The Thirteenth Tale

Thoughtfully I lifted my eyes from the final page of Hester's diary. A number of things had struck my attention as I had been reading it, and now that I had finished, I had the leisure to consider them more methodically.

Oh, I thought.

Oh.

And then, OH!

How to describe my eureka? It began as a stray what if, a wild conjecture, an implausible notion. It was, well, not impossible perhaps, but absurdl For a start-

About to begin marshaling the sensible counterarguments, I stopped dead in my tracks. For my mind, racing ahead of itself in a momentous act of premonition, had already submitted to this revised version of events. In a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same-yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or clown faces or Rouen cathedrals if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen it.

There followed a long hour of musing. One element at a time, taking all the different angles separately, I reviewed everything I knew. Everything I had been told and everything I had discovered. Yes, I thought. And yes, again. That, and that, and that, too. My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.

At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.

I knew what Hester saw that day she thought she saw a ghost.

I knew the identity of the boy in the garden.

I knew who attacked Mrs. Maudsley with a violin.

I knew who killed John-the-dig.

I knew who Emmeline was looking for underground.

Details fell into place. Emmeline talking to herself behind a closed door, when her sister was at the doctor's house.Jane Eyre, the book that appears and reappears in the story, like a silver thread in a tapestry. I understood the mysteries of Hester's wandering bookmark, the appearance of The Turn of the Screw and the disappearance of her diary. I understood the strangeness of John-the-dig's decision to teach the girl who had once desecrated his garden how to tend it.

I understood the girl in the mist, and how and why she came out of it. I understood how it was that a girl like Adeline could melt away and leave Miss Winter in her place.

'I am going to tell you a story about twins,' Miss Winter had called after me that first evening in the library, when I was on the verge of leaving. Words that with their unexpected echo of my own story attached me irresistibly to hers.

Once upon a time there were two babygirls…

Except that now I knew better. She had pointed me in the right direction that very first night, if I had only known how to listen. 'Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Lea?' she had asked me. 'I am going to tell you a ghost story.'

And I had told her, 'Some other time.'

But she had told me a ghost story.

Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

Or alternatively: Once upon a time there were three.

Once upon a time there was a house and the house was haunted.

The ghost was, in the usual way of ghosts, mostly invisible, and yet not quite invisible. There was the closing of doors that had been left open, and the opening of doors left shut. The flash of movement in a mirror that made you glance up. The shimmer of a draft behind a curtain when there was no window open. The little ghost was there in the unexpected movement of books from one room to another, and in the mysterious movement of bookmark from page to page. It was her hand that lifted a diary from one place and hid it in another, her hand that replaced it later. If, as you turned into a corridor, the curious idea occurred to you that you had just missed seeing the sole of a shoe disappearing around the far corner, then the little ghost was not far away. And when, surprised by the back of the neck feeling as if someone has their eye on you, you raised your head to find the room empty, then you could be sure that the little ghost was hiding in the emptiness somewhere.

Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.

She haunted softly. On tiptoe, in bare feet, she made never a sound; and yet she recognized the footfall of every inhabitant of the house, knew every creaking board and every squeaky door. Every dark corner of the house was familiar to her, every nook and every cranny. She knew the gaps behind cupboards and between sets of shelves, she knew the backs of sofas and the underneath of chairs. The house, to her mind, was a hundred and one hiding places, and she knew how to move among them invisibly.

Isabelle and Charlie never saw the ghost. Living as they did, outside logic, outside reason, they were not the sort to be perplexed by the inexplicable. Losses and breakages and the mislaying of random items seemed to them part of the natural universe. A shadow that fell across a carpet where a shadow ought not to be did not cause them to stop and reflect; such mysteries seemed only a natural extension of the shadows in their hearts and minds. The little ghost was the movement in their peripheral vision, the unacknowledged puzzle in the back of their minds, the permanent shadow attached, without their knowing it, to their lives. She scavenged for leftovers in their pantry like a mouse, warmed herself at the embers of their fires after they had gone to bed, disappeared into the recesses of their dilapidation the instant anyone appeared.

She was the secret of the house.

Like all secrets, she had her guardians.

The housekeeper saw the little ghost as plain as day, despite her failing eyesight. A good thing, too. Without her collaboration there would never have been enough scraps in the pantry, enough crumbs from the breakfast loaf, to sustain the little ghost. For it would be a mistake to think that the ghost was one of those incorporeal, ethereal specters. No. She had a stomach, and when it was empty it had to be filled.

But she earned her keep. For as much as she ate, she also provided. The other person who had the knack of seeing ghosts, you see, was the gardener, and he was glad of an extra pair of hands. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and an old pair of John's trousers, cut off at the ankle and held up with braces, and her haunting of the garden was fruitful. In the soil potatoes grew swollen under her care; aboveground the fruit bushes flourished, producing clusters of berries that her hands sought out under low leaves. Not only did she have a magic touch for fruit and vegetables, but the roses bloomed as they had never bloomed before. Later, she learned the secret desire of box and yew to become geometry. At her bidding leaves and branches grew corners and angles, curves and mathematically straight lines.

In the garden and in the kitchen the little ghost did not need to hide. The housekeeper and the gardener were her protectors, her guardians. They taught her the ways of the house and how to be safe in it. They fed her. They watched over her. When a stranger came to live in the house, with sharper eyes than most, with a desire to banish shadows and lock doors, they worried about her.

More than anything else, they loved her.

But where did she come from? What was her story? For ghosts do not appear at random. They come only to where they know they are at home. And the little ghost was at home in this house. At home in this family. Though she had no name, though she was no one, still the gardener and the housekeeper knew who she was all right. Her story was written in her copper hair and her emerald eyes.

For here is the most curious thing about the whole story. The ghost bore the most uncanny resemblance to the twins already living in the house. How else could she have lived there unsuspected for so long? Three girls with copper hair that fell in a mass down their backs. Three girls with striking emerald eyes. Odd, don't you think, the