AFTER HESTER

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    The  m, when Judith came with my breakfast tray, I gave her the letter for Mr. Lomax, and she took a letter for me from her apron pocket. I reized my father’s handwriting.

    My father’s letters were always a fort, and this one was no exception. He hoped I was well. Was my work progressing? He had read a very strange and delightful eenth-tury Danish hat he would tell me about when I returned. At au he had e across a bundle of eighteenth-tury letters no one seemed to want. Might I be ied? He had bought them in case. Private detectives? Well, perhaps, but would a genealogical researcher not do the job just as well or perhaps better? There was a fellow he knew who had all the right skills, and e to think of it, he owed Father a favor—he sometimes came into the shop to use the almanacs. In case I inteo pursue the matter, here was his address. Finally, as always, those well meant but desiccated four words: Mother sends her love.

    Did she really say it? I wondered. Father mentioning, I’ll write taret this afternoon, and she—casually? warmly?—Send her my love.

    No. I couldn’t imagi. It would be my father’s addition. Written without her knowledge. Why did he bother? To please me? To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to ect us? It was an impossible task. My mother and I were like two tis moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, stantly extending the fragile edifice he had structed to ect us.

    A letter had e for me at the shop; my father enclosed it with his own. It was from the law professor Father had reeo me.

    Dear Miss Lea,I was not aware Ivan Lea even had a daughter, but now I know he has one, I am pleased to make your acquaintand even more pleased to be of assistahe legal decree of decease is just what you imagi to be: a presumption in law of the death of a person whose whereabouts have been unknown for such a length of time and in such circumstahat death is the only reasonable assumption. Its main fun is to ehe estate of a missing person to be passed into the hands of his iors.

    I have uaken the necessary researches and traced the dots relating to the case you are particularly ied in. Your Mr. Angelfield arently a man of reclusive habits, and the date and circumstances of his disappearance appear not to be known. However, the painstaking and sympathetic work carried out by one Mr. Lomax on behalf of the iors (two nieces) ehe relevant formalities to be duly carried out. The estate was of some signifit value, though diminished somewhat by a fire that left the house itself uninhabitable. But you will see all this for yourself in the copy I have made you of the relevant dots.

    You will see that the solicitor himself has signed on behalf of one of the beneficiaries. This is on in situations where the beneficiary is unable for some reason (illness or other incapacity, for instao take care of his own affairs.

    It was with a most particular attention that I he signature of the other beneficiary. It was almost illegible, but I mao work it out in the end. Have I stumbled across one of the best-kept secrets of the day? But perhaps you k already? Is this what inspired your i in the case?

    Fear not! I am a man of the greatest discretion! Tell your father to give me a good dist on the Justitiae Naturalis Principia, and I will say not a word to anyone!

    Your servant,William Henry CadwalladrI turraight to the end of the  copy Professor Cadwalladr had made. Here ace for the signatures of Charlie’s nieces. As he said, Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmelihat told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the sed lihe name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March.

    Proof.

    Vida Winter was Adeline March.

    She was telling the truth.

    With this in mind, I went to my appoi in the library, and listened and scribbled in my little book as Miss Winter reted the aftermath of Hester’s departure.

    Adeline and Emmeline spent the first night and the first day in their room, in bed, arms ed around each other and gazing into each other’s eyes. There was a tacit agreemeween the Missus and John-the-dig to treat them as though they were valest, and, in a way, they were. An injury had been doo them. So they lay in bed, o nose, gazing cross-eyed at each other. Without a word. Without a smile. Blinking in unison. And with the transfusion that took place via that twenty-four-hour-long gaze, the e that had been broken, healed. And like any wound that heals, it left its scar.

    Meanwhile the Missus was in a state of fusion over what had happeo Hester. Johant to disillusion her about the governess, said nothing, but his silenly enced her to wonder aloud. “I suppose she’ll have told the doctor where she’s gone,” she cluded miserably. “I’ll have to find out from him when she’s ing back.”

