Read Online The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield - Free Book Online

the fair princess. Three wishes granted to the
fisherman by the magic talking fish. Three bears for Goldilocks and Three Billy
Goats Gruff. Miss Lea, if you had asked me two questions or four I might have
been able to lie, but three…“
     
    I slid my pencil from the ring binding of my pad and opened the
cover.
     
    ‘What is your real name?“
     
    She swallowed. “Are you quite sure this is the best way to
proceed? I could tell you a ghost story—a rather good one, even if I do say so
myself. It might be a better way of getting to the heart of things…”
     
    I shook my head. “Tell me your name.”
     
    The jumble of knuckles and rubies shifted in her lap; the stones
glowed in the firelight.
     
    ‘My name is Vida Winter. I went through the necessary legal
procedures in order to be able to call myself by that name legally and
honestly. What you want to know is the name by which I was known prior to the
change. That name was—“
     
    She paused, needing to overcome some obstacle within herself,
and when she pronounced the name it was with a noticeable neutrality, an utter
absence of intonation, as though it were a word in some foreign language she
had never applied herself to learning: “That name was Adeline March.”
     
    As though to cut short even the minimal vibration the name
carried in the air, she continued rather tartly, “I hope you’re not going to
ask my date of birth. I am of an age at which it is de rigueur to have
forgotten it.”
     
    ‘I can manage without, if you give me your place of birth.“
     
    She released an irritated sigh. “I could tell you much better,
if you would only allow me to tell it my way…”
     
    ‘This is what we have agreed. Three facts on public record.“
     
    She pursed her lips. “You will find it is a matter of record
that Adeline March was born in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. I can
hardly be expected to offer any personal guarantee of the veracity of that
detail. Though I am an exceptional person, I am not so exceptional that I can
remember my own birth.”
     
    I noted it down.
     
    Now the third question. I had, it must be admitted, no
particular third question prepared. She did not want to tell me her age, and I
hardly needed her date of birth. With her long publishing history and the date
of her first book, she could not be less than seventy-three or four, and to
judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could
be no more than eighty. But the uncertainty didn’t matter; with her name and
her place of birth, I could find the date out for myself anyway. From my first
two questions, I already had the formation I needed in order to ascertain that
a person by the name of Adeline March actually existed. What to ask, then?
Perhaps it was my desire to hear Miss Winter tell a story, but when the
occasion arose to play my third question as a wild card, I seized it.
     
    ‘Tell me,“ I began slowly, carefully. In the stories with the
wizards, is always with the third wish that everything so dangerously won is
disastrously snatched away. ”Tell me something that happened to you in the days
before you changed your name, for which there exists a public record.“
Educational successes, I was thinking. School sporting achievements. Those
minor triumphs that are recorded for proud parents and for posterity.
     
    In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her
external self into her core; under my very eyes she managed to absent herself
from herself, and I began to understand how it was that earlier I had failed to
see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing
what was going on beneath the surface.
     
    And then she emerged.
     
    ‘Do you know why my books are so successful?“
     
    ‘For a great many reasons, I believe.“
     
    ‘Possibly. Largely it is because they have a beginning, a middle
and an end. In the right order. Of course