The Thirteenth Tale

Together we began the little ritual of preparing our desks. We divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through each one, to let the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and watching the long shavings curl and dangle their way to the paper bin below. When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down with the others, but kept hold of it.

"There," I said to her. "Ready for work." She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn't hear what she was saying.

I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews immediately afterward, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from that first meeting, it worked well. Glancing at my notebook from time to time, I filled the center of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter's words, conjuring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her ma

I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any ma

The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.

I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow of my recreation; I returned to my work and picked up the thread as though there had been no interruption.

"One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people," I wrote at last in the middle column, and in the left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand over the closed fist of the damaged one.

I drew a double line under the last line of script, and stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils whose points she had worn and sharpened them one by one.

She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face. First it was a sudden blurring in the center of her forehead, like a blister. Another mark appeared on her cheek, then beneath her eye, on her nose, on her lips. Each new blemish was accompanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew faster and faster. In a few seconds her entire face, it seemed, had decomposed.

But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The long-awaited rain. I opened the window, let my hand be drenched, then wiped the water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.

I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white noise beneath which were the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and snatches of unfamiliar tunes.

AND SO WE BEGAN…

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

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.

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.

"You remember our agreement," she began, as I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire. "Begi

"I shall start at the begi

"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?"

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

"A birth is not really a begi

"But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you thinking. What are the sources? Where does the information come from? Well, where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants, of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I learned it all directly from her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she sat cleaning the silverware, and seem to 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 i

Miss Winter cleared her throat, preparing to start.

"Isabelle Angelfield was odd."

Her voice seemed to slip away from her, and she stopped, surprised. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious. "Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm." It came again, the abrupt loss of voice. 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.