I sat down. "I don't accuse you of anything," I began mildly, but immediately she interrupted me.

"Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness."

Her forehead twitched, and an eyebrow rose over the top of the sunglasses. A strong black arch that bore no relation to any natural brow.

"Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius."

Her voice flowed relentlessly on, recalling instance after instance of genius and its bedfellow selfishness, and the folds of her shawl never moved as she spoke. She must be made of steel, I thought.

Eventually she drew her lecture to a close with the words: "Politeness is a virtue I neither possess nor esteem in others. We need not concern ourselves with it." And with the air of having had the final word on the subject, she stopped.

"You raised the topic of lying," I said. "That is something we might concern ourselves with."

"In what respect?" Through the dark lenses, I could just see the movements of Miss Winter's lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone. That's just the ones I found on a quick search. There are many more. Hundreds, probably." She shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller." "I am a biographer. I work with facts." She tossed her head and her stiff curls moved as one. "How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?" "Not in the stories you have told the world so far." Miss Winter conceded a nod. "Miss Lea," she began. Her voice was slower. "I had my reasons for creating a smoke screen around my past.

Those reasons, I assure you, are no longer valid." "What reasons?" "Life is compost." I blinked. "You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel."

I nodded, liking the analogy.

"Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work."

I considered her answer, then asked, "And what has happened to change things now? " "I am old. I am ill. Put those two facts together, biographer, and what do you get? The end of the story, I think." I bit my lip. "And why not write the book yourself?" "I have left it too late. Besides, who would believe me? I have cried wolf too often." "Do you intend to tell me the truth?" I asked. "Yes," she said, but I had heard the hesitation even though it lasted only a fraction of a second. "And why do you want to tell it to me}" She paused. "Do you know, I have been asking myself the very same question for the last quarter of an hour. Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?"

I fixed my mask in place before replying. "I am a shop assistant. I work in an antiquarian bookshop. I am an amateur biographer. Presumably you have read my work on the Landier brothers?"

"It's not much to go on, is it? If we are to work together, I shall need to know a little more about who you are. I can hardly spill the secrets of a lifetime to a person of whom I know nothing. So, tell me about yourself. What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?"

On the instant I was too affronted to reply.

"Well, answer me! For goodness' sake! Am I to have a stranger living under my roof? A stranger working for me? It is not reasonable. Tell me this, do you believe in ghosts?"

Governed by something stronger than reason, I rose from my chair. "Whatever are you doing? Where are you going? Wait!" I took one step after another, trying not to run, conscious of the rhythm of my feet rapping out on the wooden boards, while she called to me in a voice that contained an edge of panic. "Come back!" she cried. "I am going to tell you a story-a marvelous story!"

I did not stop. "Once upon a time there was a haunted house-" I reached the door. My fingers closed on the handle. "Once upon a time there was a library-" I opened the door and was about to step into its emptiness when, in a voice hoarse with something like fear, she launched the words that stopped me in my tracks. "Once upon a time there were twins-"

I waited until the words stopped their ringing in the air and then, despite myself, I looked back. I saw the back of a head, and hands that rose, trembling, to the averted face.

Tentatively I took a step back into the room. At the sound of my feet, the copper curls turned.

I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, looked to me with something like a plea. For a moment I simply stared back. Then, "Miss Lea, won't you please sit down," said a voice shakily, a voice that was and was not Vida Winter's.

Drawn by something beyond my control, I moved toward the chair and sat down. "I'm not making any promises," I said wearily. "I'm not in a position to exact any," came the answer in a small voice. Truce.

"Why did you choose me?" I asked again, and this time she answered. "Because of your work on the Landier brothers. Because youknow about siblings." "And will you tell me the truth?" "I will tell you the truth." The words were unambiguous enough, but I heard the tremor that undermined them. She meant to tell me the truth, I did not doubt it. She had decided to tell. Perhaps she even wanted to tell. Only she did not quite believe that she would. Her promise of honesty was spoken as much to convince herself as to persuade me, and she heard the lack of conviction at its heart as clearly as I did.

And so I made a suggestion. "I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the commission."

"Ah, the rule of three… The magic number. Three trials before the prince wins the hand of 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."