It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. I think about it sometimes, that mailbag: of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark. Waiting, waiting, for someone to realize they were there. For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.
Forgive me, I’m being romantic – a habit acquired from the years spent reading nineteenth-century novels with a torch when my parents thought I was asleep. What I mean to say is that it’s odd to think that if Arthur Tyrell had been a little more responsible, if he hadn’t had one too many rum toddies that Christmas Eve in 1941 and gone home and fallen into a drunken slumber instead of finishing his mail delivery, if the bag hadn’t then been tucked in his attic and hidden until his death some fifty years later when one of his daughters unearthed it and called the Daily Mail, the whole thing might have turned out differently. For my mum, for me, and especially for Juniper Blythe.
You probably read about it when it happened; it was in all the newspapers, and on the TV news. Channel 4 even ran a special where they invited some of the recipients to talk about their letter, their particular voice from the past that had come back to surprise them. There was a woman whose sweetheart had been in the RAF, and the man with the birthday card his evacuated son had sent, the little boy who was killed by a piece of falling shrapnel a week or so later. It was a very good programme, I thought: moving in parts, happy and sad stories interspersed with old footage of the war. I cried a couple of times, but that’s not saying much: I’m rather disposed to weep.
Mum didn’t go on the show, though. The producers contacted her and asked whether there was anything special in her letter that she’d like to share with the nation, but she said no, that it was just an ordinary old clothing order from a shop that had long ago gone out of business. But that wasn’t the truth. I know this because I was there when the letter arrived. I saw her reaction to that lost letter and it was anything but ordinary.
It was a morning in late February, winter still had us by the throat, the flowerbeds were icy, and I’d come over to help with the Sunday roast. I do that sometimes because my parents like it, even though I’m a vegetarian and I know that at some point during the course of the meal my mother will start to look worried, then agonized, until finally she can stand it no longer and statistics about protein and anaemia will begin to fly.
I was peeling potatoes in the sink when the letter dropped through the slot in the door. The post doesn’t usually come on Sundays so that should have tipped us off, but it didn’t. For my part, I was too busy wondering how I was going to tell my parents that Jamie and I had broken up. It had been two months since it happened and I knew I had to say something eventually, but the longer I took to utter the words, the more calcified they became. And I had my reasons for staying silent: my parents had been suspicious of Jamie from the start, they didn’t take kindly to upsets, and Mum would worry even more than usual if she knew that I was living in the flat alone. Most of all, though, I was dreading the inevitable, awkward conversation that would follow my announcement. To see first bewilderment, then alarm, then resignation, cross Mum’s face as she realized the maternal code required her to provide some sort of consolation… But back to the post. The sound of something dropping softly through the letterbox.
‘Edie, can you get that?’
This was my mother. (Edie is me: I’m sorry, I should have said so earlier.) She nodded towards the hallway and gestured with the hand that wasn’t stuck up the inside of the chicken.
I put down the potato, wiped my hands on a tea towel and went to fetch the post. There was only one letter lying on the welcome mat: an official Post Office envelope declaring the contents to be ‘redirected mail’. I read the label to Mum as I brought it into the kitchen.
She’d finished stuffing the chicken by then and was drying her own hands. Frowning a little, from habit rather than any particular expectation, she took the letter from me and plucked her reading glasses from on top of the pineapple in the fruit bowl. She skimmed the post office notice and with a flicker of her eyebrows began to open the outer envelope.
I’d turned back to the potatoes by now, a task that was arguably more engaging than watching my mum open mail, so I’m sorry to say I didn’t see her face as she fished the smaller envelope from inside, as she registered the frail austerity paper and the old stamp, as she turned the letter over and read the name written on the back. I’ve imagined it many times since, though, the colour draining instantly from her cheeks, her fingers beginning to tremble so that it took minutes before she was able to slit the envelope open.
What I don’t have to imagine is the sound. The horrid, guttural gasp, followed quickly by a series of rasping sobs that swamped the air and made me slip with the peeler so that I cut my finger.
‘Mum?’ I went to her, draping my arm around her shoulders, careful not to bleed on her dress. But she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, she told me later, not then. She stood rigidly as tears spilled down her cheeks and she clutched the strange little envelope, its paper so thin I could make out the corner of the folded letter inside, hard against her bosom. Then she disappeared upstairs to her bedroom leaving a fraying wake of instructions about the bird and the oven and the potatoes.
The kitchen settled in a bruised silence around her absence and I stayed very quiet, moved very slowly so as not to disturb it further. My mother is not a crier, but this moment – her upset and the shock of it – felt oddly familiar, as if we’d been here before. After fifteen minutes in which I variously peeled potatoes, turned over possibilities as to whom the letter might be from, and wondered how to proceed, I finally knocked on her door and asked whether she’d like a cup of tea. She’d composed herself by then and we sat opposite one another at the small Formica-covered table in the kitchen. As I pretended not to notice she’d been crying, she began to talk about the envelope’s contents.
‘A letter,’ she said, ‘from someone I used to know a long time ago. When I was just a girl, twelve, thirteen.’
A picture came into my mind, a hazy memory of a photograph that had sat on my gran’s bedside when she was old and dying. Three children, the youngest of whom was my mum, a girl with short dark hair, perched on something in the foreground. It was odd; I’d sat with Gran a hundred times or more but I couldn’t bring that girl’s features into focus now. Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born; not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past. I sipped my tea, waiting for Mum to continue.
‘I don’t know that I’ve told you much about that time, have I? During the war, the Second World War. It was a terrible time, such confusion, so many things were broken. It seemed…’ She sighed. ‘Well, it seemed as if the world would never return to normal. As if it had been tipped off its axis and nothing would ever set it to rights.’ She cupped her hands around the steaming rim of her mug and stared down at it.
‘My family – Mum and Dad, Rita and Ed and I – we all lived in a small house together in Barlow Street, near the Elephant and Castle, and the day after war broke out we were rounded up at school, marched over to the railway station and put into train carriages. I’ll never forget it, all of us with our tags on and our masks and our packs, and the mothers, who’d had second thoughts because they came running down the road towards the station, shouting at the guard to let their kids off; then shouting at older siblings to look after the little ones, not to let them out of their sight.’
She sat for a moment, biting her bottom lip as the scene played out in her memory.
‘You must’ve been frightened,’ I said quietly. We’re not really hand-holders in our family or else I’d have reached out and taken hers.
‘I was, at first.’ She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Her face had a vulnerable, unfinished look without her frames, like a small nocturnal animal confused by the daylight. I was glad when she put them on again and continued. ‘I’d never been away from home before, never spent a night apart from my mother. But I had my older brother and sister with me, and as the trip went on and one of the teachers handed round bars of chocolate, everybody started to cheer up and look upon the experience almost like an adventure. Can you imagine? War had been declared but we were all singing songs and eating tinned pears and looking out of the window playing I-spy. Children are very resilient, you know; callous in some cases.
‘We arrived eventually in a town called Cranbrook, only to be split into groups and loaded onto various coaches. The one I was on with Ed and Rita took us to the village of Milderhurst, where we were walked in lines to a hall. A group of local women were waiting for us there, smiles fixed on their faces, lists in hand, and we were made to stand in rows as people milled about, making their selection.
‘The little ones went fast, especially the pretty ones. People supposed they’d be less work, I expect, that they’d have less of the whiff of London about them.’
She smiled crookedly. ‘They soon learned. My brother was picked early. He was a strong boy, tall for his age, and the farmers were desperate for help. Rita went a short while after with her friend from school.’
Well, that was it. I reached out and laid my hand on hers. ‘Oh, Mum.’
‘Never mind.’ She pulled free and gave my fingers a tap. ‘I wasn’t the last to go. There were a few others, a little boy with a terrible skin condition. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was still standing there in that hall when I left.
‘You know, for a long time afterwards, years and years, I forced myself to buy bruised fruit if that’s what I picked up first at the greengrocer’s. None of this checking it over and putting it back on the shelf if it didn’t measure up.’
‘But you were chosen eventually.’
‘Yes, I was chosen eventually.’ She lowered her voice, fiddling with something in her lap, and I had to lean close. ‘She came in late. The room was almost clear, most of the children had gone and the ladies from the Women’s Voluntary Service were putting away the tea things. I’d started to cry a little, though I did so very discreetly. Then all of a sudden, she swept in and the room, the very air, seemed to alter.’
‘Alter?’ I wrinkled my nose, thinking of that scene in Carrie when the light explodes.
‘It’s hard to explain. Have you ever met a person who seems to bring their own atmosphere with them when they arrive somewhere?’
Maybe. I lifted my shoulders, uncertain. My friend Sarah has a habit of turning heads wherever she goes; not exactly an atmospheric phenomenon, but still…
‘No, of course you haven’t. It sounds so silly to say it like that. What I mean is that she was different from other people, more… Oh, I don’t know. Just more. Beautiful in an odd way, long hair, big eyes, rather wild looking, but it wasn’t that alone which set her apart. She was only seventeen at the time, in September 1939, but the other women all seemed to fold into themselves when she arrived.’
‘They were deferential?’
‘Yes, that’s the word, deferential. Surprised to see her and uncertain how to behave. Finally, one of them spoke up, asking whether she could help, but the girl merely waved her long fingers and announced that she’d come for her evacuee. That’s what she said; not an evacuee, her evacuee. And then she came straight over to where I was sitting on the floor. “What’s your name?” she said, and when I told her she smiled and said that I must be tired, having travelled such a long way. “Would you like to come and stay with me?” I nodded, I must have, for she turned then to the bossiest woman, the one with the list, and said that she would take me home with her.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Blythe,’ said my mother, suppressing the faintest of shivers. ‘Juniper Blythe.’
‘And was it she who sent you the letter?’
Mum nodded. ‘She led me to the fanciest car I’d ever seen and drove me back to the place where she and her older twin sisters lived, through a set of iron gates, along a winding driveway, until we reached an enormous stone edifice surrounded by thick woods. Milderhurst Castle.’
The name was straight out of a gothic novel and I tingled a little, remembering Mum’s sob when she’d read the woman’s name and address on the back of the envelope. I’d heard stories about the evacuees, about some of the things that went on, and I said on a breath, ‘Was it ghastly?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that. Not ghastly at all. Quite the opposite.’
‘But the letter… It made you-’
‘The letter was a surprise, that’s all. A memory from a long time ago.’
She fell silent then and I thought about the enormity of evacuation, how frightening, how odd it must have been for her as a child to be sent to a strange place where everyone and everything was vastly different. I could still touch my own childhood experiences, the horror of being thrust into new, unnerving situations, the furious bonds that were forged of necessity – to buildings, to sympathetic adults, to special friends – in order to survive. Remembering those urgent friendships, something struck me: ‘Did you ever go back, Mum, after the war? To Milderhurst?’
She looked up sharply. ‘Of course not. Why would I?’
‘I don’t know. To catch up, to say hello. To see your friend.’
‘No.’ She said it firmly. ‘I had my own family in London, my mother couldn’t spare me, and besides, there was work to be done, cleaning up after the war. Real life went on.’ And with that, the familiar veil came down between us and I knew the conversation was over.
