Thoughtfully I lifted my eyes from the final page of Hester’s diary. A number of things had struck my attention as I had been reading it, and now that I had finished, I had the leisure to sider them more methodically.
Oh, I thought.
Oh.
And then, OH!
How to describe my eureka? It began as a stray what if, a wild jecture, an implausible notion. It was, well, not impossible perhaps, but absurd! For a start—
About to begin marshaling the sensible terarguments, I stopped dead in my tracks. For my mind, rag ahead of itself in a momentous act of premonition, had already submitted to this revised version of events. In a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same—yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old e if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or faces or Rouen cathedrals if you only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen it.
There followed a long hour of musing. One element at a time, taking all the different angles separately, I reviewed everything I knew. Everything I had been told and everything I had discovered. Yes, I thought. And yes, again. That, and that, and that, too. My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regeed. Puzzles explaihemselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.
At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke ss and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.
I knew what Hester saw that day she thought she saw a ghost.
I khe identity of the boy in the garden.
I knew who attacked Mrs. Maudsley with a violin.
I knew who killed John-the-dig.
I knew who Emmeline was looking for underground.
Details fell into place. Emmelialking to herself behind a closed door, when her sister was at the doctor’s house. Jane Eyre, the book that appears and reappears iory, like a silver thread in a tapestry. I uood the mysteries of Hester’s wandering bookmark, the appearance of The Turn of the Screw and the disappearance of her diary. I uood the strangeness of John-the-dig’s decision to teach the girl who had once desecrated his garden how to tend it.
I uood the girl in the mist, and how and why she came out of it. I uood how it was that a girl like Adeline could melt away and leave Miss Winter in her place.
‘I am going to tell you a story about twins,“ Miss Winter had called after me that first evening in the library, when I was on the verge of leaving. Words that with their ued ey own story attached me irresistibly to hers.
Once upon a time there were two baby girls…
Except that now I knew better.
She had pointed me in the right dire that very first night, if I had only known how to listen.
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Lea?“ she had asked me. ”I am going to tell you a ghost story.“
And I had told her, “Some other time.”
But she had told me a ghost story.
Once upon a time there were two baby girls…
Or alternatively: Once upon a time there were three.
Once upon a time there was a house and the house was haunted.
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