    Then John had to speak, and he sphly. “Don’t you go asking him where she’s gone! Don’t ask him anything at all. Besides, we won’t be seeing him around the plaore.”

    The Missus turned away from him, frowning. What was the matter with everyone? Why was Hester not there? Why was John all upset? And the doctor—he who had been the household’s stant visitor— why should he not be ing anymore? Things were happening that were beyond her prehension. More and more often these days, and for longer and longer periods, she had the sehat something had gone wrong with the world. More than once she seemed to wake up in her head to find that whole hours had passed by without leaving a tra her memory. Things that clearly made seo other people didn’t always make seo her. And when she asked questions to try and uand it, a queer look came into people’s eyes, which they quickly covered up. Yes. Something odd was happening, aer’s unexplained absence was only part of it.

    John, though he regretted the unhappiness of the Missus, was relieved that Hester had gohe departure of the governess seemed to take a great burden from him. He came more freely into the house, and in the evenings spent longer hours with the Missus i. To his way of thinking, losier was no loss at all. She had really made only one improvement to his life—by encing him to take up wain iarden—and she had do so subtly, so discreetly, that it was a simple matter for him tanize his mind until it told him that the decision had beeirely his own. When it became clear that she had gone food, he brought his boots from the shed and sat polishing them by the stove, legs up oable, for who was there to stop him now?

    In the nursery Charlie’s rage and fury seemed to have deserted him, leaving in their place a woeful fatigue. You could sometimes hear his slow, dragging steps across the floor, and sometimes, ear to the door, you heard him g with the exhausted sobs of a wretched two-year-old. Could it be that in some deeply mysterious though still stific way, Hester had influenced him through locked doors ahe worst of his despair at bay? It did not seem impossible.

    It was not only people who reacted to Hester’s absehe house respoo it instantly. The first thing was the new quiet. There was no tap-tap-tap of Hester’s feet trotting up and down stairs and along corridors. Thehumps and knocks of the workmen on the roof came to a halt, too. The roofer, disc that Hester was not there, had the well-founded suspi that with no oo put his invoices under Charlie’s nose, he would not be paid for his work. He packed up his tools a, came bace for his ladders, was never seen again.

    On the first day of silence, and as if nothing had ever happeo interrupt it, the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay. Small things first: Dirt began to seep from every crevi every obje every room. Surfaces secreted dust. Windows covered themselves with the first fine layer of grime. All of Hester’s ges had been superficial. They required daily attention to be maintained. And as the Missus’s ing schedules at first wavered, then crashed, the real, perma nature of the house began to reassert itself. The time came when you couldn’t piything up without feeling the old g of grime on your fingers.

    Objects, too, went quickly back t<mark></mark>o their old ways. The keys were first to go walkabout. ht they slipped themselves out of locks and off keyrings, then they gathered together in dusty panionship in the cavity beh a loose floorboard. Silver dlesticks, while they still had their gleam of Hester’s polish, made their way from the drawing room mantelpieeline’s stash of treasure uhe bed. Books left their library shelves and took themselves upstairs, where they rested in ers and under sofas. Curtains took to drawing and closing themselves. Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about. A sofa inched forward from its place against the wall, a chair shifted two feet to the left. All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.

    A roof in the process of being repaired gets worse before it gets better. Some of the holes left by the roofer were larger than the ones he had been called in to mend. It was all right to lie on<tt>?t> the floor of the attid feel the sunshine on your face, but rain was another matter. The floorboards began to soften, then water dripped through into the rooms below. There were places you knew not to tread, where the flged precariously beh your feet. Soon it would collapse and you would be able to see straight through into the room below. And how long before that room’s flave way and you would see into the library? And could the library flive way? Would it one day be possible to stand in the cellars and look up through four floors of rooms to the sky? Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Onside a house, it obeys the force of gravity ily. Inside walls and under floors it finds secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in ued dires; surfaces in the most unlikely places. All around the house were cloths to soak up the wet, but no one ever wrung them out; saus and bowls were placed here and there to catch drips, but they overflowed before anyone remembered to ge them. The sta-less brought the plaster off the walls and was eating into the mortar. Iic, there were walls so unsteady that with one hand you could rock them like a loose tooth. And the twins in all of this?