We didn’t have the roast in the end. Mum said she didn’t feel like it and asked whether I minded terribly giving it a miss this weekend. It seemed unkind to remind her that I don’t eat meat anyway and that my attendance was more in the order of daughterly service, so I told her it was fine and suggested that she have a lie-down. She agreed, and as I gathered my things into my bag she was already swallowing two paracetamol in preparation, reminding me to keep my ears covered in the wind.
My dad, as it turns out, slept through the whole thing. He’s older than Mum and had retired from his work a few months before. Retirement hasn’t been good for him: he roams the house during the week, looking for things to fix and tidy, driving Mum mad, then on Sunday he rests in his armchair. The God-given right of the man of the house, he says to anyone who’ll listen.
I gave him a kiss on the cheek and left the house, braving the chill air as I made my way to the tube, tired and unsettled and somewhat subdued to be heading back alone to the fiendishly expensive flat I’d shared until recently with Jamie. It wasn’t until somewhere between High Street Kensington and Notting Hill Gate that I realized Mum hadn’t told me what the letter said.
A Memory Clarifies
Writing it down now, I’m a little disappointed in myself. But everyone’s an expert with the virtue of hindsight and it’s easy to wonder why I didn’t go looking, now that I know what there was to find. And I’m not a complete dolt. Mum and I met for tea a few days later and, although I failed again to mention my changed circumstances, I did ask her about the contents of the letter. She waved the question away and said it wasn’t important, little more than a greeting; that her reaction had been brought on by surprise and nothing more. I didn’t know then that my mum is a good liar or I might have had reason to doubt her, to question further or to take special notice of her body language. You don’t though, do you? Your instinct is usually to believe what people tell you, particularly people you know well, family, those you trust; at least mine is. Or was.
And so I forgot for a time about Milderhurst Castle and Mum’s evacuation and even the odd fact that I’d never heard her speak of it before. It was easy enough to explain away; most things are if you try hard enough: Mum and I got on all right, but we’d never been especially close, and we certainly didn’t go in for long chummy discussions about the past. Or the present, for that matter. By all accounts her evacuation had been a pleasant but forgettable experience; there was no reason she should’ve shared it with me. Lord knows, there was enough I didn’t tell her.
Harder to rationalize was the strong, strange sense that had come upon me when I witnessed her reaction to the letter, the inexplicable certainty of an important memory I couldn’t pin down. Something I’d seen or heard and since forgotten, fluttering now within the shadowy recesses of my mind, refusing to stop still and let me name it. It fluttered and I wondered, trying very hard to remember whether perhaps another letter had arrived, years before, a letter that had also made her cry. But it was no use; the elusive, granular feeling refused to clarify and I decided it was more than likely my overactive imagination at work, the one my parents had always warned would get me into trouble if I wasn’t careful.
At the time I had more pressing concerns: namely, where I was going to live when the period of prepaid rent on the flat was up. The six months paid in advance had been Jamie’s parting gift, an apology of sorts, compensation for his regrettable behaviour, but it would end in June. I’d been combing the papers and estate agents’ windows for studio flats, but on my modest salary it was proving difficult to find anywhere even remotely close to work.
I’m an editor at Billing & Brown Book Publishers. They’re a small family-run publisher, here in Notting Hill, set up in the late 1940s by Herbert Billing and Michael Brown, as a means, initially, of publishing their own plays and poetry. When they started I believe they were quite respected, but over the decades, as bigger publishers took a greater share of the market and public taste for niche titles declined, we’ve been reduced to printing genres we refer to kindly as ‘speciality’ and those to which we refer less kindly as ‘vanity’. Mr Billing – Herbert – is my boss; he’s also my mentor, champion and closest friend. I don’t have many, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not the spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvellous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, page after glorious page of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions – full of wise counsel, some of them – but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.
For although I was inexperienced at breaking up – Jamie was my first real boyfriend, the sort with whom I’d envisaged a future – I suspected this was the time to call in favours from friends. Which is why I turned to Sarah. The two of us grew up as neighbours and our house became her second home whenever her four younger siblings turned into wild things and she needed to escape. I was flattered that someone like Sarah thought of my parents’ rather staid suburban home as a refuge, and we remained close through secondary school until Sarah was caught smoking behind the toilets one too many times and traded in maths classes for beauty school. She works freelance now, for magazines and film shoots. Her success is a brilliant thing, but unfortunately it meant that in my hour of need she was away in Hollywood turning actors into zombies, her flat and its spare room sublet to an Austrian architect.
I fretted for a time, envisaging in piquant detail the sort of life I might be forced to eke out sans roof, before, in a fine act of chivalry, Herbert offered me the sofa in his little flat below our office.
‘After all you did for me?’ he said, when I asked if he was sure. ‘Picked me up off the floor, you did. Rescued me!’
He was exaggerating; I’d never actually found him on the floor, but I knew what he meant. I’d only been with them a couple of years and had just started to look around for something slightly more challenging when Mr Brown passed away. Herbert took the death of his partner so hard, though, that there was no way I could leave him, not then. He didn’t appear to have anyone else, other than his rotund, piggy little dog, and although he never said as much, it became clear to me by the type and the intensity of his grief that he and Mr Brown had been more than business partners. He stopped eating, stopped washing, and drank himself silly on gin one morning even though he’s a teetotaller.
There didn’t seem to be much choice about the matter: I began making him meals, confiscated the gin, and when the figures were very bad and I couldn’t raise his interest, I took it upon myself to door-knock and find us some new work. That’s when we moved into printing flyers for local businesses. Herbert was so grateful when he found out that he quite overestimated my motivation. He started referring to me as his protégée and cheered up considerably when he talked about the future of Billing & Brown; how he and I were going to rebuild the company in honour of Mr Brown. The glimmer was back in his eyes and I put off my job search a little longer.
And here I am now. Eight years later. Much to Sarah’s bemusement. It’s hard to explain to someone like her, a creative, clever person who refuses to do anything on terms that aren’t her own, that the rest of us have different criteria for satisfaction in life. I work with people I adore, I earn enough money to support myself (though not perhaps in a two-bedder in Notting Hill), I get to spend my days playing with words and sentences, helping people to express their ideas and fulfil their dreams of publication. Besides, it’s not as if I haven’t got prospects. Just last year, Herbert promoted me to the position of Vice Chairman; never mind that there are only the two of us working in the office full-time. We had a little ceremony and everything. Susan, the part-time junior, baked a pound cake and came in on her day off so we could all three drink non-alcoholic wine together from teacups.
Faced with imminent eviction, I gratefully accepted his offer of a place to stay; it was really a very touching gesture, particularly in light of his flat’s tiny proportions. It was also my only option. Herbert was extremely pleased. ‘Marvellous! Jess will be beside herself – she does love guests.’
So it was, back in May, I was preparing to leave forever the flat that Jamie and I had shared, to turn the final, blank page of our story and begin a new one all of my own. I had my work, I had my health, I had an awful lot of books; I just needed to be brave, to face up to the grey, lonely days that stretched on indefinitely.
All things considered, I think I was doing pretty well: only occasionally did I allow myself to slip deep inside the pool of my own most maudlin imaginings. At these times I’d find a quiet, dark corner – all the better to give myself over fully to the fantasy – and picture in great detail those bland future days when I would walk along our street, stop at our building, gaze up at the windowsill on which I used to grow my herbs and see someone else’s silhouette fall across the glass. Glimpse the shadowy barrier between the past and the present, and know keenly the physical ache of being unable ever to go back.
I was a daydreamer when I was small, and a source of constant frustration to my poor mother. She used to despair when I walked through the middle of a muddy puddle, or had to be wrenched back from the gutter and the path of a hurtling bus, and say things like: ‘It’s dangerous to get lost inside one’s own head,’ or ‘You won’t be able to see what’s really going on around you – that’s when accidents happen, Edie. You must pay attention.’
Which was easy for her: never had a more sensible, pragmatic woman walked the earth. Not so simple, though, for a girl who’d lived inside her head for as long as she’d been able to wonder: ‘What if…?’ And I didn’t stop daydreaming, of course, I merely got better at hiding it. But she was right, in a way, for it was my preoccupation with imagining my bleak and dreary post-Jamie future that left me so utterly unprepared for what happened next.
In late May, we received a phone call at the office from a self-styled ghost whisperer who wanted to publish a manuscript about his other-worldly encounters on Romney Marsh. When a prospective new client makes contact, we do whatever we can to keep them happy, which is why I found myself driving Herbert’s rather ancient Peugeot hatchback down to Kent for a meet, greet and, hopefully, woo. I don’t drive often and I loathe the motorway when it’s busy, so I left at the crack of dawn, figuring it gave me a clearer run at getting out of London unscathed.
I was there well before nine, the meeting itself went very well – wooing was done, contracts were signed – and I was back on the road again by midday. A much busier road by then, and one to which Herbert’s car, incapable of going faster than fifty miles per hour without serious risk of tyre-loss, was decidedly unequal. I planted myself in the slow lane, but still managed to attract much frustrated horn-honking and head-shaking. It is not good for the soul to be cast as a nuisance, particularly when one has no choice in the matter, so I left the motorway at Ashford and took the back roads instead. My sense of direction is quite dreadful, but there was an AA book in the glove compartment and I was resigned to pulling over regularly to consult it.
It took me a good half hour to become well and truly lost. I still don’t know how it happened, but I suspect the map’s vintage played a part. That, and the fact that I’d been enjoying the view – fields speckled with cowslips; wild flowers decorating the ditches by the side of the road – when I probably should have been paying attention to the road itself. Whatever the cause, I’d lost my spot on the map, and was driving along a narrow lane over which great bowed trees were arched when I finally admitted that I had no idea whether I was heading north, south, east or west.
I wasn’t worried, though, not then. As far as I could see, if I just continued on my way, sooner or later I was bound to reach a junction, a landmark, maybe even a roadside stall where someone might be kind enough to draw a big red X on my map. I wasn’t due back at work that afternoon; roads didn’t continue on forever; I just needed to keep my eyes peeled.
And that’s how I saw it, poking up from the middle of an aggressive mound of ivy. One of those old white posts with the names of local villages carved into arrowed pieces of wood pointing in each direction. Milderhurst, it read, 3 miles.
I stopped the car and read the signpost again, hairs beginning to quiver on the back of my neck. An odd sixth sense overcame me, and the cloudy memory that I’d been struggling to bring into focus ever since Mum’s lost letter arrived in February resurrected itself. I climbed out of the car, as if in a dream, and followed where the signpost led. I felt like I was watching myself from the outside, almost as if I knew what I was going to find. And perhaps I did.
For there they were, half a mile along the road, right where I’d imagined they might be. Rising from the brambles, a set of tall iron gates, once grand but listing now at broken angles. Leaning, one towards the other, as if to share a weighty burden. A sign was hanging on the small stone gatehouse, a rusted sign that read, Milderhurst Castle.
My heart beat fast and hard against my ribcage and I crossed the road towards the gates. I gripped a bar with each hand – cold, rough, rusting iron beneath my palms – and brought my face, my forehead, slowly to press against them. I followed with my eyes the gravel driveway that curved away, up the hill, until it crossed a bridge and disappeared behind a thick patch of woods.
