose in the crook of her neck and
inhaled her sweetness.

Such joy.

No matter that she could not stay. She had come. She had come.

I’m not sure how or when she left. I simply realized that she
was no longer there. I sat on the bed, quite calm, quite happy. I felt the
curious sensation of my blood rerouting itself, of my heart recalibrating its
beat for me alone. Touching my scar, she had brought it alive; now, gradually,
it cooled until it felt no different from the rest of my body.