    It was a serious wound that Hester and the doctor had inflicted. Of course things would never be the same again. The twins would always hare a scar, and the effects of the separation would never be entirely eradicated. Yet they felt the scar differently. Adelier all had fallen quickly into a state of fugue once she uood what Hester and the doctor were about. She lost herself almost at the moment she lost her twin and had no recolle of the time passed away from her. As far as she khe blaess that had been interposed between losiwin and finding her again might have been a year or a sed. Not that it mattered now. For it was over, and she had e to life again.

    For Emmelihings were different. She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each sed was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before ahesia, half crazed with pain, astouhat the human body could feel so mud not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief. In short, Emmeline adapted to her twin’s absence. She learned how to exist apart.

    Yet still they reected awins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.

    At the beginning there was only the delight of reunion. They were inseparable. Where o, the other followed. Iardens they circled around the old trees, playing endless games of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t, a repetition of their ret experience of loss and rediscovery that Adeline never seemed to tire of. For Emmelihe y began gradually to wear off. Some of the old antagonism crept in. Emmeline wao go one way, Adelihe other, so they fought. And as before, it was usually Emmeline who gave in. In her new, secret self, she mihis.

    Though Emmeline had once been fond of Hester, she didn’t miss her now. During the experiment her affe had waned. She knew, after all, that it was Hester who had separated her from her sister. And not only that, but Hester had been so taken up with her reports and her stifisultations that, perhaps without realizing it, she had ed Emmeline. During that time, finding herself in unaced solitude, Emmeline had found ways of distrag herself from her sorrow. She discovered amusements aertais that she grew to enjoy for their own sake. Games that she did not expect to give up just because her sister was back.

    So it was that ohird day after the reunion, Emmeline abahe lost-and-found game iarden and wandered off to the billiards room, where she kept a pack of cards. Lying ooma the middle of the baize table, she began her game. It was a version of solitaire, but the simplest, most childish kind. Emmeline woime; the game was designed so that she couldn’t fail. And every time she was delighted.

    Halfway through a game, she tilted her head. She couldly hear it, but her inner ear, which was tuned stantly to her twin, told her Adeline was calling her. Emmeline ig. She was busy. She could see Adelier. When she had finished her game.

    An hour later, when Adeline came st into the room, eyes screwed tight with rage, there was nothing Emmeline could do to defend herself. Adeline clambered onto the table and, hysterical with fury, launched herself at Emmeline.

    Emmeline did not raise a fio defend herself. Nor did she cry. She made not a sound, her during the attaor when it was all over.

    When Adeline’s rage ent, she stood for a few minutes watch-g her sister. Blood was seeping into the green baize. Playing cards ere scattered everywhere. Emmeline was curled into a ball, and her shoulders were jerkily rising and falling with her breath. Adeliurned her bad walked away.

    Emmeline remained where she was, oable, until John came to find her hours later. He took her to the Missus, who washed the blood out of her hair, pu<big></big>t a press on her eye and treated her bruises with witch hazel. “This wouldn’t have happened wheer was here,” she ented. “I do wish I knew when she was ing back.”

    ‘She won’t be ing back,“ John said, trying to tain his annoyance. He didn’t like to see the child like this either.

    ‘But I don’t see why she would have gone like that. Without a word. Whatever  have happened? Some emergency, I suppose. With her family…“

    John shook his head. He’d heard this a dozen times, this idea the Missus g to, that Hester would be ing back. The whole village knew she would not e back. The Maudsleys’ servant had heard everything. She professed to have seen it, too, and more besides, and by now it was impossible that there was a single adult in the village who did not know for a fact that the plain-faced governess had been carrying on an adulterous affair with the doctor.

