The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield Read Free Book Online Page B

luck or accident I cannot say, but I found my way to
the library a full twenty minutes earlier than I had been commanded to attend.
It was not a problem. What better place to kill time than a library? And for
me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and
treatment of books?
     
    My first impression was of the room as a whole, and it struck me
by its marked difference from the rest of the house. The other rooms were thick
with the corpses of suffocated words; here in the library you could breathe.
Instead of being shrouded in fabric, it was a room made of wood. There were
floorboards underfoot, shutters at the tall windows and the walls were lined
with solid oak shelves.
     
    It was a high room, much longer than it was wide. On one side
five arched windows reached from ceiling almost to floor; at their base window
seats had been installed. Facing them were five similarly shaped mirrors,
positioned to reflect the view outside, but tonight echoing the carved panels
of the shutters. The bookshelves extended from the walls into the rooms,
forming bays; in each recess an amber-shaded lamp was placed on a small table.
Apart from the fire at the far end of the room, this was the only lighting, and
it created soft, warm pools of illumination at the edge of which rows of books
melted into darkness.
     
    Slowly I made my way down the center of the room, taking a look
to the bays on my right and left. After my first glances I found myself
nodding. It was a proper, well-maintained library. Categorized, alphabetized
and clean, it was just as I would have done it myself. All my favorites were
there, with a great number of rare and valuable volumes as well as more
ordinary, well-thumbed copies. Not only Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman
in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Spectre Bride. I
was thrilled to come across a Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so rare that my father had
given up believing in its existence.
     
    Marveling at the rich selection of volumes on Miss Winter’s
shelves, I browsed my way toward the fireplace at the far end of the room. In
the final bay on the right, one particular set of shelves stood it even from
some distance: Instead of displaying the mellow, preeminently brown stripes
that were the spines of the older books, this stack showed the silvery blues,
sage greens and pink-beiges of more :cent decades. They were the only modern
books in the room. Miss Winter’s own works. With her earliest titles at the top
of the stack and ;cent novels at the bottom, each work was represented in its
many different editions and even in different languages. I saw no Thirteen
Tales, the mistitled book I had read at the bookshop, but in its other guise as
Tales of Change and Desperation there were more than a dozen different
editions.
     
    I selected a copy of Miss Winter’s most recent book. On page one
an elderly nun arrives at a small house in the backstreets of an unnamed town
that seems to be in Italy; she is shown into a room where a pompous young man,
whom we take to be English or American, greets her in some surprise. (I turned
the page. The first paragraphs had drawn me in, just as I had been drawn in
every time I had opened one of her books, and without meaning to, I began to
read in earnest.) The young man does not at first appreciate what the reader
already understands: that his visitor has come on a grave mission, one that
will alter is life in ways he cannot be expected to foresee. She begins her
explanation and bears it patiently (I turned the page; I had forgotten the
library, forgotten Miss Winter, forgotten myself) when he treats her with the
levity of indulged youth…
     
    And then something penetrated through my reading and drew me out
of the book. A prickling sensation at the back of the neck.
     
    Someone was watching me.
     
    I know the back-of-the-neck experience is not an uncommon
phenomenon; it was, however,