I thought I knew it all, when I had my moment of elucidation.

I thought, when I realized that there were not two girls at Angelfield but three, that I had the key to the whole story in my hand.

At the end of my cogitations I realized that until I knew what happened on the night of the fire, I knew nothing.

BONES

It was Christmas Eve; it was late; it was snowing hard. The first taxi driver and the second refused to take me so far out of town on such a night, but the third, indifferent of expression, must have been moved by the ardor of my request, for he shrugged his shoulders and let me in. "We'll give it a go," he warned gruffly.

We drove out of town and the snow continued to fall, piling up meticulously, flake by flake, on every inch of earth, every hedge top, every bough. After the last village, the last farmhouse, we found ourselves in a white landscape, the road indistinguishable at times from the flat land all about, and I shrank into my seat, expecting at any moment that the driver would give up and turn back. Only my clear directions reassured him that we were in fact on a road. I got out myself to open the first gate, then we found ourselves at the second set, the main gates of the house.

"I hope you'll find your way back all right," I said.

"Me? I'll be all right," he said with another shrug.

As I expected, the gates were locked. Not wanting the driver to think I was some kind of thief, I pretended to be looking for my keys in my bag while he turned the car. Only when he was some distance away did I grab hold of the bars of the gate and clamber over.

The kitchen door was not locked. I pulled off my boots, shook the snow off my coat and hung it up. I walked through the empty kitchen and made my way to Emmeline's quarters, where I knew Miss Winter would be. Full of accusations, full of questions, I stoked my rage; it was for Aurelius and for the woman whose bones had lain for sixty years in the burned-out ruins of Angelfield's library. For all my inward storming, my approach was silent; the carpet drank in the fury of my tread.

I did not knock but pushed the door open and went straight in.

The curtains were still closed. At Emmeline's bedside Miss Winter was sitting quietly. Startled by my entrance, she stared at me, an extraordinary shimmer in her eyes.

"Bones/" \ hissed at her. "They have found bones at Angelfield!"

I was all eyes, all ears, waiting on tenterhooks for an admission to emerge from her. Whether it was in word or expression or gesture did not matter. She would make it, and I would read it.

Except that there was something in the room trying to distract me from my scrutiny. "Bones?" said Miss Winter. She was paper-white and there was an ocean in her eyes, vast enough to drown all my fury.

"Oh," she said.

Oh. What richness of vibration a single syllable can contain. Fear. Despair. Sorrow and resignation. Relief, of a dark, unconsoling kind. And grief, deep and ancient.

And then the nagging distraction in the room swelled so urgently in my mind that there was no room for anything else. What was it? Something extraneous to my drama of the bones. Something that preceded my intrusion. For a faltering second I was confused, then all the insignificant things I had noticed without noticing came together. The atmosphere in the room. The closed curtains. The aqueous transparency of Miss Winter's eyes. The fact that the steel core that had always been her essence seemed to have simply gone from her.

My attention narrowed to one thing: Where was the slow tide of Emmeline 's breath? No sound came to my ears.

"No! She's-"

I fell to my knees by the bed and stared.

"Yes," Miss Winter said softly. "She's gone. It was a few minutes ago.»

I gazed at Emmeline's empty face. Nothing really had changed. Her scars were still angrily red; her lips had the same sideways slant; her eyes were still green. I touched her twisted patchwork hand, and her skin was warm. Was it true that she was gone? Absolutely, irrevocably gone? It seemed impossible that it should be so. Surely she had not deserted us completely? Surely there was something of her left behind to console us? Was there no spell, no talisman, no magic that would bring her back? Was there nothing I could say that would reach her?

It was the warmth in her hand that persuaded me she could hear me. It was the warmth in her hand that brought all the words into my chest, falling over each other in their impatience to fly into Emmeline's ear.

"Find my sister, Emmeline. Please find her. Tell her I'm waiting for her. Tell her-" My throat was too narrow for all the words and they broke against each other as they rose, choking, out of me. "Tell her I miss her! Tell her I'm lonely!" The words launched themselves impetuously, urgently from my lips. With fervor they flew across the space between us, chasing Emmeline. "Tell her I can't wait any longer! Tell her to corned

But I was too late. The divide had come down. Invisible. Irrevocable. Implacable.

My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

"Oh, my poor child." I felt the touch of Miss Winter's hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly.

Eventually I dried my eyes. There were only a few words left. Rattling around loose without their old companions. "She was my twin," I said. "She was here. Look."

I pulled at the jumper tucked into my skirt, revealed my torso to the light.

My scar. My half-moon. Pale silver-pink, a nacreous translucence. The line that divides. "This is where she was. We were joined here. And they separated us. And she died. She couldn't live without me." I felt the flutter of Miss Winter's fingers tracing the crescent on my skin, saw the tender sympathy in her face. "The thing is- " (the final words, the very last words, after this I need never say anything, ever again) "I don't think I can live without her."

"Child." Miss Winter looked at me. Held me suspended in the compassion of her eyes.

I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water.

All the time Miss Winter held me in her long green gaze.

Then slowly, slowly, the sand resettled and the water returned to its quietness, slowly, slowly. And the bones resettled in the rusting hold. "You asked me once for my story," I said. "And you told me you didn't have one." "Now you know, I do have one." "I never doubted it." She smiled a poor regretful smile. "When I invited you here I thought I knew your story already. I had read your essay about the Landier brothers. Such a good essay, it was. You knew so much about siblings. Insider knowledge, I thought. And the more I looked at your essay, the more I thought you must have a twin. And so I fixed upon you to be my biographer. Because if after all these years of tale telling I was tempted to lie to you, you would find me out."

"I have found you out."

She nodded, tranquil, sad, unsurprised. "About time, too. How much do you know?"

"What you told me. Only a subplot, is how you put it. You told me the story of Isabelle and her twins, and I wasn't paying attention. The subplot was Charlie and his rampages. You kept pointing me in the direction of Jane Eyre. The book about the outsider in the family. The motherless cousin. I don't know who your mother was. And how you came to be at Angelfield without her."