Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

I saw him again the next day. I was in the garden, perhaps ten feet from the front porch, when I heard the crackle of tires on gravel. I stood still, retreated inside myself. To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see. The man did not see me.

His face was grave. The heavy line of his brow cast his eyes into shadow, while the rest of his face was distinguished by a numb stillness. He reached into his car for his case, slammed the door and went up the steps to ring the bell.

I heard the door open. Neither he nor Judith spoke a word, and he disappeared inside the house. Later that day, Miss Winter told me the story of Merrily and the perambulator.

As the twins grew older, they explored farther and farther afield and soon knew all the farms and all the gardens on the estate. They had no sense of boundaries, no understanding of property, and so they went where they wished. They opened gates and didn't always close them. They climbed over fences when they got in their way. They tried kitchen doors, and when they opened-usually they did, people didn't lock doors much in Angelfield-they went inside. They helped themselves to anything tasty in the pantry, slept for an hour on the beds upstairs if they felt weary, took saucepans and spoons away with them to scare birds in the fields.

The local families got upset about it. For every accusation made, there was someone who had seen the twins at the relevant time in another distant place; at least they had seen one of them; at least they thought they had. And then it came about that all the old ghost stories were remembered. No old house is without its stories; no old house is without its ghosts. And the very twinness of the girls had a spookiness about it. There was something not right about them, everyone agreed, and whether it was because of the girls themselves or for some other reason, there came to be a disinclination to approach the old house, as much among the adults as the children, for fear of what might be seen there.

But eventually the inconvenience of the incursions won ground over the thrill of ghost talk, and the women grew angry. On several occasions they cornered the girls red-handed and shouted. Anger pulled their faces all out of shape, and their mouths opened and closed so quickly, it made the girls laugh. The women didn't understand why the girls were laughing. They didn't know it was the speed and jumble of the words pouring from their own mouths that had bewildered the twins. They thought it was pure devilment and shouted even more. For a time the twins stayed to watch the spectacle of the villagers' anger, then they turned their backs and walked off.

When their husbands came home from the fields, the women would complain, say something had to be done, and the men would say, "You're forgetting they're the children of the big house." And the women said in return, "Big house or no, children didn't ought to be allowed to run riot the way them two girls do. It's not right. Something's got to be done." And the men would sit quiet over their plates of potato and meat and shake their heads and nothing would be done.

Until the incident of the perambulator.

There was a woman in the village called Mary Jameson. She was the wife of Fred Jameson, one of the farm laborers, and she lived with her husband and his parents in one of the cottages. The couple were newlyweds, and before her marriage the woman had been called Mary Leigh, which explains the name the twins invented for her in their own language: They called her Merrily, and it was a good name for her. Sometimes she would go and meet her husband from the fields and they would sit in the shelter of a hedge at the end of the day, while he had a cigarette. He was a tall brown man with big feet and he used to put his arm around her waist and tickle her and blow down the front of her dress to make her laugh. She tried not to laugh, to tease him, but she wanted to laugh really, and eventually she always did.

She'd have been a plain woman if it wasn't for that laugh of hers. Her hair was a dirty color that was too dark to be blond, her chin was big and her eyes were small. But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed. Her eyes disappeared altogether above her fat moon cheeks, and suddenly, in their absence, you noticed her mouth. Plump cherry-colored lips and even white teeth- no one else in Angelfield had teeth to match hers-and a little pink tongue that was like a kitten's. And the sound. That beautiful, rippling, unstoppable music that came gurgling out of her throat like spring-water from an underground stream. It was the sound of joy. He married her for it. And when she laughed his voice went soft, and he put his lips against her neck and said her name, Mary, over and over again. And the vibration of his voice on her skin tickled her and made her laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Anyway, during the winter, while the twins kept to the gardens and the park, Merrily had a baby. The first warm days of spring found her in the garden, hanging out little clothes on a line. Behind her was a black perambulator. Heaven knows where it had come from; it wasn't the usual kind of thing for a village girl to have; no doubt it was some second- or thirdhand thing, bought cheap by the family (though no doubt seeming very dear) in order to mark the importance of this first child and grandchild. In any case, as Merrily bent for another little vest, another little chemise, and pegged them on the line, she was singing, like one of the birds that were singing, too, and her song seemed destined for the beautiful black perambulator. Its wheels were silver and very high, so although the carriage was large and black and rounded, the impression was of speed and weightlessness.

The garden gave onto fields at the back; a hedge divided the two spaces. Merrily did not know that from behind the hedge two pairs of green eyes were fixed on the perambulator.

Babies make a lot of washing, and Merrily was a hardworking and devoted mother. Every day she was out in the garden, putting the washing out and taking it in. From the kitchen window, as she washed napkins and vests in the sink, she kept an eye on the fine perambulator outdoors in the sun. Every five minutes it seemed she was nipping outdoors to adjust the hood, tuck in an extra blanket or simply sing.

Merrily was not the only one who was devoted to the perambulator. Emmeline and Adeline were besotted.

Merrily emerged one day from under the back porch with a basket of washing under one arm, and the perambulator wasn't there. She halted abruptly. Her mouth opened and her hands came up to her cheeks; the basket tumbled into the flower bed, tipping collars and socks onto the wallflowers. Merrily never looked once toward the fence and the brambles. She turned her head left and right as if she couldn't believe her eyes, left and right, left and right, left and right, all the time with the panic building up inside her, and in the end she let out a shriek, a high-pitched noise that rose into the blue sky as if it could rend it in two.

Mr. Griffin looked up from his vegetable plot and came to the fence, three doors down. Next door old Granny Stokes frowned at the kitchen sink and came out onto her porch. Astounded, they looked at Merrily, wondering whether their laughing neighbor was really capable of making such a sound, and she looked wildly back at them, dumbstruck, as though her cry had used up a lifetime's supply of words.

Eventually she said it. "My baby's gone."

And once the words were out they sprang into action. Mr. Griffin jumped over three fences in a flash, took Merrily by the arm and led her around to the front of her house, saying, "Gone? Where's he gone?" Granny Stokes disappeared from her back porch and a second later her voice floated in the air from the front garden, calling out for help.