At nine o’clock the m Miss Winter sent for me and I went to her in the library.
By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters folded back, the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky. The garden, still wet from the night’s downpleamed in the m sun. The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier, damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes in place seemed no more solid than the 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 i winter garden.
In trast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss Winter was all heat and fire, aic 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 reement,“ she began, as I sat down in the chair oher 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, atonie 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 borhat is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to toue part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to uand one part without having a sense of the whole.
‘My story is not only mi is the story of Angelfield. Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself. Gee and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle’s children, Emmeline and Adeliheir house, their fortuheir Fears. And their ghost. One should alay 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 tinuation of someone else’s story. Take me, for instao look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn’t you? Apanied 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 e from? Well, where does any information e from in a house like Angelfield? The servants, of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I ear all directly from her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she sat ing the silverware, and seem et my presence as she spoke. She frowned as she remembered village rumors and local gossip. Events and versations and ses rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over the kit table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas unsuitable for a child—uns
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