Free The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Page A

glimmering threads of a spider’s web
stretched across a garden path from branch to branch. The library itself,
slighter, narrower seemingly than the night before, appeared as a mirage of
books in the wet winter garden.
     
    In contrast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss
Winter was all heat and fire, an exotic hothouse flower in a northern winter
garden. She wore no sunglasses today, but her eyelids were colored purple,
lined Cleopatra-style with kohl and fringed with the same heavy black lashes as
yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before:
along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter’s copper curls was a narrow
margin of pure white.
     
    ‘You remember our agreement,“ she began, as I sat down in the
chair on the other side of the fire. ”Beginnings, middles and endings, all in
the correct order. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions.“
     
    I was tired. A strange bed in a strange place, and I had woken
with a dull, atonic tune ringing in my head. “Start where you like,” I said.
     
    ‘I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning
is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend
to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then
I was born… Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can
be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are
webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.
Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
     
    ‘My story is not only mine; it is the story of Angelfield.
Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself.
George and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle’s children,
Emmeline and Adeline. Their house, their fortunes, their Fears. And their
ghost. One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?“
     
    She gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it.
     
    ‘A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are
not really your own but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me,
for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been
something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended
by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In act, when I was
born I was no more than a subplot.
     
    ‘But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you
thinking. What are the sources? Where does the information come from? Well,
where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants,
of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I earned it all directly from
her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she
sat cleaning the silverware, and seem o forget my presence as she spoke. She
frowned as she remembered village rumors and local gossip. Events and
conversations and scenes rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over
the kitchen table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas
unsuitable for a child—unsuitable in particular for me—then suddenly she would
remember I was there, break off her account mid-sentence and start rubbing the
cutlery vigorously, as if to erase the past altogether. But there can be no
secrets in a house where there are children. I pieced the story together
another way. When the Missus talked with the gardener over their morning tea, I
learned to interpret the sudden silences that punctuated seemingly innocent
conversations. Without appearing to notice anything, I saw the silent glances
that certain words provoked between them. And when they thought they were alone
and could talk privately… they were not in fact alone. In this way I understood
the story of my origins. And later, when the Missus was no longer the woman she
used to be, when age