It was beautiful and overgrown and melancholy, but it wasn’t the view that stole my breath. It was the thudding realization, the absolute certainty, that I had been here before. That I had stood at these gates and peered between the bars and watched the birds flying like scraps of night-time sky above the bristling woods.
Details murmured into place around me and it seemed as if I’d stepped into the fabric of a dream; as if I were occupying, once again, the very same temporal and geographical space that my long-ago self had done. My fingers tightened around the bars and somewhere, deep within my body, I recognized the gesture. I’d done the same thing before. The skin of my palms remembered. I remembered. A sunny day, a warm breeze playing with the hem of my dress – my best dress – the shadow of my mother, tall in my peripheral vision.
I glanced sideways to where she stood, watching her as she watched the castle, the dark and distant shape on the horizon. I was thirsty, I was hot, I wanted to go swimming in the rippling lake that I could see through the gates. Swimming with the ducks and moorhens and the dragon- flies making stabbing movements amongst the reeds along the banks.
‘Mum,’ I remembered saying, but she didn’t reply. ‘Mum?’ Her head turned to face me, and a split second passed in which not a spark of recognition lit her features. Instead, an expression that I didn’t understand held them hostage. She was a stranger to me, a grown-up woman whose eyes masked secret things. I have words to describe that odd amalgam now: regret, fondness, sorrow, nostalgia; but back then I was clueless. Even more so when she said, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I should never have come. It’s too late.’
I don’t think I answered her, not then. I had no idea what she meant and before I could ask she’d gripped my hand and pulled so hard that my shoulder hurt, dragging me back across the road to where our car was parked. I’d caught a hint of her perfume as we went, sharper now and sour where it had mixed with the day’s scorching air, the unfamiliar country smells. And she’d started the car, and we’d been driving, and I was watching a pair of sparrows through the window when I heard it: the same ghastly cry that she’d made when the letter arrived from Juniper Blythe.
The Books and the Birds
The castle gates were locked and far too high to scale, not that I’d have rated my chances had they been lower. I’ve never been one for sports or physical challenges, and with the arrival of that missing memory my legs had turned, most unhelpfully, to jelly. I felt strangely disconnected and uncertain and, after a time, there was nothing for it but to go back to the car and sit for a while, wondering how best to proceed. In the end, my choices were limited. I felt far too distracted to drive, certainly anywhere as far as London, so I started up the car and proceeded at a crawl into Milderhurst village.
On first glimpse it was like all the other villages I’d driven through that day: a single road through the centre with a green at one end, a church beside it, and a school along the way. I parked in front of the local church hall and I could almost see the lines of weary London schoolchildren, grubby and uncertain after their interminable train ride. A ghostly imprint of Mum long ago, before she was my mum, before she was much of anything, filing helplessly towards the unknown.
I drifted along the High Street, trying – without much success – to tame my flyaway thoughts. Mum had been back to Milderhurst, all right, and I had been with her. We’d stood at those gates and she’d become upset. I remembered it. It had happened. But as surely as one answer had been found, a host of new questions had broken free, fluttering about my mind like so many dusty moths seeking the light. Why had we come and why had she wept? What had she meant when she told me she’d made a mistake, that it was too late? And why had she lied to me, just three months before, when she’d told me that Juniper Blythe’s letter mean nothing?
Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily. I was aware of my pulse slowing to its regular pace and my thoughts stilling their wings. It was dim, which was all the better, and I picked out favourite authors and titles like a teacher taking roll-call. Brontë – present; Dickens – accounted for; Shelley – a number of lovely editions. No need to slide them out of place; just to know that they were there was enough, to brush them lightly with my fingertips.
I wandered and noted, reshelved occasionally when books were out of place, and eventually I came upon a clearing at the back of the shop. There was a table set up at the centre with a special display labelled Local Stories. Crowded together were histories, coffee-table tomes, and books by local authors: Tales of Mystery, Murder and Mayhem, Adventures of the Hawkhurst Smugglers, A History of Hop Farming. In the middle, propped on a wooden stand, was a title I knew: The True History of the Mud Man.
I gasped and picked it up to cradle.
‘You like that one?’ The shop assistant had appeared from nowhere, hovering nearby as she folded her dusting cloth.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said reverently. ‘Of course. Who doesn’t?’
The first time I encountered The True History of the Mud Man I was ten years old and home from school, sick. It was the mumps, I think, one of those childhood illnesses that keep you isolated for weeks, and I must’ve been getting whiney and unbearable because Mum’s sympathetic smile had tightened to a stoical crease. One day, after ducking out for a brief reprieve on the High Street, she’d returned with renewed optimism and pressed a tattered library book into my hands.
‘Perhaps this will cheer you up,’ she’d said tentatively. ‘It’s for slightly older readers, I think, but you’re a clever girl; with a bit of effort I’m sure you’ll be fine. It’s rather long compared with what you’re used to, but do persevere.’
I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return; that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me. For although I didn’t know it then, after falling deep inside the world of the Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again. I’ve been grateful to Miss Perry ever since, for when she handed that novel over the counter and urged my harried mother to pass it on to me, she’d either confused me with a much older child or else she’d glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I’ve always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it’s the librarian’s sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
I opened that yellowing cover and, from the first chapter, the one describing the Mud Man’s awakening in the sleek, black moat, the awful moment in which his heart begins to kick, I was hooked. My nerves thrilled, my skin flushed, my fingers quivered with keenness to turn page after page, each thinning on the corner where countless other readers had taken the journey before me; I went to grand and fearsome places, all without leaving the tissue-laden couch in my family’s suburban breakfast room. The Mud Man kept me imprisoned for days: my mother started smiling again, my swollen face subsided, and my future self was forged.
I noted again the handwritten sign – Local Stories – and turned to the beaming shop assistant. ‘Raymond Blythe came from around here?’
‘Oh yes.’ She pushed fine hair behind each ear. ‘He certainly did. Lived and wrote up at Milderhurst Castle; died there too. That’s the grand estate a few miles outside the village.’ Her voice took on a vaguely forlorn note. ‘At least, it was grand once.’
Raymond Blythe. Milderhurst Castle. My heart had started to hammer pretty hard by now. ‘I don’t suppose he had a daughter?’
‘Three of them, actually.’
‘One called Juniper?’
‘That’s right; she’s the youngest.’
I thought of my mum, her memory of the seventeen-year-old girl who’d charged the air as she entered the village hall, who’d rescued her from the evacuee line, who’d sent a letter in 1941 that made Mum cry when it arrived, fifty years later. And I felt the sudden need to lean on something firm.
‘All three of them are still alive up there,’ the shop assistant continued. ‘Something in the castle water, my mother always says; they’re hale and hearty for the most part. Excepting your Juniper, of course.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’
‘Dementia. I believe it’s in the family. A sad story – they say she was quite a beauty once, and very bright with it, a writer of great promise, but her fiancé abandoned her back in the war and she was never the same again. Went soft in the head; kept waiting for him to come back, but he never did.’
I opened my mouth to ask where the fiancé had gone, but she was on a roll and it was evident she’d be taking no questions from the floor.
‘Just as well she had her sisters to look after her – they’re a dying breed, those two; used to be involved in all sorts of charities, way back when – she’d have been packed off to an institution otherwise.’ She checked behind her, making sure we were alone, then leaned closer. ‘I remember when I was a girl, Juniper used to roam the village and the local fields; didn’t bother anyone, nothing like that, just wandered sort of aimlessly. Used to terrify the local kids; but then children like to be scared, don’t they?’
I nodded eagerly and she resumed: ‘She was harmless enough, though; never got herself into trouble she couldn’t be got back out of. And every village worth its salt needs a local eccentric.’ A smile trembled on her lips. ‘Someone to keep the ghosts company. You can read more about them all in here, if you like.’ She held up a book called Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst.
‘I’ll take it,’ I said, handing over a ten-pound note. ‘And a copy of the Mud Man, too.’
I was almost out of the shop, brown paper bundle in hand, when she called after me, ‘You know, if you’re really interested you ought to think about doing a tour.’
‘Of the castle?’ I peered back into the shadows of the shop.
‘It’s Mrs Bird you’ll be wanting to see. Home Farm Bed and Breakfast down on the Tenterden Road.’
The farmhouse stood a couple of miles back the way I’d come, a stone and tile-hung cottage attended by profusely flowering gardens, a hint of other farm buildings clustered behind. Two small dormers peeked through the roofline and a flurry of white doves wafted around the coping of a tall brick chimneystack. Leaded windows had been opened to take advantage of the warm day, diamond panels winking blindly at the afternoon sun.
I parked the car beneath a giant ash whose looming arms caught the edge of the cottage in its shadow, then wandered through the sun-warmed tangle: heady jasmine, delphiniums and campanulas, spilling over the brick path. A pair of white geese waddled fatly by, without so much as pausing to acknowledge my intrusion, as I went through the door, passing from brilliant sunshine into a faintly lit room. The immediate walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of the castle and its grounds, all taken, according to the subtitles, on a Country Life shoot in 1910. Against the far wall, behind a counter with a gold ‘Reception’ sign, a short, plump woman in a royal-blue linen suit was waiting for me.
‘Well now, you must be my young visitor from London.’ She blinked through a pair of round tortoiseshell frames, and smiled at my confusion. ‘Alice from the bookshop called ahead, letting me know I might expect you. You certainly didn’t waste any time in coming; Bird thought you’d be another hour at least.’
I glanced at the yellow canary in a palatial cage suspended behind her.
‘He was ready for his lunch, but I said you’d be sure to arrive just as soon as I closed the door and put out the sign.’ She laughed then, a smoky chuckle that rolled up from the base of her throat. I’d guessed her age as pushing sixty, but that laugh belonged to a much younger, far more wicked woman than first impressions suggested. ‘Alice tells me you’re interested in the castle.’
‘That’s right. I was hoping to do a tour and she sent me here. Do I need to sign up somewhere?’
‘Dear me, no, nothing as official as all that. I run the tours myself.’ Her linen bosom puffed self-importantly before deflating again. ‘That is, I did.’
‘Did?’
‘Oh yes, and a lovely task it was too. The Misses Blythe used to operate them personally, of course; they started in the 1950s as a way to fund the castle’s upkeep and save themselves from the National Trust – Miss Percy wouldn’t have that, I can assure you – but it all got a bit much some years ago. We’ve all of us got our limits and when Miss Percy reached hers, I was delighted to step in. There was a time I used to run five a week, but there’s not much call these days. It seems people have forgotten the old place.’ She gave me a quizzical look, as though I might be able to explain the vagaries of the human race.
‘Well, I’d love to see inside,’ I said brightly, hopefully, maybe even a little desperately.
Mrs Bird blinked at me. ‘Of course you would, my dear, and I’d love to show you, but I’m afraid the tours don’t run any more.’
The disappointment was crushing and for a moment I didn’t think I’d be able to speak. ‘Oh,’ I managed. ‘Oh dear.’
‘It’s a shame, but Miss Percy said her mind was made up. She said she was tired of opening her home so ignorant tourists had somewhere to drop their rubbish. I’m sorry Alice misled you.’ She shrugged her shoulders helplessly and a knotty silence fell between us.
