The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Page B

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 Dent 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