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.
She had come and she had gone. I would not see her again this side of the grave. My life was my own.
In the suitcase, Shadow was asleep. I put out my hand to stroke him. He opened a cool green eye, regarded me for a moment, then closed it again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to Jo Anson, Gaia Banks, Martyn Bedford, Emily Bestler, Paula Catley, Ross and Colin Catley, Jim Crace, Penny Dolan, Marianne Downie, Mandy Franklin, Anna and Nathan Franklin, Vivien Green, Douglas Gurr, Jenny Jacobs, Caroline le Marechal, Pauline and Jeffrey Setterfield, Christina Shingler, Janet and Bill Whittall, John Wilkes and Jane Wood.
With special thanks to Owen Staley, who has been a friend to this book from the very beginning, and Peter Whittall, to whom The Thirteenth Tale owes its title and a good deal more besides.
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