I attempted polite resignation, but as the possibility of seeing inside Milderhurst Castle receded, there was suddenly very little in life that I wanted more fiercely. ‘Only – I’m such a great admirer of Raymond Blythe,’ I heard myself say. ‘I don’t think I’d have ended up working in publishing if I hadn’t read the Mud Man when I was a child. I don’t suppose… That is, perhaps if you were to put in a good word, reassure the owners that I’m not the sort of person to go dropping rubbish in their home?’
‘Well…’ She frowned, considering. ‘The castle is a joy to behold, and there’s no one as proud of her perch as Miss Percy… Publishing, you say?’
It had been an inadvertent stroke of brilliance: Mrs Bird belonged to a generation for whom those words held a sort of Fleet Street glamour; never mind my poky, paper-strewn cubicle and rather sobering balance sheets. I seized upon this opportunity as a drowning person might a raft: ‘Billing & Brown Book Publishers, Notting Hill.’ I remembered then the business cards Herbert had presented at my little promotion party. I never think to carry them with me, not in an official way, but they come in very handy as bookmarks and I was thus able to whip one out from the copy of Jane Eyre I keep in my tote in case I need to queue unexpectedly. I tendered it like the winning lottery ticket.
‘Vice Chairman,’ read Mrs Bird, eyeing me over her glasses. ‘Well, indeed.’ I don’t think I imagined the new note of veneration in her voice. She thumbed the corner of the business card, tightened her lips, and gave a short nod of decision. ‘All right. Give me a minute and I’ll telephone the old dears. See if I can’t convince them to let me show you round this afternoon.’
While Mrs Bird spoke hushed words into an old-fashioned phone receiver, I sat in a chintz-upholstered chair and opened the brown paper package containing my new books. I slipped out the shiny copy of the Mud Man and turned it over. It was true what I’d said: in one way or another my encounter with Raymond Blythe’s story had determined my entire life. Just holding it in my hands was enough to fill me with an all-encompassing sense of knowing precisely who I was.
The cover design of the new edition was the same as that on the West Barnes library’s copy Mum had borrowed almost twenty years before, and I smiled to myself, vowing to buy a Jiffy bag and post it to them just as soon as I got home. Finally, a twenty-year debt would be repaid. For when my mumps subsided and it was time to return the Mud Man to Miss Perry the book, it seemed, had vanished. No amount of furious searching on Mum’s part and impassioned declarations of mystification on mine, managed to turn it up, not even in the wasteland of missing things beneath my bed. When all avenues of search had been exhausted, I was marched up to the library to make my barefaced confession. Poor Mum earned one of Miss Perry’s withering stares and almost died of shame, but I was too emboldened by the delicious glory of possession to suffer guilt. It was the first and only time I’ve ever stolen, but there was no help for it; quite simply, that book and I belonged to one another.
Mrs Bird’s phone receiver met the cradle with a plastic clunk and I jumped a little. By the tug of her features I gathered instantly that the news was bad. I stood and limped to the counter, my left foot numb with pins and needles.
‘I’m afraid one of the Blythe sisters isn’t well today,’ said Mrs Bird.
‘Oh?’
‘The youngest has had a turn and the doctor’s on his way out to see her.’
I worked to conceal my disappointment. There was something very unseemly about a show of personal frustration when an old lady had been taken ill. ‘That’s terrible. I hope she’s all right.’
Mrs Bird waved my concern away like a harmless but pesky fly. ‘I’m sure she will be. It’s not the first time. She’s suffered episodes since she was a girl.’
‘Episodes?’
‘Lost time, is what they used to call it. Time she couldn’t account for, usually after she became over-excited. Something to do with an unusual heart rate – too fast or too slow, I can’t remember which, but she used to black out and wake up with no memory of what she’d done.’ Her mouth tightened around some further sentiment she’d thought better of expressing. ‘The older sisters will be too busy looking after her today to be bothered by disturbances, but they were loath to turn you away. The castle needs its visitors, they said. Funny old things – I’m quite surprised, to be honest, they’re ordinarily not keen on guests. I suppose it gets lonely though, just the three of them rattling around inside. They suggested tomorrow instead, mid-morning?’
A flutter of anxiety in my chest. I hadn’t planned to stay, and yet the thought that I might leave without seeing inside the castle brought with it a profound and sudden surge of desolation. Disappointment darkened inside me.
‘We’ve had a cancellation so there’s a room free if you’d like it?’ said Mrs Bird. ‘Dinner’s included.’
I had work to catch up on over the weekend, Herbert needed his car to get to Windsor the following afternoon, and I’m not the sort of person who decides on a whim to stay for a night in a strange place.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst
While Mrs Bird started on the paperwork, transferring details from my business card, I disengaged myself with a mumble of polite noises and drifted over to peek through the open back door. A courtyard had been formed by the farmhouse wall and those of other farm buildings: a barn, a dovecote, and a third construction with a conical roof that I would later learn to call an oast house. A round pool meditated at the centre and the pair of fat geese had launched themselves across the sun-warmed surface, floating regally now as ripples chased one another towards the flagstone edges. Beyond, a peacock inspected the edge of clipped lawn separating the tended courtyard from a meadow of wild flowers that tumbled towards distant parkland. The whole sunlit garden, framed as it was by the shadowed doorway in which I stood, was like a snapshot of a long-ago spring day, come back somehow to life.
‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Bird, behind me suddenly, though I hadn’t noticed her approach. ‘Have you ever heard of Oliver Sykes?’
I indicated that I hadn’t and she nodded, only too happy to enlighten me: ‘He was an architect, quite well known in his time. Terribly eccentric. He had his own place in Sussex, Pembroke Farm, but he did some work at the castle in the early 1900s, soon after Raymond Blythe married for the first time and brought his wife here from London. It was one of the last jobs Sykes worked on before he disappeared, off on his own version of the Grand Tour. He supervised the creation of a larger version of our circular pool, and did some tremendous work on the moat around the castle: turned it into a rather grand bathing ring for Mrs Blythe. She was a terrific swimmer, they say, very athletic. They used to put…’ She glued a finger to her cheek and wrinkled her forehead. ‘A chemical – oh dear now, what was it?’ She removed the finger and raised her voice. ‘Bird?’
‘Copper sulphate,’ came a disembodied male voice.
I glanced again at the canary, fossicking for seed in his cage, then the picture-hung walls.
‘Yes, yes, of course it was,’ Mrs Bird continued, unfazed, ‘copper sulphate to keep it azure blue.’ A sigh. ‘That was a long time ago now though. Sadly, Sykes’s moat was filled in decades ago, and his grand circular pool belongs only to the geese. Full of dirt and duck mess.’ She handed me a heavy brass key and patted my fingers closed around it. ‘We’ll walk up to the castle tomorrow. The forecast is clear and there’s a beautiful view from the second bridge. Shall we meet here at ten?’
‘You’ve an appointment with the vicar tomorrow morning, dear.’ That patient, wood-panelled voice drifted towards us again, however this time I pinpointed its source. A small door, barely visible, hidden in the wall behind the reception counter.
Mrs Bird pursed her lips and seemed to consider this mysterious amendment before nodding slowly. ‘Bird’s right. Oh now, what a shame.’ She brightened. ‘Never mind. I’ll leave you instructions, finish as quickly as I can in the village, and meet you up at the castle. We’ll only stay an hour. I don’t like to impose any longer: the Misses Blythe are all very old.’
‘An hour sounds perfect.’ I could be on my way home to London by lunchtime.
My room was tiny, a four-poster bed squatting greedily in the centre, a narrow writing desk huddled beneath the leaded window and little besides, but the outlook was glorious. The room was at the back of the farmhouse and the window opened out to look across the same meadow I’d glimpsed through the door downstairs. The second storey, however, offered a better view of the hill that climbed towards the castle, and above the woods I could just pick out the tower’s spire pointing at the sky.
On the desk someone had left a neatly folded plaid picnic blanket and a welcome basket filled with fruit. The day was balmy and the grounds were beautiful, so I picked up a banana, pinned the blanket beneath my arm, and headed straight downstairs again with my new book, Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst.
In the courtyard, jasmine sugared the air, great white sprays tumbling from the top of a wooden arbour at the side of the lawn. Huge goldfish swam slowly near the surface of the pool, listing their plump bodies backwards and forwards to court the afternoon sun. It was heavenly, but I didn’t stick around; a distant band of trees was calling to me and I wove my way towards it, through the meadow dusted with buttercups, self-sown amidst the long grass. Although it wasn’t quite summer, the day was warm, the air dry, and by the time I’d reached the trees my hairline was laced with perspiration.
I spread the rug in a patch of dappled light and kicked off my shoes. Somewhere nearby a shallow brook chattered over stones and butterflies sailed the breeze. The blanket smelled reassuringly of laundry flakes and squashed leaves, and when I sat down the tall meadow grasses enclosed me so I felt utterly alone.
I leaned Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst against my bent knees and ran my hand over the cover. It showed a series of black-and-white photos arranged at various angles, as if they’d dropped from someone’s hand and been photographed where they fell. Beautiful children in old-fashioned dresses, long-ago picnics by a shimmering pool, a line of swimmers posing by the moat; the earnest gazes of people for whom capturing images on photographic paper was a type of magic.
I turned to the first page and began to read.
CHAPTER ONE
MAN OF KENT
‘There were those who said the Mud Man had never been born, that he had always been, just as the wind and the trees and the earth; but they were wrong. All living things are born, all living things have a home, and the Mud Man was no different.’
There are some authors for whom the world of fiction presents an opportunity to scale unseen mountains and depict great realms of fantasy. For Raymond Blythe, however, as for few other novelists of his time, home was to prove a faithful, fertile and fundamental inspiration, in his life as in his work. Letters and articles written over the course of his seventy-five years contain a common theme: Raymond Blythe was unequivocally a homebody who found respite, refuge and ultimately religion in the plot of land that for centuries his forebears had called their own. Rarely has a writer’s home been turned so clearly to fictive purpose as in Blythe’s gothic tale for young people, The True History of the Mud Man. Yet even before this milestone work, the castle standing proud upon its fertile rise within the verdant weald of Kent, the arable farmlands, the dark and whispering woods, the pleasure gardens over which the castle gazes still, contrived to make of Raymond Blythe the man he would become.
Raymond Blythe was born in a room on the second floor of Milderhurst Castle on the hottest day of the summer of 1866. The first child of Robert and Athena Blythe, he was named for his paternal grandfather, whose fortune was made in the goldfields of Canada. Raymond was the eldest of four brothers, the youngest of whom, Timothy, died tragically during a violent storm in 1876. Athena Blythe, a poetess of some note, was heartbroken by her youngest son’s death and is said to have descended, soon after the boy was laid to rest, into a black depression from which there would be no return. She took her life in a leap from the Milderhurst tower, leaving her husband, her poetry and her three small sons behind.
On the adjoining page there was a photograph of a handsome woman with elaborately arranged dark hair, leaning from an open mullioned window to gaze upon the heads of four small boys arranged in order of height. It was dated 1875 and had the milky appearance of so many early amateur photographs. The smallest boy, Timothy, must have moved when the photo was being taken because his smiling face had blurred. Poor little fellow, with no idea he’d only months left to live.
