Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

I fixed my mask in place before replying. "I am a shop assistant. I work in an antiquarian bookshop. I am an amateur biographer. Presumably you have read my work on the Landier brothers?"

"It's not much to go on, is it? If we are to work together, I shall need to know a little more about who you are. I can hardly spill the secrets of a lifetime to a person of whom I know nothing. So, tell me about yourself. What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?"

On the instant I was too affronted to reply.

"Well, answer me! For goodness' sake! Am I to have a stranger living under my roof? A stranger working for me? It is not reasonable. Tell me this, do you believe in ghosts?"

Governed by something stronger than reason, I rose from my chair. "Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!" I took one step after another, trying not to run, conscious of the rhythm of my feet rapping out on the wooden boards, while she called to me in a voice that contained an edge of panic. "Come back!" she cried. "I am going to tell you a story-a marvelous story!"

I did not stop. "Once upon a time there was a haunted house-" I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle. "Once upon a time there was a library-" I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when, in a voice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped me in my tracks. "Once upon a time there were twins -"

I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and then, despite myself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that rose, trembling, to the averted face.

Tentatively I took a step back into the room. At the sound of my feet, the copper curls turned.

I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, looked to me with something like a plea. For a moment I simply stared back. Then, "Miss Lea, won't you please sit down," said a voice shakily, a voice that was and was not Vida Winter's.

Drawn by something beyond my control, I moved toward the chair and sat down. "I'm not making any promises," I said wearily. "I'm not in a position to exact any," came the answer in a small voice. Truce.

"Why did you choose me?" I asked again, and this time she answered. "Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because youknow about siblings." "And will you tell me the truth?" "I will tell you the truth." The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that undermined them. She meant to tell me the truth, I did not doubt it. She had decided to tell. Perhaps she even wanted to tell. Only she did not quite believe that she would. Her promise of honesty was spoken as much to convince herself as to persuade me, and she heard the lack of conviction at its heart as clearly as I did.

And so I made a suggestion. "I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the commission."

"Ah, the rule of three… The magic number. Three trials before the prince wins the hand of the fair princess. Three wishes granted to the fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears for Goldilocks and Three Billy Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have been able to lie, but three… "

I slid my pencil from the ring binding of my pad and opened the cover.

"What is your real name?"

She swallowed. "Are you quite sure this is the best way to proceed? I could tell you a ghost story-a rather good one, even if I do say so myself. It might be a better way of getting to the heart of things… "

I shook my head. "Tell me your name."

The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones glowed in the firelight.

"My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and honestly. What you want to know is the name by which I was known prior to the change. That name was-"

She paused, needing to overcome some obstacle within herself, and when she pronounced the name it was with a noticeable neutrality, an utter absence of intonation, as though it were a word in some foreign language she had never applied herself to learning: "That name was Adeline March."

As though to cut short even the minimal vibration the name carried in the air, she continued rather tartly, "I hope you're not going to ask my date of birth. I am of an age at which it is de rigueur to have forgotten it."

"I can manage without, if you give me your place of birth."

She released an irritated sigh. "I could tell you much better, if you would only allow me to tell it my way…"

"This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record."

She pursed her lips. "You will find it is a matter of record that Adeline March was born in Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, London. I can hardly be expected to offer any personal guarantee of the veracity of that detail. Though I am an exceptional person, I am not so exceptional that I can remember my own birth."

I noted it down.

Now the third question. I had, it must be admitted, no particular third question prepared. She did not want to tell me her age, and I hardly needed her date of birth. With her long publishing history and the date of her first book, she could not be less than seventy-three or -four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty. But the uncertainty didn't matter; with her name and her place of birth, I could find the date out for myself anyway. From my first two questions, I already had the information I needed in order to ascertain that a person by the name of Adeline March actually existed. What to ask, then? Perhaps it was my desire to hear Miss Winter tell a story, but when the occasion arose to play my third question as a wild card, I seized it.

"Tell me," I began slowly, carefully. In the stories with the wizards, it is always with the third wish that everything so dangerously won is disastrously snatched away. "Tell me something that happened to you in the days before you changed your name, for which there exists a public record." Educational successes, I was thinking. School sporting achievements. Those minor triumphs that are recorded for proud parents and for posterity.

In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her external self into her core; under my very eyes she managed to absent herself from herself, and I began to understand how it was that earlier I had failed to see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath the surface.

And then she emerged.

"Do you know why my books are so successful?"

"For a great many reasons, I believe."

"Possibly. Largely it is because they have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the right order. Of course all stories have beginnings, middles and endings; it is having them in the right order that matters. That is why people like my books."

She sighed and fidgeted with her hands. "I am going to answer your question. I am going to tell you something about myself, which happened before I became a writer and changed my name, and it is something for which there exists a public record. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. But I did not expect to find myself telling it to you so soon. I shall have to break one of my rules to do it. I shall have to tell you the end of my story before I tell you the beginning."

"The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before you started writing? "

"Quite simply because my story-my own personal story-ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished."