I felt a sudden chill. Who had selected these words, I wondered? Was it Vida Winter? And what was the mood behind them? It seemed to me that there was room for a certain ambiguity in the expression. Was it the sorrow of bereavement? Or the triumphant farewell of the survivors to a bad lot?

Leaving the church and walking slowly down the gravel drive to the lodge gates, I felt a light, almost weightless scrutiny on my back. Aurelius was gone, so what was it? The Angelfield ghost, perhaps? Or the burned-out eyes of the house itself? Most probably it was just a deer, watching me invisibly from the shadow of the woods.

"It's a shame," said my father in the shop that evening, "that you can't come home for a few hours."

"I am home," I protested, feigning ignorance. But I knew it was my mother he was talking about. The truth was that I couldn't bear her tinny brightness, nor the pristine paleness of her house. I lived in shadows, had made friends with my grief, but in my mother's house I knew my sorrow was unwelcome. She might have loved a cheerful, chatty daughter, whose brightness would have helped banish her own fears. As it was, she was afraid of my silences. I preferred to stay away. "I have so little time," I explained. "Miss Winter is anxious that we should press on with the work. And it's only a few weeks till Christmas, after all. I'll be back again then."

"Yes," he said. "It will be Christmas soon." He seemed sad and worried. I knew I was the cause, and I was sorry I couldn't do anything about it. "I've packed a few books to take back to Miss Winter's with me. I've put a note on the cards in the index." "That's fine. No problem."

That night, drawing me out of sleep, a pressure on the edge of my bed. The angularity of bone pressing against my flesh through the bedclothes.

It is her! Come for me at last!

All I have to do is open my eyes and look at her. But fear paralyzes me. What will she be like? Like me? Tall and thin with dark eyes? Or- it is this I fear-has she come direct from the grave? What terrible thing is it that I am about to join myself-rejoin myself-to?

The fear dissolves.

I have woken up.

The pressure through the blankets is gone, a figment of sleep. I do not know whether I am relieved or disappointed. I got up, repacked my things, and in the bleakness of the winter dawn walked to the station for the first train north.

MIDDLES

When I left Yorkshire, November was going strong; by the time I returned it was in its dying days, about to tilt into December.

December gives me headaches and diminishes my already small appetite. It makes me restless in my reading. It keeps me awake at night with its damp, chilly darkness. There is a clock inside me that starts to tick on the first of December, measuring the days, the hours and the minutes, counting down to a certain day, the anniversary of the day my life was made and then unmade: my birthday. I do not like December.

This year the sense of foreboding was made worse by the weather. A heavy sky hovered repressively over the house, casting us into an eternal dim twilight. I arrived back to find Judith scurrying from room to room, collecting desk lamps and standard lamps and reading lamps from guest rooms that were never used, and arranging them in the library, the drawing room, my own rooms. Anything to keep at bay the murky grayness that lurked in every corner, under every chair, in the folds of the curtains and the pleats of the upholstery.

Miss Winter asked no questions about my absence, nor did she tell me anything about the progression of her illness, but even after so short an absence, her decline was clear to see. The cashmere wraps fell in apparently empty folds around her diminished frame, and on her fingers the rubies and emeralds seemed to have expanded, so thin had her hands become. The fine white line that had been visible in her parting before I left had broadened; it crept along each hair, diluting the metallic tones to a weaker shade of orange. But despite her physical frailty, she seemed full of some force, some energy, that overrode both illness and age and made her powerful. As soon as I presented myself in the room, almost before I had sat down and taken out my notebook, she began to speak, picking up the story where she had left off, as though it were brimful in her and could not be contained a moment longer.

With Isabelle gone, it was felt in the village that something should be done for the children. They were thirteen; it was not an age to be left unattended; they needed a woman's influence. Should they not be sent to school somewhere? Though what school would accept children such as these? When a school was found to be out of the question, it was decided that a governess should be employed.

A governess was found. Her name was Hester. Hester Barrow. It was not a pretty name, but then she was not a pretty girl.

Dr. Maudsley organized it all. Charlie, locked in his grief, was scarcely aware of what was going on, and John-the-dig and the Missus, mere servants in the house, were not consulted. The doctor approached Mr. Lomax, the family solicitor, and between the two of them and with a hand from the bank manager, all the arrangements were made. Then it was done.

Helpless, passive, we all shared in the anticipation, each with our particular mix of emotion. The Missus was divided. She felt an instinctive suspicion of this stranger who was to come into her domain, and connected with this suspicion was the fear of being found wanting-for she had been in charge for years and knew her limitations. She also felt hope. Hope that the new arrival would instill a sense of discipline in the children and restore manners and sanity to the house. In fact, so great was her desire for a settled and well-run domestic life that in the advent of the governess's arrival she took to issuing orders, as though we were the sort of children who might comply. Needless to say, we took no notice.

John-the-dig's feelings were less divided, were in fact entirely hostile. He would not be drawn into the Missus's long wonderings about how things would be, and refused by stony silence to encourage the optimism that was ready to take root in her heart. "If she's the right kind of person…" she would say, or "There's no knowing how much better things could be…, " but he stared out of the kitchen window and would not be drawn. When the doctor suggested that he take the brougham to meet the governess at the station he was downright rude. "I've not got the time to be traipsing across the county after damned schoolmistresses," he replied, and the doctor was obliged to make arrangements to collect her himself. Since the incident with the topiary garden, John had not been the same, and now, with the coming of this new change, he spent hours alone, brooding over his own fears and concerns for the future. This incomer meant a fresh pair of eyes, a fresh pair of ears, in a house where no one had looked or listened properly for years. John-the-dig, habituated to secrecy, foresaw trouble.

In our separate ways we all felt daunted. All except Charlie, that is. When the day came, only Charlie was his usual self. Though he was locked away and out of sight, his presence was nonetheless made known by the thundering and clattering that shook the house from time to time, a din to which we 'd all become so accustomed that we scarcely even noticed. In his vigil for Isabelle, the man had no notion of day or time, and the arrival of a governess meant nothing to him.

We were idling that morning in one of the front rooms on the first floor. A bedroom, you'd have called it, if the bed had been visible under the pile of junk that had accumulated there the way junk does over the decades. Emmeline was working away with her nails at the silver embroidery threads that ran through the pattern of the curtains. When she succeeded in freeing one, she surreptitiously put it in her pocket, ready to add later to the magpie stash under her bed. But her concentration was broken. Someone was coming, and whether she knew what that meant or not, she had been contaminated by the sense of expectation that hung about the house.