I skimmed the next few paragraphs – withdrawn Victorian father, dispatch to Eton, a scholarship to Oxford – until Raymond Blythe reached adulthood.
After graduating from Oxford in 1887, Raymond Blythe moved to London where he began his literary life as a contributor to Punch magazine. Over the following decade he published twelve plays, two novels and a collection of children’s poetry; however, his letters indicate that despite his professional accomplishments he was unhappy living in London and longed for the rich countryside of his boyhood.
It might be supposed that city life was made more bearable for Raymond Blythe by his marriage in 1895 to Miss Muriel Palmerston, much admired and said to be ‘the most handsome of all the year’s debutantes’, and certainly his letters suggest a sharp elevation of spirit at this time. Raymond Blythe was introduced to Miss Palmerston by a mutual acquaintance and, by all reports, the match was a good one. The two shared a passion for outdoor activities, word games and photography, and made a handsome couple, gracing the social pages on numerous occasions.
After his father’s death in 1898, Raymond Blythe inherited Milderhurst Castle and returned with Muriel to set up home. Many accounts from the period suggest that the pair had long wished to begin a family and certainly, by the time they moved to Milderhurst, Raymond Blythe was quite open in expressing concern in his letters that he was not yet a father. This particular happiness, however, was to elude the couple for some years and as late as 1905 Muriel Blythe wrote to her mother confessing the agonizing fear that she and Raymond would be denied ‘the final blessing of children’. It must have been with tremendous joy, and perhaps some relief, that four months after her letter was sent she wrote again to her mother advising that she was now ‘with child’. With children, as it turned out: after a fraught pregnancy, including a lengthy period of enforced confinement, in January 1906 Muriel was delivered successfully of twin daughters. Raymond Blythe’s letters to his surviving brothers indicate that this was the happiest time of his life, and the family scrapbooks overflow with photographic evidence of his paternal pride.
The next double page held an assortment of photographs of two little girls. Though they were obviously very similar, one was smaller and finer than the other, and seemed to smile a little less certainly than her sister. In the last photo, a man with wavy hair and a kind face sat in an upholstered chair with a lace-clad baby on each knee.
There was something in his bearing – the light in his eyes, perhaps, or else the gentle press of his hands against each girl’s arm – that communicated his deep affection for the pair, and it occurred to me, as I looked more closely, how rare it was to find a photograph from the period in which a father was captured with his daughters in such a simple, domestic way. My heart warmed with affection for Raymond Blythe and I continued reading.
All was not to remain thus joyous, however. Muriel Blythe was killed on a winter’s evening in 1910 when a red-hot ember from the fireplace by which she sat escaped the bounds of the screen to land in her lap. The chiffon of her dress caught fire rapidly and she was aflame before aid could reach her; the blaze went on to consume the east turret of Milderhurst Castle and the vast Blythe family library. The burns to Mrs Blythe’s body were extensive and although she was wrapped in damp bandages and treated by the very best doctors, she succumbed within the month to her terrible injuries.
Raymond Blythe’s grief following his wife’s death was so profound that for some years after he failed to publish another word. Some sources claim that he suffered a crippling writer’s block, while others believe he sealed up his writing room and refused to work, opening it again only when he began his now famous novel, The True History of the Mud Man, born of a period of intense activity in 1917. Despite its widespread appeal to young readers, many critics see the story as an allegory for the Great War, in which so many lives were lost on the muddy fields of France; in particular, parallels are drawn between the titular Mud Man and the scores of displaced soldiers attempting to return home and reclaim their families after the appalling slaughter. Raymond Blythe himself was wounded at Flanders in 1916 and invalided home to Milderhurst, where he convalesced under the care of a team of private nurses. The Mud Man’s lack of identity and the narrator’s quest to learn the forgotten creature’s original name and his position and place in history are also seen as a homage to the many unknown soldiers of the Great War and the feelings of displacement that Raymond Blythe may have suffered on his return.
No matter the large volume of scholarship devoted to its discussion, the truth of the Mud Man ’s inspiration remains a mystery; Raymond Blythe was famously reticent about the novel’s composition, saying only that it had been ‘a gift’; that ‘the muse had attended’ and that the story had arrived whole. Perhaps as a result, The True History of the Mud Man is one of very few novels that has managed to capture and retain public interest, becoming almost mythic in its significance. Questions of its creation and influences are still vigorously debated by the literary scholars of many nations, but the inspiration behind the Mud Man remains one of the twentieth century’s most enduring literary mysteries.
A literary mystery. A shiver crept down my spine as I repeated the words beneath my breath. I loved the Mud Man for its story and the way its arrangement of words made me feel when I read them, but to know that mystery surrounded the novel’s composition made it just that much better.
Although Raymond Blythe had, to this point, been professionally well regarded, the enormous critical and commercial success of The True History of the Mud Man overshadowed his previous work and he would ever after be known as the creator of the nation’s favourite novel. The production in 1924 of the Mud Man as a play in London’s West End brought it to an even wider audience, but despite repeated calls from readers, Raymond Blythe declined to write a sequel. The novel was dedicated in the first instance to his twin daughters, Persephone and Seraphina, however in later editions a second line was added, containing the initials of his two wives: MB and OS.
For along with his professional triumph, Raymond Blythe’s personal life flourished again. He had remarried in 1919, to a woman named Odette Silverman whom he met at a Bloomsbury party hosted by Lady Londonderry. Though Miss Silverman was of unremarkable origins, her talent as a harpist gave her an entrée to social events that would most certainly have been closed to her other wise. The engagement was short and the marriage caused a minor society scandal due to the groom’s age and the bride’s youth – he was over fifty, and she, at eighteen, only five years older than the daughters of his first marriage – and their different provenances. Rumours circulated that Raymond Blythe had been bewitched – by Odette Silverman’s youth and beauty. The pair were wed in a ceremony at the Milderhurst chapel, opened for the first time since the funeral of Muriel Blythe.
Odette gave birth to a daughter in 1922. The child was christened Juniper and her fairness is evident in the many photographs that survive from the period. Once again, despite jocular remarks as to the continued absence of a son and heir, Raymond Blythe’s letters from the time indicate that he was delighted by the addition to his family. Sadly his happiness was to be short-lived, for storm clouds were already gathering on the horizon. In December 1924 Odette died from complications in the early stages of her second pregnancy.
I turned the page eagerly to find two photos. In the first, Juniper Blythe must have been about four, sitting with her legs straight out in front and her ankles crossed. Her feet were bare and her expression made it clear she’d been surprised – and not happily – in a moment of solitary contemplation. She was staring up at the camera with almond-shaped eyes set slightly too wide apart. Combined with her fine blonde hair, the dusting of freckles across her snub nose, and the fierce little mouth, those eyes created an aura of ill-gotten knowledge.
In the next photo Juniper was a young woman, the passing of years seemingly instant, so that the same catlike gaze met the camera now from a grown-up face. A face of great but strange beauty. I remembered Mum’s description of the way the other women in the village hall had stepped aside when Juniper arrived, the atmosphere she’d seemed to carry with her. Looking at this photograph, I could well imagine it. She was curious and secretive, distracted and knowing, all at the same time. The individual features, the hints and glimmers of emotion and intellect, combined to form a whole that was compelling. I skimmed the accompanying text for a date – April 1939. The same year my twelve-year-old mother would meet her.
After the death of his second wife, Raymond Blythe is said to have retreated to his writing room. Aside from a few small opinion pieces in The Times, however, he was to publish nothing of note again. Though Blythe was working on a project at the time of his death it was not, as many hoped, a new instalment of the Mud Man, but rather a lengthy scientific tract about the non-linear nature of time, explicating his own theories, familiar to readers of the Mud Man, about the ability of the past to permeate the present. The work was never completed.
In the later years of his life, Raymond Blythe was subject to declining health and became convinced that the Mud Man of his famous story had come to life to haunt and torment him. An understandable – if fanciful – fear, given the litany of tragic events that had befallen so many of his loved ones over the course of his life, and one that has been gladly adopted by many a visitor to the castle. It is a prevailing expectation, of course, that a historic castle should come replete with its own spine-chilling stories, and natural that a well-loved novel like The True History of the Mud Man, set within the walls of Milderhurst Castle, should provoke such theories.
Raymond Blythe converted to Catholicism in the late nineteen-thirties and in his final years refused visits from all but his priest. He died on Friday 4 April 1941 after a fall from the Milderhurst tower, the same fate that had claimed his mother sixty-five years earlier.
There was another photograph of Raymond Blythe at the end of the chapter. It was vastly different from the first – the smiling young father with the pair of plump twins on his knees – and as I studied it my conversation with Alice in the bookshop came rushing back. In particular, her suggestion that the mental instability that plagued Juniper Blythe had run in the family. For this man, this version of Raymond Blythe, had none of the satisfied ease that had been so remarkable in the first photograph. Instead, he appeared to be riddled by anxiety: his eyes were wary, his mouth was pinched, his chin locked by tension. The photograph was dated 1939, and Raymond would have been seventy-three years old, but it wasn’t age alone that had drawn the deep lines on his face: the longer I stared at it, the more certain I was of that. I’d thought, as I read, that the biographer might have been speaking metaphorically when she referred to Raymond Blythe’s haunting, but now I saw she was not. The man in the photograph wore the frightened mask of prolonged internal torment.
Dusk slumped into place around me, filling the depressions between the undulations and woods of the Milderhurst estate, creeping across the fields and swallowing the light. The photograph of Raymond Blythe dissolved into the darkness and I closed the book. I didn’t leave, though. Not then. I turned instead to look through the gap in the trees to where the castle stood on the crest of the hill, a black mass beneath an inky sky. And I thrilled to think that the following morning I would step across its threshold.
The characters of the castle had come to life for me that afternoon; they’d seeped beneath my skin as I read and I now felt that I had known them all forever. That although I’d stumbled upon the village of Milderhurst by accident, there was a rightness to my being there. I’d experienced the same sensation when I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Bleak House. As if the story were one I’d already known, that it confirmed something I’d always suspected about the world: that it had sat in my future all along, waiting for me to find it.
Journey Through a Garden’s Bones
If I close my eyes now, I can still see the glittering morning sky on my lids: the early summer sun simmering round beneath a clear blue film. It stands out in my memory, I suppose, because by the time I next saw Milderhurst, the seasons had swung and the gardens, the woods, the fields, were cloaked in the metallic tones of autumn. But not that day. As I set off for Milderhurst, Mrs Bird’s detailed instructions loosely in hand, I was enlivened by the stirrings of long-buried desire. Everything was being reborn: birdsong coloured the air, bee-buzz thickened it, and the warm, warm sun drew me up the hill and towards the castle.
