Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

Before we parted, Aurelius took my hand and patted it in an easy, old-fashioned manner. Then his massive frame glided gracefully up the wide sweep of steps and he closed the heavy doors behind him.

Slowly I walked down the drive to the church, my mind full of the stranger I had just met-met and befriended. It was most unlike me. And as I passed through the lych-gate, I reflected that perhaps /was the stranger. Was it just my imagination, or since meeting Miss Winter was I not quite myself?

I had left it too late for the light, and photographs were out of the question. So I took my notebook out for my walk in the churchyard. Angelfield was an old community but a small one, and there were not so very many graves. I found John Digence, Gathered to the Garden of the Lord, and a woman, Martha Dunne, Loyal Servant of our Lord, whose dates corresponded closely enough with what I expected for the Missus. I copied the names, dates and inscriptions into my notebook. One of the graves had fresh flowers on it, a gay bunch of orange chrysanthemums, and I went closer to see who it was who was remembered so warmly. It was Joan Mary Love, Never Forgotten.

Though I looked, I could not see the Angelfield name anywhere. But it did not puzzle me for more than a minute. The family of the house would not have ordinary graves in the churchyard. Their tombs would be grander affairs, marked by effigies and with long histories carved into their marble slabs. And they would be inside, in the chapel.

The church was gloomy. The ancient windows, narrow pieces of greenish glass held in a thick stone framework of arches, let in a sepulchral light that weakly illuminated the pale stone arches and columns, the whitened vaults between the black roof timbers and the smooth polished wood of the pews. When my eyes had adjusted, I peered at the memorial stones and monuments in the tiny chapel. Angelfields dead for centuries all had their epitaphs here, line after loquacious line of encomium, expensively carved into costly marble. Another day I would come back to decipher the engravings of these earlier generations; for today it was only a handful of names I was looking for.

With the death of George Angelfield, the family's loquacity came to an end. Charlie and Isabelle-for presumably it was they who decided-seemed not to have gone to any great lengths in summing up their father's life and death for generations to come. Released from earthly sorrows, he is with his Savior now, was the stone's laconic message. Isabelle 's role in this world and her departure from it were summed up in the most conventional terms: Much loved mother and sister, she is gone to a betterplace. But I copied it into my notebook all the same and did a quick calculation. Younger than me! Not so tragically young as her husband, but still, not an age to die.

I almost missed Charlie's. Having eliminated every other stone in the chapel, I was about to give up, when my eye finally made out a small, dark stone. So small was it, and so black, that it seemed designed for invisibility, or at least insignificance. There was no gold leaf to give relief to the letters so, unable to make them out by eye, I raised my hand and felt the carving, Braille style, with my fingertips, one word at a time.

CHARLIE ANGELFIELD

HE IS GONE INTO THE DARK NIGHT.

WE SHALL NEVER SEE HIM MORE.

There were no dates.

I felt a sudden chill. Who had selected these words, I wondered? Was it Vida Winter? And what was the mood behind them? It seemed to me that there was room for a certain ambiguity in the expression. Was it the sorrow of bereavement? Or the triumphant farewell of the survivors to a bad lot?

Leaving the church and walking slowly down the gravel drive to the lodge gates, I felt a light, almost weightless scrutiny on my back. Aurelius was gone, so what was it? The Angelfield ghost, perhaps? Or the burned-out eyes of the house itself? Most probably it was just a deer, watching me invisibly from the shadow of the woods.

"It's a shame," said my father in the shop that evening, "that you can't come home for a few hours."

"I am home," I protested, feigning ignorance. But I knew it was my mother he was talking about. The truth was that I couldn't bear her tinny brightness, nor the pristine paleness of her house. I lived in shadows, had made friends with my grief, but in my mother's house I knew my sorrow was unwelcome. She might have loved a cheerful, chatty daughter, whose brightness would have helped banish her own fears. As it was, she was afraid of my silences. I preferred to stay away. "I have so little time," I explained. "Miss Winter is anxious that we should press on with the work. And it's only a few weeks till Christmas, after all. I'll be back again then."

"Yes," he said. "It will be Christmas soon." He seemed sad and worried. I knew I was the cause, and I was sorry I couldn't do anything about it. "I've packed a few books to take back to Miss Winter's with me. I've put a note on the cards in the index." "That's fine. No problem."

That night, drawing me out of sleep, a pressure on the edge of my bed. The angularity of bone pressing against my flesh through the bedclothes.

It is her! Come for me at last!

All I have to do is open my eyes and look at her. But fear paralyzes me. What will she be like? Like me? Tall and thin with dark eyes? Or- it is this I fear-has she come direct from the grave? What terrible thing is it that I am about to join myself- rejoin myself-to?

The fear dissolves.

I have woken up.

The pressure through the blankets is gone, a figment of sleep. I do not know whether I am relieved or disappointed. I got up, repacked my things, and in the bleakness of the winter dawn walked to the station for the first train north.

When I left Yorkshire, November was going strong; by the time I returned it was in its dying days, about to tilt into December.

December gives me headaches and diminishes my already small appetite. It makes me restless in my reading. It keeps me awake at night with its damp, chilly darkness. There is a clock inside me that starts to tick on the first of December, measuring the days, the hours and the minutes, counting down to a certain day, the anniversary of the day my life was made and then unmade: my birthday. I do not like December.

This year the sense of foreboding was made worse by the weather. A heavy sky hovered repressively over the house, casting us into an eternal dim twilight. I arrived back to find Judith scurrying from room to room, collecting desk lamps and standard lamps and reading lamps from guest rooms that were never used, and arranging them in the library, the drawing room, my own rooms. Anything to keep at bay the murky grayness that lurked in every corner, under every chair, in the folds of the curtains and the pleats of the upholstery.

Miss Winter asked no questions about my absence, nor did she tell me anything about the progression of her illness, but even after so short an absence, her decline was clear to see. The cashmere wraps fell in apparently empty folds around her diminished frame, and on her fingers the rubies and emeralds seemed to have expanded, so thin had her hands become. The fine white line that had been visible in her parting before I left had broadened; it crept along each hair, diluting the metallic tones to a weaker shade of orange. But despite her physical frailty, she seemed full of some force, some energy, that overrode both illness and age and made her powerful. As soon as I presented myself in the room, almost before I had sat down and taken out my notebook, she began to speak, picking up the story where she had left off, as though it were brimful in her and could not be contained a moment longer.