The Thirteenth Tale

Aurelius. I was suddenly conscious of the beating of my heart, and I stretched out my hand, half fearful, half hopeful. The figure eluded me and swam out of view.

'Aurelius?' My voice sounded shaky to my own ears.

'Yes?'

'Are you still there?'

'Ofcourselam.'

His voice was in quite the wrong direction. What had I seen? It was not Aurelius. It must have been an effect of the mist. Afraid of what I might yet see if I waited, I stood still, staring into the aqueous air, willing the figure to appear again.

'Aha! There you are!' boomed a great voice behind me. Aurelius. He clasped my shoulders in his mittened hands as I turned to face him. 'Goodness gracious, Margaret, you're as white as a sheet. Anyone would think you'd seen a ghost!'

We walked together in the garden. In his overcoat, Aurelius seemed even taller and broader than he really was. Beside him, in my mist-gray raincoat, I felt insubstantial.

'How is your book going?'

'It's just notes at the moment. Interviews with Miss Winter. And research.' 'Today is research, is it?' 'Yes.' 'What do you need to know?' 'I just want to take some photographs. I don't think the weather is on my side, though.' 'You'll get to see it properly within the hour. This mist won't last long.' We came to a kind of walkway, lined on each side with cones grown so wide that they almost made a hedge.

'Why aoyou come here, Aurelius?'

We strolled on to the end of the path, then into a space where there seemed to be nothing but mist. When we came to a wall of yew twice as high as Aurelius himself, we followed it. I noticed a sparkling in the grass and on the leaves: The sun had come out. The moisture in the air began to evaporate and the circle of visibility grew wider by the minute. Our wall of yew had led us full circle around an empty space; we had arrived back at the same walkway we had entered by.

When my question seemed so lost in time that I was not even sure I had asked it, Aurelius answered. 'I was born here.'

I stopped abruptly. Aurelius wandered on, unaware of the effect his words had had on me. I half ran a few paces to catch up with him. 'Aurelius!' I took hold of the sleeve of his greatcoat. 'Is it true?

Were you really born here?' 'Yes.' 'When?' He gave a strange, sad smile. 'On my birthday.' Unthinking, I insisted, 'Yes, but when?' 'Sometime in January, probably. Possibly February. Possibly the end of December, even. Sixty years ago, roughly. I'm afraid I don't know any more than that.'

I frowned, remembered what he had told me before about Mrs. Love and not having a mother. But in what circumstances would an adopted child know so little about his original circumstances that he does not even know his own birthday?

'Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?'

'Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.' I was lost for words.

'One does get used to it, I suppose,' he said, and I regretted that he had to comfort me for his own loss. 'Do you really?' He considered me with a curious expression, no doubt wondering how much to tell me. 'No, actually,' he said.

With the slow and heavy steps of invalids, we resumed our walking. The mist was almost gone. The magical shapes of the topiary had lost their charm and looked like the unkempt bushes and hedges they were.

'So it was Mrs. Love who… ' I began. '… found me. Yes.'

'And your parents…'

'No idea.'

'But you know it was here? In this house?'

Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. 'I wouldn't expect other people to understand. I haven't got any proof. But I do know' He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue.

'Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can't explain it.'

I nodded, and Aurelius went on.

'The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs. Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I've been coming ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway-'

His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

'Anyway, the minute I got here I knew. This is home, I said to myself. This is where I come from. There was no doubt about it. I knew.'

With his last words, Aurelius had let the lightness slip, allowed a fervor to creep in. He cleared his throat. 'Obviously I don't expect anyone to believe it. I've no evidence as such. Only a coincidence of dates, and Mrs. Love's vague memory of a smell of smoke-and my own conviction.'

'I believe it,' I said.

Aurelius bit his lip and sent me a wary sideways look.

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.

'I believe you,' I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. 'I've had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can't know. From before you can remember.'

And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant. 'Did you see that, Aurelius?' He followed my gaze to the topiary pyramids and beyond. 'See what? No, I didn't see anything.' It had gone. Or else it had never been there at all. I turned back to Aurelius, but I had lost my nerve. The moment for confidences was gone. ''Haveyou got a birthday?' Aurelius asked. 'Yes. I've got a birthday.' All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years. 'I'll make a note of it, shall I?' he said brightly. 'Then I can send you a card.' I feigned a smile. 'It's coming up soon, actually. ' Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months. 'The nineteenth,' I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpick in his huge hand.

MRS. LOVE TURNS A HEEL

When it started to rain we put our hoods up and made our way hurriedly to the shelter of the church. In the porch we did a little jig to drive the raindrops off our coats, and then went inside. We sat in a pew near the altar and I stared up at the pale, vaulted ceiling until I made myself dizzy. 'Tell me about when you were found,' I said. 'What do you know aboutit?' 'I know what Mrs. Love told me,' he answered. 'I can tell you that.

And of course there's always my inheritance.' 'You have an inheritance?' 'Yes. It's nothing much. Not what people usually mean when they talk about an inheritance, but all the same… In fact, I could show it to you later.' 'That would be nice.' 'Yes… Because I was thinking, nine is a bit too adjacent to breakfast for cake, isn't it?' It was said with a reluctant grimace that turned into a gleam with his next words: 'So I thought, Invite Margaret back for elevenses. Cake and coffee, how does that sound? You could do with feeding up. And I'll show you my inheritance at the same time. What little there is to see.'

I accepted the invitation. Aurelius took his glasses from his pocket and began to polish them absently with a handkerchief. 'Well now.' Slowly he took a deep breath. Slowly he exhaled. 'As it was told to me. Mrs. Love, and her story.'

His face settled into passive neutrality, a sign that, in the way of all storytellers, he was disappearing to make