THE GHOST IN THE TALE

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    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 sider them more methodically.

    Oh, I thought.

    Oh.

    And then, OH!

    How to describe my eureka? It began as a stray what if, a wild jecture, an implausible notion. It was, well, not impossible perhaps, but absurd! For a start—

    About to begin marshaling the sensible terarguments, I stopped dead in my tracks. For my mind, rag 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 e.９９ｌib? if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or  faces or Rouen cathedrals if you  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 ed<mark></mark>ges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regeed. Puzzles explaihemselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.

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

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

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

    I uood the girl in the mist, and how and why she came out of it. I uood 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 ued ey own story attached me irresistibly to hers.

    Once upon a time there were two baby girls…

    Except that now I knew better.

    She had pointed me in the right dire 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, a not quite invisible. There was the closing of doors that had bee 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 curtaihere was no window open. The little ghost was there in the ued 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 plad 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 er, thetle 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 ro<u>.</u>om 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; a she reized the footfall of every inhabitant of the house, knew every creaking board and every squeaky door. Every dark er of the house was familiar to her, every nook and every y. She khe gaps behind cupboards awees of shelves, she khe backs of sofas and the underh 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 unaowledged puzzle in the back of their minds, the perma shadow attached, without their knowing it, to their lives. She sged for leftovers in their pantry like a mouse, warmed herself at the embers of their fires after they had goo 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 sustaitle 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 ara 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 Nourished, produg clusters of berries that her hands sought out under low leaves. Not only did she have a magic touch for fruit aables, but the roses bloomed as they had never bloomed before. Later, he learhe secret desire of box ao bee geomebbr></abbr>try. At her bidding leaves and branches grew ers and angles, curves and mathematically straight lines.

    In the garden and i the little ghost did not o 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 e from? What was her story? Fhosts do not appear at random. They e 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 hough she was no oill 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 uny resemblao 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 resemblahey both bore to the little ghost and she to them?

    ‘When I was born,“ Miss Wiold me, ”I was no more than a subplot.“ So she begaory in which Isabelle went to a piic, met Roland aually ran away to marry him, esg her brother’s dark, unbrotherly passion. Charlie, ed by his sister, went on a rampage, venting his rage, his passion, his jealousy on others. The daughters of earls or of shopkeepers, of bankers or of ey sweeps; to him it did not really matter who they were. With or without their sent, he threw himself upon them in his desperation for oblivion.

    Isabelle gave birth to her twins in a London hospital. Two girls with nothing of their mother’s husband about them. Copper hair—just like their uncle. Green eyes—just like their uncle.

    Here is the subplot: At about the same time, in some barn or dim cottage bedroom, another woman gave birth. Not the daughter of an earl, I think. Or a bahe well-off have ways of dealing with trouble. She must have been some anonymous, ordinary, powerless woman. Her child was a girl, too. Copper hair. Emerald eyes.

    Child e. Child of rape. Charlie’s child.

    Once upon a time there was a house called Angelfield.

    Once upon a time there were twins.

    Once upon a time there came to Angelfield a cousin. More likely a half sister.

    As I sat irain with Hester’s diary closed in my lap, the great rush of sympathy I was beginning to feel for Miss Winter was curtailed when another illegitimate child came to mind. Aurelius. And my sympathy turo anger. Why was he separated from his mother? Why abandoned? Why left to fend for himself in the world without knowing his own story?

    I thought, too, of the white tent and the remaih it that I now knew not to be Hester’s.

    It all boiled down to the night of the fire. Arson, murder, abando of a baby.

    Wherain arrived in Harrogate and I stepped out onto the platform, I was surprised to find it ankle-deep in snow. For although I had been staring out the window of th９9lｉb?rain for the last hour, I had seen nothing of the view outside.

    I thought I k all, when I had my moment of elucidation.

    I thought, when I realized that there were not two girls at Angelfield but three, that I had the key to the whole story in my hand.

    At the end of my cogitations I realized that until I knew what happened on the night of the fire, I knew nothing.

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