I walked and I walked, until, just when I thought I was in danger of losing myself forever in an unending wooded grove, I emerged through a rusted gate to find a neglected bathing pool laid out before me. It was large and circular, at least thirty feet across, and I knew it at once as the pool Mrs Bird had told me about, the one designed by Oliver Sykes when Raymond Blythe brought his first wife to live at the castle. It was similar in some ways, of course, to its smaller twin down by the farmhouse, yet I was struck by the differences. Where Mrs Bird’s pool glistened blithely beneath the sun, manicured lawn reaching out to tether itself to the sandstone surround, this one had long been left to its own devices. The edging stones were coated in moss and gaps had appeared between them, so the pool was fringed now by kingcups and ox-eye daisies, yellow faces vying for the patchy sunlight. Lily pads grew wild across the surface, one tiled over the other, and the warm breeze rippled the entire skin like that of a giant scaled fish. The sort that evolves unchecked; an exotic aberration.
I couldn’t see the bottom of the pool, but I could guess at its depth. A diving board had been installed on the far side, the wooden plank bleached and splintered, the springs rusted, the whole contraption held together, it appeared, by little more than good luck. From the bough of an enormous tree a wooden swing seat was suspended on twin ropes, stilled now by the host of thorny brambles that had plaited their way from top to bottom.
The brambles hadn’t stopped at the ropes either: they’d been having a lovely time thriving unchallenged in the odd, abandoned clearing. Through a tangle of greedy greenery, I spied a small brick building, a changing room, I supposed, the peak of its pitched roof visible at the top. The door was padlocked, the mechanism completely rusted, and the windows, when I found them, were laminated thickly with grime that wouldn’t wipe off. At the back, however, a pane of glass was broken, a grey tuft of fur impaled on the sharpest peak, and I was able to peer through. Which, of course, I wasted no time in doing.
Dust, so dense I could smell it from where I stood, decades of dust, blanketing the floor and everything else. The room was unevenly lit, courtesy of skylights from which several wooden shutters had been lost, some still hanging by their hinges, others discarded on the floor below. Fine flecks sifted through the gaps, spiralling in streamers of strangled light. A row of shelves was stacked with folded towels, their original colour impossible to guess, and an elegant door on the far wall wore a sign that read ‘Dressing Room’. Beyond, a gossamer curtain fluttered pinkly against a set of stacked lounging chairs, just as it must have done for a long time unobserved.
I stepped back, conscious suddenly of the noise of my shoes on the fallen leaves. An uncanny stillness permeated the clearing, though the faint lapping of the lily pads remained, and for a split second I could imagine the place when it was new. A delicate overlay insinuated itself atop the present neglect: a laughing party in old-fashioned bathing suits laying down their towels, sipping refreshments, diving from the board, swinging out low and long over the cool, cool water…
And then it was gone. I blinked, and it was just me again, and the overgrown building. A vague atmosphere of unnameable regret. Why, I wondered, had this pool been abandoned? Why had the last long-ago occupant washed their hands of the place, locked it up, walked away, and never come back? The three Misses Blythe were old ladies now, but they hadn’t always been so. In the many years they’d lived at the castle surely there had been steaming summers ideal for swimming in just such a place…
I would learn the answers to my questions, though not for some time yet. I would learn other things too, secret things, answers to questions I hadn’t begun to dream of asking. But back then all that was still to come. Standing in the outlying garden of Milderhurst Castle that morning, I was easily able to shrug off such musings and focus instead on the task at hand. For not only was my investigation of the pool getting me no closer to my appointment with the Misses Blythe, I also had a niggling feeling I wasn’t supposed to be in the clearing at all.
I reread Mrs Bird’s instructions closely.
It was just as I thought: there was no mention of a pool. In fact, according to the directions, I was supposed to be approaching the south front right about now, making my way between a pair of majestic pillars.
A small stone of dismay sank slowly to the pit of my stomach.
This was not the south lawn. I could see no pillars.
And, while it was no surprise to me that I was lost – I can get in a muddle crossing Hyde Park – it was intensely annoying. Time was pressing and, other than retrace my steps and start again, there seemed little choice but to keep heading higher and hope for the best. There was a gate on the other side of the pool and, beyond it, a stone staircase carved steeply into the overgrown hillside. At least a hundred steps, each sinking into the one beneath as if the whole construction had heaved an enormous sigh. The trajectory was promising, though, so I started climbing. I figured it was all a matter of logic. The castle, the Sisters Blythe, were at the top: keep going upwards and I’d have to reach them eventually.
The Sisters Blythe. It must’ve been around this time that I started thinking of them that way; the ‘Sisters’ jumped in front of the ‘Blythe’, somewhat like the Brothers Grimm, and there was little I could do to stop it. It’s funny the way things happen. Before Juniper’s letter I’d never heard of Milderhurst Castle, now I was drawn to it like the dusty little moth to the big, bright flame. In the beginning it was all about my mum, of course, the surprise news of her evacuation, the mysterious castle with the gothic-sounding name. Then there was the Raymond Blythe connection – the place where the Mud Man came to life, for goodness’ sake! But now, as I drew closer to that flame, I realized there was something new making my pulse all thrilled and spiky. It might have been the reading I’d done, or the background information Mrs Bird had pushed upon me over breakfast that morning, but at some point I’d become fascinated by the Sisters Blythe themselves.
I should say that siblings interest me generally. I’m intrigued and repelled by their closeness. The sharing of genetic ingredients, the random and at times unfair distribution of inheritance, the inescapability of the tie. I understand a little of that tie myself. I had a brother once, but not for long. He was buried before I knew him and by the time I’d pieced enough together to miss him, the traces he’d left behind had been neatly put away. A pair of certificates, one birth, one death, in a slim file in the cabinet; a small photograph in my father’s wallet, another in my mum’s jewellery drawer: all that remained to say, ‘I was here!’ Along with the memories and sorrows that live inside my parents’ heads, of course, but they don’t share those with me.
My point is not to make you feel uncomfortable or sorry for me, only to express that despite having almost nothing material or memorable left with which to conjure Daniel, I’ve felt the tie between us all my life. An invisible thread connects us just as certainly as day is bound to night. It’s always been that way, even when I was small. If I was a presence in my parents’ house, he was an absence. An unspoken sentence every time we were happy: If only he were here; every time I disappointed them: He wouldn’t have done so; every time I started a new school year: Those would be his classmates, those big kids over there. The distant look I caught in their gazes sometimes when they thought they were alone.
Now I’m not saying my curiosity about the Sisters Blythe had much, if anything, to do with Daniel. Not directly. But theirs was such a beautiful story: two older sisters giving up their own lives to devote themselves to the care of the younger: a broken heart, a lost mind, an unrequited love; it made me wonder what things might have been like, whether Daniel might have been the sort of person I’d have given my life to protect. I couldn’t stop thinking of those sisters, you see, the three of them tied together like that. Growing old, fading, spinning out their days in their ancestral home, the last living members of a grand, romantic family.
I climbed carefully, up and up, past a weathered sundial, past a row of patient urns on silent plinths, past a pair of stone deer facing off across neglected hedges, until finally I reached the last step and the ground flattened. A pleached alley of gnarled fruit trees racked before me, drawing me onwards. It was as if the garden had a plan, I remember thinking that first morning; as if there were an order, as if it had been waiting for me, refusing to leave me lost, conspiring instead to deliver me to the castle.
Sentimental silliness, of course. I can only suppose that the steep incline had left me light-headed and subject to wildly grandiose thoughts. Whatever the case, I felt infused. I was intrepid (if rather sweaty). An adventurer who’d slipped from my own time and place and was going forth now to conquer… well, to conquer something. Never mind that this particular mission was destined to end with three old ladies and a country house tour, perhaps an offer of tea if I was lucky.
Like the pool, this part of the garden had long been left untended, and as I passed through the tunnel of arches I felt myself to be walking within the ancient skeleton of some enormous monster, long dead. Giant ribs stretched above, encasing me, while long linear shadows created the illusion that they also curved beneath. I skipped quickly to the end but when I reached it I stopped short.
There before me, cloaked in shade though the day was warm, stood Milderhurst Castle. The back of Milderhurst Castle, I realized with a frown, taking in the outhouses, the exposed plumbing, the distinct lack of pillars, entrance lawn or driveway.
And then it dawned on me, the precise nature of my lostness. Somehow I must’ve missed an early turn and I had ended up winding right around the wooded hillside instead, approaching the castle from the north rather than the south.
All’s well that end’s well, though: I’d made it relatively unscathed and I was quite sure I wasn’t yet offensively late. Even better, I’d spied a flat strip of wild grass wrapping its way around the walled castle gardens. I followed it, and finally – a triumphant trumpet flourish – stumbled upon Mrs Bird’s pillars. Across the south lawn, just where it ought to be, the front face of Milderhurst Castle rose tall and taller to meet the sun.
The quiet, steady accumulation of years I’d felt on the garden climb was more concentrated here, spun out like a web around the castle. The building had a dramatic grace and was decidedly oblivious to my intrusion. The bored sash windows gazed beyond me, looking towards the English Channel with a weary permanence of expression that emphasized my sense that I was trivial, temporary, that the grand old building had seen too much else in its time to be bothered much by me.
A clutter of starlings took flight from the chimney tops, wheeling through the sky and into the valley where Mrs Bird’s farmhouse nestled. The noise, the motion, was oddly disconcerting.
I followed their progress as they skimmed the treetops, skirling towards the tiny red-tiled roofs. The farmhouse looked so far away, I was overcome by the strangest sense that at some point during my walk up the wooded hill I’d crossed an invisible line of sorts. I’d been there, but now I was here, and something more complicated was at work than a simple shift in location.
Turning back towards the castle, I saw that a large black door in the lower arch of the tower stood wide open. Strange that I hadn’t noticed it before.
I started across the grass, but when I reached the stone front stairs I faltered. Sitting by a weathered marble greyhound was his flesh and blood descendant, a black dog of the type I would come to know as a lurcher. He’d been watching me, it seemed, the whole time I’d been standing on the lawn.
Now he stood, blocking my way, assessing me with his dark eyes. I felt unwilling, unable to continue. My breathing was shallow and I was suddenly cold. I wasn’t afraid, though. It’s difficult to explain, but it was as if he were the ferryman, or an old-fashioned butler, someone whose permission I needed before I could proceed.
He padded towards me, gaze fixed, footfalls noiseless. Brushed lightly beneath my fingertips before he turned and loped away. Disappeared without a second glance through the open door.
Beckoning me, or so it seemed, to follow.
Three Fading Sisters
Have you ever wondered what the stretch of time smells like? I can’t say I had, not before I set foot inside Milderhurst Castle, but I certainly know now. Mould and ammonia, a pinch of lavender and a fair whack of dust, the mass disintegration of very old sheets of paper. And there’s something else, too, something underlying it all, something verging on rotten or stewed but not. It took me a while to work out what that smell was, but I think I know now. It’s the past. Thoughts and dreams, hopes and hurts, all brewed together, fermenting slowly in the fusty air, unable ever to dissipate completely.
‘Hello?’ I called, waiting at the top of the wide stone staircase for a return greeting. Time passed and none came, so I said it again, louder this time. ‘Hello? Is anyone home?’
