Diane Setterfield - The Thirteenth Tale

It was Aurelius.

"Look at you! You're blue with cold! Quick, come with me." He took my arm and led me briskly off. My feet stumbled over the ground behind him until we came to a road, a car. He bundled me in. There was a slamming of doors, the hum of an engine, and then a blast of warmth around my ankles and knees. Aurelius opened a Thermos flask and poured a mug of orange tea.

"Drink!"

I drank. The tea was hot and sweet.

"Eat!"

I bit into the sandwich he held out.

In the warmth of the car, drinking hot tea and eating chicken sandwiches, I felt colder than ever. My teeth started to chatter and I shivered uncontrollably. "Goodness gracious!" Aurelius exclaimed softly as he passed me one dainty sandwich after another. "Dear me!" The food seemed to bring me to my senses a little. "What are you doing here, Aurelius?" "I came to give you this," he said, and he reached over to the back and lifted a cake tin through the gap between the seats. Placing the tin on my lap, he beamed gloriously at me as he removed the lid. Inside was a cake. A homemade cake. And on the cake, in curly icing letters, were three words: Happy Birthday Margaret.

I was too cold to cry. Instead the combination of cold and cake set me talking. Words emerged from me, randomly, like objects disgorged by glaciers as they thaw. Nocturnal singing, a garden with eyes, sisters, a baby, a spoon. "And she even knows the house," I babbled while Aurelius dried my hair with paper towels, "your house and Mrs. Love's. She looked through the window and thought Mrs. Love was like a fairy-tale grandmother… Don't you see what it means? "

Aurelius shook his head. "But she told me-"

"She lied to you, Aurelius! When you came to see her in your brown suit, she lied. She has admitted it."

"Bless me!" exclaimed Aurelius. "However did you know about that brown suit of mine? I had to pretend to be a journalist, you know." But then, as what I was telling him began to sink in, "A spoon like mine, you say? And she knew the house?"

"She's your aunt, Aurelius. And Emmeline is your mother."

Aurelius stopped patting my hair, and for a long moment he stared out of the car window in the direction of the house. "My mother," he murmured, "there."

I nodded.

There was another silence, and then he turned to me. "Take me to her, Margaret."

I seemed to wake up. "The thing is, Aurelius, she's not well."

"111? Then you must take me to her. Without delay!"

"Not ill, exactly." How to explain? "She was injured in the fire, Aurelius. Not only her face. Her mind."

He absorbed this new information, added it to his store of loss and pain, and when he spoke again it was with a grave firmness of purpose. "Take me to her."

Was it illness that dictated my response? Was it the fact that it was my birthday? Was it my own motherlessness? These factors might have had something to do with it, but more significant than all of them was Aurelius's expression as he waited for my answer. There were a hundred and one reasons to say no to his demand, but faced with the ferocity of his need, they faded to nothing.

I said yes.

My bath went some way toward thawing me out, but did nothing to soothe the ache behind my eyes. I gave up all thoughts of working for the rest of the afternoon and crept into bed, pulling the extra covers well up over my ears. Inside I was still shivering. In a shallow sleep I saw strange visions. Hester and my father and the twins and my mother, visions in which everyone had someone else's face, in which everyone was someone else disguised, and even my own face was disturbing to me as it shifted and altered, sometimes myself, sometimes another. Then Aurelius's bright head appeared in my dream: himself, always himself, only himself, and he smiled and the phantoms were banished. Darkness closed over me like water, and I sank to the depths of sleep.

I awoke with a headache, aches in my limbs and my joints and my back. A tiredness that had nothing to do with exertion or lack of sleep weighed me down and slowed my thoughts. The darkness had thickened. Had I slept through the hour of my appointment with Aurelius? The thought nagged at me but only very distantly, and long minutes passed before I could rouse myself to look at my watch. For during my sleep, an obscure sentiment had formed within me-trepidation? nostalgia? excitement?-and it had given rise to a sense of expectation.

The past was returning! My sister was near. There was no doubting it. I couldn't see her, couldn't smell her, but my inner ear, attuned always and only to her, had caught her vibration, and it filled me with a dark and soporific joy.

There was no need to put off Aurelius. My sister would find me, wherever I was. Was she not my twin? In fact, I had half an hour before I was due to meet him at the garden door. I dragged myself heavily from my bed and, too cold and weary to take off my pajamas before dressing, I pulled a thick skirt and sweater on over the top. Bundled up like a child on firework night, I went downstairs to the kitchen. Judith had left a cold meal for me, but I had no appetite and left the food untouched. For ten minutes I sat at the kitchen table, longing to close my eyes and not daring to, in case I gave in to the torpor that was inviting my head toward the hard tabletop.

With five minutes to spare, I opened the kitchen door and slipped into the garden.

No light from the house, no stars. I stumbled in the darkness; soft soil underfoot and the brush of leaves and branches told me when I had veered o(( the path. Out of nowhere a branch scratched my face and I closed my eyes to protect them. Inside my head was a half-painful, half-euphoric vibration. I understood entirely. It was her song. My sister was coming.

I reached the meeting point. The darkness stirred itself. It was him. My hand bumped clumsily against him, then felt itself clasped.

"Are you all right?"

I heard the question, but distantly.

"Do you have a temperature?"

The words were there; it was curious that they had no meaning.

I'd have liked to tell him about the glorious vibrations, to tell him that my sister was coming, that she would be here with me any minute now. I knew it; I knew it from the heat radiating from her mark on my side. But the white sound of her stood between me and my words and made me dumb.

Aurelius let go of my hand to remove a glove, and I felt his palm, strangely cool in the hot night, on my forehead. "You should be in bed," he said.

I pulled at Aurelius's sleeve, a feeble tug, but enough. He followed me through the garden as smoothly as a statue on casters.

I have no memory of Judith's keys in my hand, though I must have taken them. We must have walked through the long corridors to Emme-line's apartment, but that, too, has been wiped from my mind. I do remember the door, but the picture that presents itself to my mind is that it swung open as we reached it, slowly and of its own accord, which I know to be quite impossible. I must have unlocked it, but this piece of reality has been lost and the image of the door opening by itself persists.

My memory of what happened in Emmeline 's quarters that night is fragmented. Whole tracts of time have collapsed in on themselves, while other events seem in my recollection to have happened over and over again in rapid succession. Faces and expressions loom frighteningly large, then Emmeline and Aurelius appear as tiny marionettes a great distance away. As for myself, I was possessed, sleepy, chilled- and distracted during the whole affair by my own overwhelming preoccupation: my sister.

By a process of logic and reason, I have attempted to place into a meaningful sequence images that my mind recorded only incompletely and in random fashion, like events in a dream.