    It was iable that one day rumors of Hester’s “behavior” (a village euphemism for misbehavior) should reach the ears of the Missus. At first she was sdalized. She refused to eain the idea that Hester—her Hester—could have done such a thing. But when she reported angrily to John what was being said, he only firmed it. He had been at the doctor’s that day, he reminded her, colleg the child. He had heard it directly from the housemaid. On the very day it occurred. And besides, why would Hester have left so suddenly, without warning, if something out of the ordinary hadn’t occurred?

    ‘Her family,“ the Missus stammered, ”an emergency…“

    ‘Where’s the letter, then? She’d have written, wouldn’t she, if she meant to e back? She’d have explained. Have you had a letter?“

    The Missus shook her head.

    ‘Well then,“ finished John, uo keep the satisfa from his voice, ”she’s done something that she didn’t ought to, and she won’t be ing back. She’s gone food. Take it from me.“

    The Missus went round and around it in her head. She didn’t know what to believe. The world had bee a very fusing place.

    GONE!

    Only Charlie was ued. There were ges, of course. The proper meals that under Hester’s regime had been placed outside the door at breakfast, lund dinner became occasional sandwiches, a cold chop and a tomato, a bowl of gealed scrambled egg, appearing at uable intervals, whehe Missus remembered. It didn’t make any differeo Charlie. If he felt hungry and it was there, he might eat a mouthful of yesterday’s chop, or a dry end of bread, but if it isn’t there he wouldn’t, and his hunger didn’t bother him. He had a more powerful huo worry about. It was the essence of his life and something that Hester, in her arrival and in her departure, had not ged.

    Yet ge did e for Charlie, though it had nothing to do with Hester.

    From time to time a letter would e to the house, and from time to time someone would open it. A few days after John-the-dig’s ent about there having been er from Hester, the Missus, finding herself in the hall, noticed a small pile of letters gathering dust o uhe letter box. She opehem.

    One from Charlie’s banker: was he ied in an iment opportunity… ?

    The sed was an invoice from the builders for the work done on the roof.

    Was the third from Hester?

    No. The third was from the asylum. Isabelle was dead.

    The Missus stared at the letter. Dead! Isabelle! Could it be true? Influenza, the letter said.

    Charlie would have to be told, but the Missus quailed at the prospect. Better talk to Dig first, she resolved, putting the letters aside. But later, when John was sitting at his place at the kit table and she was topping up his cup with fresh tea, there remained no trace of the letter in her mind. It had joihose other, increasingly frequent, lost moments, lived a but unrecorded and then lost. heless, a few days later, passing through the hall with a tray of burnt toast and ba, she meically put the letters oray with the food, though she had no memory at all of their tents.

    And then the days passed and nothing seemed to happen at all, except that the dust got thicker, and the grime accumulated on the windowpanes, and the playing cards crept farther and farther from their box in the drawing room, and it became easier and easier tet that there had ever been a Hester.

    It was John-the-dig who realized in the silence of the days that something had happened.

    He was an outdoors man and not domesticated. heless he khat there es a time when cups ot be made to do for one more cup of tea without being first washed, and he knew moreover that a plate that has held raw meat ot be used straight after for cooked. He saw how things were going with the Missus; he was no fool. So when the pile of dirty plates and cups piled up, he would set to and do the washi藏书网ng up. It was an odd thing to see him at the sink in his Wellington boots and his cap, so clumsy with the cloth and a where he was so adroit with his terra-cotta pots and tender plants. And it came to his attention that the number of cups and plates was diminishing. Soon there would not be enough. Where was the missing crockery? He thought instantly of the Missus making her haphazard stairs with a plate for Master Charlie. Had he ever seen her return ay plate to the kit? No.

    He went upstairs. Outside the locked door, plates and cups were arranged in a long queue. The food, untouched by Charlie, roviding a fi for the flies that buzzed over it, and there owerful, unpleasant smell. How many days had the Missus been leaving food here without notig that the previous day’s was still untouched? He toted up the number of plates and cups and frowhat is when he knew.

    He did not knock at the door. What was the point? He had to go to his shed for a piece of timber strong enough to use as a battering ram. The noise of it against the oak, the creaking and smashing as metal hiore away from wood, was enough t us all, even the Missus, to the door.

