Free The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Page B

confused her and released her tongue, then her meanderings
confirmed the story I had spent years divining. It is this story—the one that
came to me in hints, glances and silences—I am going to translate into words
for you now.“
     
    Miss Winter cleared her throat, preparing to start.
     
    ‘Isabelle Angelfield was odd.“
     
    Her voice seemed to slip away from her, and she stopped,
surprised. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious.
     
    ‘Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.“
     
    It came again, the abrupt loss of voice.
     
    So used was she to hiding the truth that it had become atrophied
in her. She made one false start, then another. But, like a gifted musician
who, after years without playing, takes up her instrument again, she finally
found her way.
     
    She told me the story of Isabelle and Charlie.
     
    Isabelle Angelfield was odd.
     
    Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm.
     
    It is impossible to know whether or not these facts are
connected.
     
    But when, two and a half decades later, Isabelle left home for
the second time, people in the village looked back and remembered the
endlessness of the rain on the day of her birth. Some remembered as if it was
yesterday that the doctor was late, delayed by the floods caused by the river having
burst its banks. Others recalled beyond the shadow of a doubt that the cord had
been wrapped round the baby’s neck, almost strangling her before she could be
born. Yes, it was a difficult birth, all right, for on the stroke of six, just
as the baby was born and the doctor rang the bell, hadn’t the mother passed
away, out of this world and into the next? So if the weather had been fine, and
the doctor had been earlier, and if the cord had not deprived the child of
oxygen, and if the mother had not died…
     
    And if, and if, and if. Such thinking is pointless. Isabelle was
as Isabelle was, and that is all there is to say about the matter.
     
    The infant, a white scrap of fury, was motherless. And at the
beginning, to all intents and purposes, it looked like she’d be fatherless,
too. For her father, George Angelfield, fell into a decline. He locked himself
in the library and refused point-blank to come out. This might seem excessive;
ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield
was an odd fellow, and there it was. He had loved his wife—his ill-tempered,
lazy, selfish and pretty Mathilde. He had loved her more than he loved his
horses, more even than his dog. As for their son, Charlie, a boy of nine, it
never entered George’s head to wonder whether he loved him more or less than
Mathilde, for the fact was, he never thought of Charlie at all.
     
    Bereaved, driven half mad with grief, George Angelfield sat all
day in the library, eating nothing, seeing no one. And he spent his nights
there, too, on the daybed, not sleeping but staring red-eyed at the moon. This
went on for months. His pale cheeks became paler; he grew thin; tie stopped
speaking. Specialists were called from London. The vicar came and left again.
The dog pined away from want of affection, and when it died, George Angelfield
barely noticed.
     
    In the end the Missus got fed up with it all. She picked up baby
Isabelle from the crib in the nursery and took her downstairs. She strode past
the butler, ignoring his protestations, and went into the library without
knocking. Up to the desk she marched, and she plumped the baby down in George
Angelfield’s arms without a word. Then she turned her back and walked out,
slamming the door behind her.
     
    The butler made to go in, thinking to retrieve the infant, but
the Missus raised her finger and hissed, “Don’t you dare!” He was so startled
that he obeyed. The household servants gathered outside the library door,
looking at one another, not knowing what to do. But the force of the Missus’s
conviction held them paralyzed, and they did