Mrs Bird had told me to go on in, that the Sisters Blythe were expecting us, that she’d meet me inside. In fact, she’d been at great pains to impress upon me that I was not to knock or ring the bell or otherwise announce my arrival. I’d been dubious – where I came from, entrance without announcement came pretty close to trespassing – but I did as she’d bid me: took myself straight through the stone portico, beneath the arched walkway, and into the circular room beyond. There were no windows and it was dim despite a ceiling that swept up to form a high dome. A noise drew my attention to the rounded top, where a white bird had flown through the rafters and hovered now in a shaft of dusted light.
‘Well then.’ The voice came from my left and I turned quickly to see a very old woman standing in a doorframe some ten feet away, the lurcher by her side. She was thin but tall, dressed in tweeds and a button-up collared shirt, almost gentlemanly in style. Her gender had been brittled by the years, any curves she’d had sunken long ago. Her hair had receded from her forehead and sat short and white around her ears with a wiry stubbornness; the egg-shaped face was alert and intelligent. Her eyebrows, I noted as I moved closer, had been plucked to the point of complete removal then drawn in again, scores the colour of old blood. The effect was dramatic, if a little grim. She leaned forward slightly on an elegant ivory-handled cane. ‘You must be Miss Burchill.’
‘Yes.’ I held out my hand, breathless suddenly. ‘Edith Burchill. Hello there.’
Chill fingers pressed lightly against mine and the leather strap of her watch fell noiselessly around her wrist bone. ‘Marilyn Bird from the farmhouse said you’d be coming. My name is Persephone Blythe.’
‘Thank you so much for agreeing to meet me. Ever since I learned of Milderhurst Castle, I’ve been dying to see inside.’
‘Really?’ A sharp twist of her lips, a smile as crooked as a hairpin. ‘I wonder why.’
That was the time, of course, to tell her about Mum, about the letter, her evacuation here as a girl. To see Percy Blythe’s face light up with recognition, for us to exchange news and old stories as we walked. Nothing could have been more natural, which is why it came as something of a surprise to hear myself say: ‘I read about it in a book.’
She made a noise, a less interested version of ‘ah’.
‘I read a lot,’ I added quickly, as if the truthful qualifier might somehow lessen the lie. ‘I love books. I work with books. Books are my life.’
Her wrinkled expression wilted further in the face of such an innocuous response, and little wonder. The original fib was dreary enough, the additional biographical titbits positively inane. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t just told the truth: it was far more interesting, not to mention honest. Some half-cocked, childish notion of wanting my visit to be my own, I suspect; for it to remain untinged by my mother’s arrival fifty years earlier. Whatever the case, I opened my mouth to backtrack but it was too late: Persephone Blythe had already motioned for me to follow as she and the lurcher started down the gloomy corridor. Her pace was steady and her footfalls light, the cane, it seemed, paying mere lip service to her great age.
‘Your punctuality pleases me, at any rate,’ her voice floated back to me. ‘I abhor tardiness.’
We continued in silence, deep and deepening silence. With each step, the sounds of outside were left more emphatically behind: the trees, the birds, the distant chattering of the somewhere brook. Noises I hadn’t even realized I was hearing until they were gone, leaving a strange airy vacuum so stark my ears began to hum, conjuring their own phantoms to fill the void; whispering sounds, like children when they play at being snakes.
It was something I would come to know well, the odd isolation of the castle interior. The way sounds, smells, sights that were clear outside the walls seemed somehow to get stuck in the old stone, unable ever to burrow their way through. It was as if over centuries the porous sandstone had absorbed its fill, trapping past impressions, like those flowers preserved and forgotten between the pages of nineteenth-century books, creating a barrier between inside and out that was now absolute. The air outside may have carried rumours of buttercups and freshly mown grass, but inside it smelled only of accumulating time, the muddy held breath of centuries.
We passed a number of tantalizing sealed doors until finally, at the very end of the corridor, just before it turned a corner and disappeared into the further gloom, we came to one that stood ajar. A sliver of light smiled from inside, widening into a grin when Percy Blythe prodded it with her cane.
She stepped back and nodded bluntly, indicating that I should enter first.
It was a parlour and it stood in great welcoming contrast to the shadowy oak-panelled corridor from which we’d come: yellow wallpaper that must once have been fiercely bright had faded over time, the swirled pattern settling into a tepid languor, and an enormous rug, pink and blue and white – whether pale or threadbare I couldn’t tell – stretched almost to reach the skirting boards. Facing the elaborate carved fireplace was an upholstered sofa, oddly long and low, that wore the imprints of a thousand bodies and looked all the more comfortable for it. A Singer sewing machine fed with a swathe of blue fabric stood alongside.
The lurcher padded past me, arranging himself artfully on a flattened sheepskin at the base of a great painted screen, two hundred years old at least. A scene of dogs and cockerels was depicted, the olives and browns of the foreground faded to form a muted meld, the background sky eternally in the gloaming. The patch behind the lurcher had worn almost completely away.
At a rounded table nearby a woman the same age as Percy sat with her head bent close over a sheet of paper, an island in a sea of scattered Scrabble pieces. She wore huge reading glasses that were fumbled off when she noticed me, folded into a hidden pocket in her long silk dress as she stood. Her eyes were revealed as grey-blue, her brows a rather ordinary affair, neither arched nor straight, short nor long. Her fingernails, however, were painted a vivid pink to match her lipstick and the large flowers in her dress. Though dressed differently, she was as neatly packaged as Percy, with a commitment to outward appearance that was somehow old-fashioned even if the clothes themselves were not.
‘This is my sister, Seraphina,’ said Percy, going to stand beside her. ‘Saffy,’ she said in an exaggeratedly loud voice, ‘this is Edith.’
Saffy tapped the fingers of one hand against her ear. ‘No need to shout, Percy dear,’ came a soft singsong voice, ‘my earpiece is in place.’ She smiled shyly at me, blinking for need of the glasses her vanity had removed. She was as tall as her twin, but through some trick of dress or the light, or perhaps of posture she didn’t seem it. ‘Old habits die hard,’ she said. ‘Percy was always the bossy one. I’m Saffy Blythe and it’s really, truly, a pleasure to meet you.’
I came closer to take her hand. She was a carbon copy of her sister, or she had been once. The past eighty-odd years had etched different lines on their faces and the result was somehow softer on Saffy, sweeter. She looked just as an old lady of the manor should and I warmed to her immediately. Where Percy was formidable, Saffy made me think of oatmeal biscuits and cotton-fibre paper covered with a beautiful inky scrawl. It’s a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.
‘We’ve had a telephone call from Mrs Bird,’ said Saffy. ‘I’m afraid she’s been caught up in the village with her business.’
‘Oh.’
‘She was in a frightful flap,’ Percy continued flatly. ‘But I told her I’d be happy to show you round myself.’
‘More than happy.’ Saffy smiled. ‘My sister loves this house as other people love their spouses. She’s thrilled to have a chance to show it off. And well she might. The old place is a credit to her: only years of her tireless work have kept it from falling into disrepair.’
‘I’ve done what was necessary to stop the walls collapsing around us. No more.’
‘My sister is being modest.’
‘And mine is being stubborn.’
This chiding was evidently a normal part of their repartee, and the two paused to smile at me. For a moment I was trans- fixed, remembering the photograph in Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst, wondering which of these old ladies was which little twin, and then Saffy reached across the narrow divide to take Percy’s hand. ‘My sister has taken care of us all our long lives,’ she said, before turning to look with such admiration at her twin’s profile that I knew she had been the smaller, thinner of the two girls in the photo, the one whose smile wavered uncertainly beneath the camera’s gaze.
The additional praise did not sit well with Percy, who scrutinized her watch before muttering, ‘Never mind. Not much further to go now.’
It’s always difficult to know what to say when a very old person starts talking about death and its imminence, so I did what I do when Herbert hints about my taking over at Billing & Brown ‘one day’: I smiled as if I might have misheard and gave the sunlit bay window a closer inspection.
And that’s when I noticed the third sister, the one who must be Juniper. She was sitting statue-still in an armchair of faded green velvet, watching through the open window as the parkland spilled away from her. A faint plume of cigarette smoke rose from a crystal ashtray, smudging her into soft focus. Unlike her sisters, there was nothing fine about her clothing or the way she wore it. She was dressed in the international costume of the invalid: an ill-fitting blouse tucked in firm and high to shapeless slacks, her lap marked by greasy spots where things had spilled.
Perhaps Juniper sensed my gaze, for she turned slightly – just the side of her face – towards me. Her eye, I could see, was glassy and unsteady in a way that suggested heavy medication and when I smiled she gave no sign that she had seen, just continued to stare as if she sought to bore a hole right through me.
Watching her, I became aware of a soft press of sound I hadn’t noticed before. A small television set perched on a wooden occasional table beneath the window frame. An American sitcom was playing and the laugh track punctuated the constant hum of sassy dialogue with periodic stabs of static. It gave me a familiar feeling, that television set, the warm, sunny day outside, the still, stale air within: a nostalgic memory of visiting Gran in the school holidays and being allowed to watch television in the daytime.
‘What are you doing here?’
Pleasant memories of Gran shattered beneath the sudden icy blow. Juniper Blythe was still staring at me but her expression was no longer blank. It was distinctly unwelcoming.
‘I, uh… hello,’ I said. ‘I…’
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
The lurcher gave a strangled yelp.
‘Juniper!’ Saffy hurried to her sister’s side. ‘Darling girl, Edith is our guest.’ She took her sister’s face gently in both hands. ‘I told you, June, remember? I explained it all: Edith’s here to have a tour of the castle. Percy’s taking her for a lovely little walk. You mustn’t worry, darling, everything’s all right.’
While I wished fervently that I could somehow disappear, the twins exchanged a glance that sat so easily in the different lines of their matching faces that I knew it must have passed between them many times before. Percy nodded at Saffy, tight-lipped, and then the expression dissolved before I’d worked out what it was about that glance that gave me such a peculiar feeling.
‘Well then,’ she said with an affected cheeriness that made me wince, ‘time is wasting. Let’s get on, shall we, Miss Burchill?’
I followed gladly as she led us out of the room, around a corner and down another cool, shadowed passage.
‘I’ll walk you past the back rooms first,’ she said, ‘but we won’t stop long. There’s little point. They’ve been under sheets for years.’
‘Why is that?’
‘They all face north.’
Percy had a pared way of speaking; a little like the way wireless commentators used to sound, back when the BBC was the last word on all matters enunciative. Short sentences, perfect diction, the hint of nuance concealed in the body of each full stop. ‘The heating in winter is impossible,’ she said. ‘It’s just the three of us so we hardly need the space. It was easier to close some doors for good. My sisters and I took rooms in the small west wing; near the yellow parlour.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said quickly. ‘There must be a hundred rooms in a building this size. All the different levels – I’d be sure to get lost.’ I was babbling, I could hear it but I couldn’t stop it. A basic lack of facility with small talk, excitement at finally being inside the castle, lingering discomfort from the scene with Juniper… whatever, it proved a lethal combination. I drew a deep breath and, to my horror, continued: ‘Though of course you’ve been here all your life so I’m sure it’s not a problem for you-’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said sharply, turning to face me. Even in the gloom I could see that her skin had whitened. She’s going to ask me to leave, I thought; my visit is too much, she’s old and tired, her sister isn’t well.
