The Thirteenth Tale

soil.

Foxes indeed.

Once they were gone I might have been able to persuade myself that I had imagined it. That I had been sleepwalking, and that in my sleep I had dreamed that Adeline's twin appeared to me and hissed a secret, unintelligible message. But I knew it was real. And though she was no longer visible, I could hear her singing as she departed. That infuriating, tuneless five-note fragment. La la la la la.

I stood, listening, until it faded completely away. Then, realizing that my feet and hands were freezing, I turned back to the house.

PHONETIC ALPHABET

A great many years had passed since I learned the phonetic alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in father's shop. There was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one weekend and was enamored of the signs and symbols it contained. There were familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N's that weren't the same as little ns and capital K's that weren't the same as little j/s. Other letters, ns and d's and s's and {'s, had funny little tails and loops attached, and you could cross h's and i's and us as if they were t's. I loved these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m s that turned intoy 's, and vs that perched precariously on tiny o's like performing dogs on balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I discovered, you could write words that looked like math, words that looked like secret code, words that looked like lost languages.

I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister's name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my pleat of paper always close to me. In winter it lived in my coat pocket; in summer it tickled my ankle inside the fold of my sock. At night, I fell asleep clutching it in my hand. For all my care, I did not always keep track of these bits of paper. I lost them, made new ones, then came across the old ones. When my mother tried to prize one from my fingers, I swallowed it to thwart her, even though she wouldn't have been able to read it. But when I saw my father pick a grayed and fraying fold of paper out of the junk in the bottom of a drawer and unfold it, I did nothing to stop him. When he read the secret name, his face seemed to break, and his eyes, when they rose to me, were full of sorrow.

He would have spoken. He opened his mouth to speak but, raising my finger to my lips, I commanded his silence. I would not have him speak her name. Had he not tried to shut her away, in the dark? Had he not wanted to forget her? Had he not tried to keep her from me? He had no right to her now.

I prized the paper from his fingers. Without a word I left the room. On the window seat on the second floor I put the morsel of paper in my mouth, tasted its dry, woody tang, and swallowed. For ten years my parents had buried her name in silence, trying to forget. Now I would protect it in a silence of my own. And remember.

Alongside my mispronunciation of hello, good-bye and sorry in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular effort to practice it. That is why, when I came in from the garden and put pencil to paper to capture the sibilants and fricatives, the plosives and trills of Emmeline 's urgent whisper, I had to make several attempts.

After three or four goes, I sat on the bed and looked at my line of squiggles and symbols and signs. Was it accurate? Doubts began to assail me. Had I remembered the sounds accurately after my five-minute journey back into the house? Was my recollection of the phonetic alphabet itself adequate? What if my first failed attempts had contaminated my memory?

I whispered what I had written on the paper. Whispered it again, urgently. Waited for the birth of some answering echo in my memory to tell me I had got it right. Nothing came. It was the travestied transcription of something misheard and then only half-remembered. It was useless.

I wrote the secret name instead. The spell, the charm, the talisman. It had never worked. She never came. I was still alone. I screwed the paper into a ball and kicked it into a corner.

THE LADDER

My story isn't boring you, is it, Miss Lea?' I endured a number of such comments the following day as, unable to suppress my yawns, I fidgeted and rubbed my eyes while listening to Miss Winter's narration.

'I'm sorry. I'm just tired.'

'Tired!' she exclaimed. 'You look like death warmed up! A proper meal would put you right. Whatever's the matter with you? '

I shrugged my shoulders. 'Just tired. That's all.'

She pursed her lips and regarded me sternly, but I said nothing more, and she took up her story.

For six months things went on. We sequestered ourselves in a handful of rooms: the kitchen, where John still slept at night, the drawing room and the library. We girls used the back stairs to get from the kitchen to the one bedroom that seemed secure. The mattresses we slept on were those we had dragged from the old room, the beds themselves being too heavy to move. The house had felt too big anyway, since the household had been so diminished in number. We survivors felt more at ease in the security, the manageability of our smaller accommodation. All the same, we could never quite forget the rest of the house, slowly festering behind closed doors, like a moribund limb.

Emmeline spent much of her time inventing card games. 'Play with me. Oh, go on, do play,' she would pester. Eventually I gave in and played. Obscure games with ever-shifting rules, games only she understood, and which she always won, which gave her constant delight. She took baths. She never lost her love of soap and hot water, spent hours luxuriating in the water I'd heated for the laundry and washing up. I didn't begrudge her. It was better if at least one of us could be happy.

Before we closed up the rooms, Emmeline had gone through cupboards belonging to Isabelle and taken dresses and scent bottles and shoes, which she hoarded in our campsite of a bedroom. It was like trying to sleep in a dressing-up box. Emmeline wore the dresses. Some were out of date by ten years, others-belonging to Isabelle 's mother, I presume-were thirty and forty years old. Emmeline entertained us in the evenings by making dramatic entrances into the kitchen in the more extravagant outfits. The dresses made her look older than fifteen; they made her look womanly. I remembered Hester's conversation with the doctor in thegarden-There isno reason why Emmeline should not marry one day-and I remembered what the Missus had told me about Isabelle and thepicnics-She was the kind of girl men can h look at without wanting to touch-and I felt a sudden anxiety. But then she flopped down on a kitchen chair, took a pack of cards from a silk purse and said, all child, 'Play cards with me, go on.' I was half reassured, but still, I made sure she did not leave the house in her finery.

John was listless. He did rouse himself to do the unthinkable, though: He got a boy to help in the garden. 'It'll be all right,' he said. 'It's only old Proctor's boy, Ambrose. He's a quiet lad. It won't be for long. Only till I get the house fixed up.'

That, I knew, would take forever.

The boy came. He was taller than John and broader across the shoulders. They stood hands in pockets, the two of them, and discussed the day's work, and then the boy started. He had a measured, patient way of digging;