and her children, wishing only to grieve.
'What about Christian names?'
'Adeline and Emmeline,' said Isabelle sleepily.
'And how do you tell them apart?'
But the child-widow was sleeping already. And as she dreamed in her old bed, her escapade and her husband 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-but as mere spirits of the house.
The babies slept, too. In the kitchen, the Missus and the gardener bent over their smooth, pale faces and talked in low voices.
'Which one is which?' he asked.
'I don't know.'
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.
'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.
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.
'Two babies. Honestly, Dig. At our age!' When he raised his eyes from the babies, he saw the tears that misted her round brown eyes.
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.
Beneath the arch of their clasped hands, beneath the trembling line of their gaze, the babies were dreaming.
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.
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.
'What's his name?' I had asked.
'Shadow,' she absently replied.
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.
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
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 borders, peering at the mysteries beyond its bounds.
GARDENS
I 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.
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-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.
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.
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.
'How do you manage not to get lost?' I wanted to know. 'Is there a trick to it?'
'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.
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.
Later that day I went to Miss Winter and she told me more about the household at Angelfield.
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, the 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 she 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.
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
