The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Read Free Book Online

of •ops on the windowpane. Yet
the rain did not come.
     
    At Harrogate, Miss Winter’s driver, a dark-haired, bearded man,
as disinclined to talk. I was glad, for his lack of conversation left me free
to study the unfamiliar views that unfolded as soon as we left the town behind.
I had never been north before. My researches had taken e to London and, once or
twice, across the channel to libraries and chives in Paris. Yorkshire was a
county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once
we left the town behind, There were few signs of the contemporary world, and it
was possible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into
the countryside. The villages were quaint, with their churches and pubs and
stone cottages; then, the farther we went, the smaller the villages became and
the greater the distance between them until isolated farmhouses were the only
interruptions to the naked winter fields. At last we left even the farmhouses
behind and it grew dark. The car’s headlamps showed me swathes of a colorless,
undefined landscape: no fences, no walls, no hedges, no buildings. Just a
vergeless road and each side of it, vague undulations of darkness.
     
    ‘Is this the moors?“ I asked.
     
    ‘It is,“ the driver said, and I leaned closer to the window, but
all I could make out was the waterlogged sky that pressed down
claustrophobically on the land, on the road, on the car. Beyond a certain
distance even the light from our headlamps was extinguished.
     
    At an unmarked junction we turned off the road and bumped along
for a couple of miles on a stony track. We stopped twice for the driver to open
a gate and close it behind us, then on we went, jolting and shaking for another
mile.
     
    Miss Winter’s house lay between two slow rises in die darkness,
almost-hills that seemed to merge into each other and that revealed the
presence of a valley and a house only at the last turn of the drive. The sky by
now was blooming shades of purple, indigo and gunpowder, and the house beneath
it crouched long and low and very dark. The driver opened the car door for me,
and I stepped out to see that he had already unloaded my case and was ready to
pull away, leaving me alone in front of an unlit porch. Barred shutters blacked
out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in
upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors.
     
    I rang the bell. Its clang was oddly muted in the damp air.
While I waited I watched the sky. Cold crept through the soles of my shoes, and
I rang the bell again. Still no one came to the door.
     
    About to ring for a third time, I was caught by surprise when
with no sound at all the door was opened.
     
    The woman in the doorway smiled professionally and apologized
for keeping me waiting. At first sight she seemed very ordinary. Her short,
neat hair was the same palish shade as her skin, and her eyes were neither blue
nor gray nor green. Yet it was less the absence of color than a lack of
expression that made her plain. With some warmth of emotion in them, her eyes
could, I suspected, have gleamed with life; and it seemed to me, as she matched
my scrutiny lance for glance, that she maintained her inexpressivity only by
deliberate effort.
     
    ‘Good evening,“ I said. ”I am Margaret Lea.“
     
    ‘The biographer. We’ve been expecting you.“
     
    What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s
pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was
anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit em
unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely
that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, it only the fact
that I had come and was a stranger.
     
    She ushered me in and closed the door behind me. The key turned
the lock without a sound and there was not a squeak as the well-oiled bolts
were