The Thirteenth Tale

The things looked like a pile of discarded junk waiting to be swept into the bin, but he gazed at them with the intensity of a boy staring at a treasure trove. 'These things are my story,' he said. 'These things tell me who I am. It's just a matter of… of understanding them.' His bafflement was intent but resigned. 'I've tried all my life to piece them together. I keep thinking, If only I could find the thread… it would all fall into place. Take that, for instance-'

It was a piece of cloth. Linen, once white, now yellow. I disentangled it from the other objects and smoothed it out. It was embroidered with a pattern of stars and flowers also in white; there were four dainty mother-of-pearl buttons; it was an infant's dress or nightgown. Aurelius's broad fingers hovered over the tiny garment, wanting to touch, not wanting to mark it with flour. The narrow sleeves would just fit over a finger now.

'It's what I was wearing,' Aurelius explained.

It s very old.

'As old as me, I suppose.'

'Older than that, even.'

'Do you think so?'

'Look at the stitching here-and here. It's been mended more than once. And this button doesn't match. Other babies wore this before you.'

His eyes flitted from the scrap of linen to me and back to the cloth, hungry for knowledge. 'And there's this.' He pointed at a page of print. It was torn from a book and riddled with creases. Taking it in my hands I started to read.

'… not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift andpoise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cryof alarm-'

Aurelius took up the phrase and continued, reading not from the page but from memory: '… not soon enough however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. '

Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. 'Jane Eyre, ' I said wonderingly. 'You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It's by

Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.'

'Have you read it?'

'Started to. It was about a little girl. She's lost her family, and so her aunt takes her in. I thought I was on to something with that. Nasty woman, the aunt, not like Mrs. Love at all. This is one of her cousins throwing the book at her, on this page. But later she goes to school, a terrible school, terrible food, but she does make a friend.' He smiled, remembering his reading. 'Only then the friend died.' His face fell. 'And after that… I seemed to lose interest. Didn't read the end. I couldn't see how it fitted after that.' He shrugged off his puzzlement. 'Have you read it? What happened to her in the end? Is it relevant?'

'She falls in love with her employer. His wife-she's mad, lives in the house but secretly-tries to burn the house down, and Jane goes away. When she comes back, the wife has died, and Mr. Rochester is blind, and Jane marries him.'

'Ah.' His forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle it all out. But he gave up. 'No. It doesn't make sense, does it? The beginning, perhaps. The girl without the mother. But after that… I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth.'

He turned back to the torn-out page. 'Probably it's not the book that's important at all. Perhaps it's just this page. Perhaps it has some secret meaning. Look here-'

Inside the back cover of his childhood recipe book were tightly packed columns and rows of numbers and letters written in a large, boyish hand. 'I used to think it was a code,' he explained. 'I tried to decipher it. I tried the first letter of every word, the first of every line. Or the second. Then I tried replacing one letter for another.' He pointed to his various trials, eyes feverish, as though there was still a chance he might see something that had escaped him before.

I knew it was hopeless.

'What about this?' I picked up the next object and couldn't help giving a shudder. Clearly it had been a feather once, but now it was a nasty, dirty-looking thing. Its oils dried up, the barbs had separated into stiff brown spikes along the cracked spine.

Aurelius shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in helpless ignorance, and I dropped the feather with relief.

And then there was just one more thing. 'Now this…' Aurelius began, but he didn't finish. It was a scrap of paper, roughly torn, witha faded ink stain that might once have been a word. I peered at it closely.

'I think-' Aurelius stuttered, 'well, Mrs. Love thought- We both agreed, in fact'-he looked at me in hope-'that it must be my name.'

He pointed. 'It got wet in the rain, but here, just here-' He led me to the window, gestured at me to hold the paper scrap up to the light. 'Something like anA at the beginning. And then anS. Just here, toward the end. Of course, it's faded a bit, over the years; you have to look hard, but you can see it, can't you?'

I stared at the stain.

'Can't you?'

I made a vague motion with my head, neither nod nor shake.

'You see! It's obvious when you know what you're looking for, isn't it?'

I continued to look, but the phantom letters that he could see were invisible to my eye. 'And that,' he was saying, 'is how Mrs. Love settled on Aurelius. Though I might just as easily be Alphonse, I suppose.'

He laughed at himself, sadly, uneasily, and turned away. 'The only other thing was the spoon. But you've seen that.' He reached into his top pocket and took out the silver spoon I had seen at our first meeting, when we ate ginger cake while sitting on the giant cats flanking the steps of Angelfield House.

'And the bag itself,' I wondered. 'What kind of a bag is it?'

'Just a bag,' he said vaguely. He lifted it to his face and sniffed it delicately. 'It used to smell of smoke, but not anymore.' He passed it to me, and I bent my nose to it. 'You see? It's faded now.'

Aurelius opened the oven door and took out a tray of pale gold biscuits that he set to cool. Then he filled the kettle and prepared a tray. Cups and saucers, a sugar bowl, a milk jug and little plates.

'You take this,' he said, passing the tray to me. He opened a door that showed a glimpse of a sitting room, old comfy chairs and floral cushions. 'Make yourself at home. I'll bring the rest in a minute.' He kept his back to me, head bowed as he washed his hands. 'I'll be with you when I've put these things away.'

I went into Mrs. Love's front room and sat in a chair by the fireplace, leaving him to stow his inheritance-his invaluable, indecipherable inheritance-safely away.

I left the house with something scratching at my mind. Was it something Aurelius had said? Yes. Some echo or connection had vaguely appealed for my attention but had been swept away by the rest of his story. It didn't matter. It would come back to me.

In the woods there is a clearing. Beneath it, the ground falls away steeply and is covered in patchy scrub before it levels out and there are trees again. Because of this, it provides an unexpected vantage point from which to view the house. It was in this clearing that I stopped, on my way back from Aurelius's cottage.

The scene was bleak. The house, or what remained of it, was ghostly. A smudge of gray against a gray sky. The upper stories on the left-hand side were all gone. The ground floor remained, the door frame demarcated by its dark stone lintel and the steps that led up to it, but the door itself was gone. It was not a day to be open to the elements, and I shivered for the half-dismantled house. Even the stone cats had abandoned it. Like the deer, they had taken themselves off out of the wet. The right-hand side of the building was still largely intact, though to judge by the position of the crane it would be next to go. Was all that machinery really necessary? I caught myself thinking. For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.

My camera was slung around my neck. I disentangled it from under my coat and raised it to my eyes. Was it possible to capture the evanescent appearance of the house through all this wetness? I doubted it but was willing to try.