    Whetered door fell open, half broken off its hinges, we could hear buzzing flies, and a terrible stench billowed out, knog Emmeline and the Missus back a few steps. Even John put his hand to his mouth and turned a shade whiter. “Stay back,” he ordered as he ehe room. A few paces behind, I followed him.

    We stepped gingerly through the debris of rotting food on the floor if the old nursery, stirring clouds of flies up into the air as we passed. Charlie had been living like an animal. Dirty plates covered with mold were on the floor, on the mantelpiece, on chairs and oable. The bedroom door was ajar. With the end of the battering ram he still had in his hand, John he door cautiously, and a startled rat came scurrying out over our feet. It was a gruesome se. More flies, more deposing food and worse: The man had been ill. A pile of dried, fly-spotted vomit encrusted the rug on the floor. Oable by the ed was a heap of bloody handkerchiefs and the Missus’s old darning needle.

    The bed was empty. Just crumpled, filthy sheets stained with blood id other human vileness.

    We did not speak. We tried not to breathe, and when, of y, we ihrough our mouths, the sick, repugnant air caught in our throats and made us retch. Yet we had not had the worst of it. There was one more room. John had to steel himself to open the door to the bathroom. Even before the door was fully open, we sehe horror of it. Before it snagged in my nostrils, my skin seemed to smell it, and a cold sweat bloomed all over my body. The toilet was bad enough. The lid was down but could not quite tain the overflowing mess it was supposed to cover. But that was nothing. For ih—John took a sharp step bad would have stepped on me if I had not, at the same moment, taken two steps back myself. Ih was a dark swill of bodily effluehe stink of which sent John and me rag to the door, back through the rat droppings and the flies, out into the corridor, dowairs and out of doors.

    I was sick. On the green grass, my pile of yellow vomit looked fresh and  and sweet.

    ‘All right,“ said John, ated my back with a hand that was still trembling.

    The Missus, having followed at her own hurried shuffle, approached us across the lawn, questions all over her face. What could we tell her?

    We had found Charlie’s blood. We had found Charlie’s shit, Charlie’s piss and Charlie’s vomit. But Charlie himself?

    ‘He’s not there,“ we told her. ”He’s gone.“

    I returo my room, thinking about the story. It was curious in more than one respect. There was Charlie’s disappearance, of course, which was an iing turn of events. It left me thinking about the almanad that curious abbreviation: ldd. But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

    In my room, on a tray o the ham sandwiches, I found a large brown envelope.

    Mr. Lomax, the solicitor, had replied to my letter by return of post. Attached to his brief but kindly note were copies of Hester’s tract, which I gla and put aside, a letter of reendation from a Lady Blake in Naples, who wrote positively of Hester’s gifts, and, most iing of all, a letter accepting the offer of employment, written by the miracle worker herself.

    Dear Dr. Maudsley,Thank you for the offer of work you have kindly made to me.

    I shall be pleased to take up the post at Angelfield oh April as you suggest.

    I have made inquiries and gather that the trains run only to Banbury. Perhaps you would advise me how I  best make my way to Angelfield from there. I shall arrive at Banbury Station at half past ten.

    Yours sincerely, Hester BarrowThere was firmness ier’s sturdy capitals, sisten the slant of the letters, a sense of smooth flow in the moderate loops of the g’s and the m’s. The letter size was small enough for ey of ink and paper, yet large enough for clarity. There were no embellishments. No elaborate curls, flounces or flourishes. The beauty of the raphy came from the sense of order, baland proportion that governed ead every letter. It was a good,  hand. It was Hester herself, made word.

    Iht-hand er was an address in London.

    Good, I thought. I  find you now.

    I reached for paper, and before I began my transcription, wrote a letter to the genealogist Father had reended. It was a longish letter: I had to introduce myself, for he would doubtless be unaware Mr. Lea even had a daughter; I had to touch lightly oter of the almanacs to justify my claim on his time; I had to ee everything I knew about Hester: Naples, London, Angelfield. But the gist of my letter was simple: Find her.

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