‘Our sister isn’t well,’ she said and my heart plunged. ‘It has nothing to do with you. She can be rude sometimes, but it isn’t her fault. She suffered a great disappointment – a terrible thing. A long time ago.’
‘There’s no need to explain,’ I said. Please don’t ask me to leave.
‘Very kind, but I feel I must. At least a little. Such rudeness. She doesn’t do well with strangers. It’s been an awful trial. Our family physician died a decade ago and we’re still battling to find another we can tolerate. She gets confused. I hope you don’t feel unwelcome.’
‘Not at all, I understand completely.’
‘I hope so. Because we’re very pleased you could visit.’ That short hairpin smile. ‘The castle likes to be visited; it needs it.’
Caretakers in the Veins
On the morning of my tenth birthday, Mum and Dad took me to visit the dolls’ houses at the Bethnal Green Museum. I don’t know why we went to see dolls’ houses, whether I’d expressed an interest or my parents had read a newspaper article about the collection, but I remember the day very clearly. One of those few shining memories you gather along the way; perfectly formed and sealed, like a bubble that forgot to pop. We went in a taxi, which I remember thinking very posh, and afterwards we had tea at a fancy place in Mayfair. I even remember what I wore: a diamond-patterned mini-dress I’d coveted for months and finally unwrapped that morning.
The other thing I remember with blinding clarity is that we lost my mum. Perhaps that event, rather than the dolls’ houses themselves, is why the day didn’t fade for me when it was tossed in amongst the crushing constellation of childhood experiences. It was all topsy-turvy, you see. Grown-up people didn’t get lost, not in my world: it was the province of children, of little girls like me who made a habit of following their daydreams and dragging their feet and generally Failing to Keep Up.
But not this time. This time, inexplicably, earth joltingly, it was my mum who’d slipped through the cracks. Dad and I were waiting in a queue to buy a souvenir booklet when it happened; we were shuffling forward, following the line, each of us keeping silent company with our own thoughts. It wasn’t until we reached the counter and both stood mutely, blinking first at the shop assistant, then at one another, that we realized we were somehow without our traditional family mouthpiece.
I was the one to find her again, kneeling in front of a doll’s house we’d already passed. It was tall and dark, as I recall, with lots of staircases, and an attic running along the top. She didn’t explain why she’d returned, saying only, ‘There are actual places like this, Edie. Real houses with real people living in them. Can you imagine? All those rooms?’ A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: ‘Ancient walls that sing the distant hours.’
I don’t think I answered her. For one thing there wasn’t time – my dad turned up right then looking flustered and somehow personally wounded – and for another I wasn’t sure what to say. Although we never discussed it again, it was a long time before I let go completely of the belief that somewhere out there in the great, wide world, stood real houses with real people living in them and walls that sang.
I mention the Bethnal Green Museum here only because, as Percy Blythe led me down darkening corridors, Mum’s comment came back to me, bright and brighter, until I could see her face, hear her words, as clearly as if she were standing right next to me. It might have had something to do with the odd sense that pressed upon me as we explored the enormous house; the impression that I’d fallen victim somehow to a shrinking spell and been transported inside a house for dolls, albeit a doll’s house that was rather down at heel. One whose child owner had grown beyond the point of interest and moved on to new obsessions, leaving the rooms with their faded wallpapers and silks, the rush-matted floors, the urns and stuffed birds, the heavy furniture waiting silently, hopefully, for reoccupation.
Then again, perhaps all that came second. Perhaps it was Mum’s comment that came to mind first because of course she’d been thinking of Milderhurst when she’d told me about the real people in their real houses with lots of rooms. What else could have inspired her to say such a thing? That unreadable expression on her face had been the result of remembering this place. She’d been thinking about Percy, Saffy and Juniper Blythe and the strange, secret things that must have happened to her as a girl when she was transplanted from south London to Milderhurst Castle. The things that had reached across fifty years with a grasp strong enough that a lost letter could make her cry.
Whatever the case, as I took Percy’s tour that morning, I carried my mum with me. I couldn’t have resisted her if I’d tried. No matter that I’d become inexplicably jealous that my exploration of the castle be my own – a small part of Mum, a part I’d never known, certainly never noticed, was anchored to this place. And although I wasn’t used to having things in common with her, although the very notion made the earth spin a little faster, I realized that I didn’t mind. In fact, I rather liked that the curious comment at the doll’s house museum was no longer an oddity, a mosaic piece that didn’t fit the whole. It was a fragment of Mum’s past, a fragment that was somehow brighter and more interesting than those surrounding it.
So it was, as Percy led, and I listened and looked and nodded, that a small ghostly Londoner stepped silently beside me: wide-eyed, nervous, glimpsing the house for the first time, too. And it turned out I liked her being there; if I could’ve, I’d have reached down across the decades to take her hand in mine. I wondered how different the castle must have been in 1939, how much change had occurred in the past fifty years. Whether even then Milderhurst Castle had felt like a house asleep, everything dull and dusty and dim. An old house biding its time. And I wondered whether I’d have the chance to ask that little girl, if she was still at large somewhere. If I’d ever be able to find her.
It is impossible to recount everything that was said and seen that day at Milderhurst, and, for the purposes of this story, unnecessary. So much has happened since, subsequent events have bowed and bent and mixed in my mind so that it’s difficult to isolate my first impressions of the castle and its inhabitants. I will stick, then, in this account, to the sights and sounds that were most vivid, and to those events pertinent to what came after, and what came before. Events that could never – will never – fade from memory.
Two important things became clear to me as I took the tour: first, Mrs Bird had been underplaying matters when she’d told me Milderhurst was a little shabby. The castle was distressed, and not in a glamshackle way. Second, and more remarkably, Percy Blythe was blind to the fact. No matter that dust smothered the heavy wooden furniture, that countless specks thickened the stagnant air, that generations of moths had been feasting on the curtains, she continued to speak about the rooms as if they were in their prime, as if elegant literary salons were staged, and royalty mingled with members of the literati, and an army of servants bustled unseen along the corridors doing the Blythe family’s bidding. I’d have felt sympathy for her, caught as she was in a fantasy world, except that she wasn’t at all the sort of person who engendered sympathy. She was resolutely un-victim-like and therefore my pity was transformed into admiration; respect for her stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the old place was falling apart around them.
Another thing I feel compelled to mention about Percy: for an octogenarian with a cane she set a cracking pace. We took in the billiard room, the ballroom, the conservatory, then swept on downstairs into the servants’ hall; marched though the butler’s pantry, the glass pantry, the scullery, before arriving finally at the kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from hooks along the walls, a stout Aga rusted beside a sagging range, a family of empty ceramic pots stood chest to chest on the tiles. At the centre, an enormous pine table balanced on pregnant ankles, its top scored by centuries of knives, flour salting the wounds. The air was cool and stale and it seemed to me that the servants’ rooms, even more than those upstairs, bore the pallor of abandonment, They were disused limbs of a great Victorian engine that had fallen victim to changing times and ground to a final halt.
I wasn’t the only one to register the increased gloom, the weight of decline. ‘Diffi cult to believe, but this place used to hum,’ said Percy Blythe, running her finger along the table’s crenelation. ‘My grandmother had a staff of over forty servants. Forty. One forgets how the house once gleamed.’
The floor was littered with small brown pellets I took at first for dirt but recognized, by their particular crunch underfoot, as mouse droppings. I made a mental note to refuse cake if it was offered.
‘Even when we were children, there were twenty or so servants inside and a team of fifteen gardeners keeping the grounds in order. The Great War ended that: they all enlisted, every last one. Most young men did.’
‘And none came back?’
‘Two. Two made it home, but they weren’t the men they’d been before they went. There were none returned in quite the same shape they’d left. We kept them on, of course – to do otherwise would have been unthinkable – but they didn’t last long.’
Whether she referred specifically to the length of their employment or, more generally, to their lives, I wasn’t sure, and she didn’t leave me pause to enquire.
‘We muddled along after that, employing temporary staff where possible, but by the second war one couldn’t have found a gardener for love nor money. What sort of a young man would be content to occupy himself tending pleasure gardens when there was a war to be fought? Not the sort we cared to employ. Household help was just as scarce. We were all of us busy with other things.’ She was standing very still, leaning on the head of her cane, and the skin of her cheeks slackened as her thoughts wandered.
I cleared my throat, spoke gently. ‘What about now? Do you have any help these days?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She waved a hand dismissively, her attention returning from wherever it had been. ‘Such as it is. We’ve a retainer who comes in once a week to help with the cooking and cleaning, and one of the local farmers keeps the fences standing. There’s a young fellow, too, Mrs Bird’s nephew from the village, who mows the lawn and attempts to keep the weeds in check. He does an adequate job, though a strong work ethic seems to be a thing of the past.’ She smiled briefly. ‘The rest of the time we’re left to our own devices.’
I returned her smile as she gestured towards the narrow service staircase and said, ‘You mentioned that you’re a bibliophile?’
‘My mother says I was born with a book in my hand.’
‘I expect, then, that you’ll be wanting to see our library.’
I remembered reading that fire had consumed the Milderhurst library, the same fire that had killed the twins’ mother, so although I’m not sure what I expected to see behind the black door at the end of the sombre corridor, I do know that a well-stocked library was not it. That, however, is precisely what lay before me when I followed Percy Blythe through the doorway. Shelves spanned all four walls, floor to ceiling, and although it was shadowy inside – the windows were cloaked by thick, draping curtains that brushed the ground – I could see they were lined with very old books, the sort with marbled end papers, gold-dipped edges, and black cloth binding. My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.
Percy Blythe noticed the focus of my attention and seemed to read my mind. ‘Replacements, of course,’ she said. ‘Most of the original Blythe family library went up in flames. There was very little salvageable; those that weren’t burned were tortured by smoke and water.’
‘All those books,’ I said, the notion a physical pain.
‘Quite. My father took it very badly indeed. He dedicated much of his later life to resurrecting the collection. Letters flew hither and yon. Rare-book dealers were our most frequent callers; visitors weren’t otherwise encouraged. Daddy never used this room, though, not after Mother.’
It might have been merely the product of an overactive imagination, but as she spoke I became certain that I could smell old fire, seeping from beneath the new walls, the fresh paint, issuing from deep within the original mortar. There was a noise, too, that I couldn’t place; a tapping sound, unremarkable under normal circumstances but noteworthy in this strange and silent house. I glanced at Percy, who had wandered to stand behind a leather chair with deep-set buttons, but if she heard it at all, she didn’t show it. ‘My father was a great one for letters,’ she said, gazing fixedly at a writing desk within a nook by the window. ‘My sister, Saffy, too.’
‘Not you?’
A tight smile. ‘I’ve written very few in my life and those only when absolutely necessary.’
Her answer struck me as unusual and perhaps it showed on my face, for she went on to explain.
‘The written word was never my métier. In a family of writers it seemed as well to recognize one’s shortcomings. Lesser attempts were not celebrated. Father and his two surviving brothers used to exchange great essays when we were young, and he would read them aloud in the evenings. He expected amusement and exercised no restraint in passing judgement on those who failed to meet his standards. He was devastated by the invention of the telephone. Blamed it for many of the world’s ills.’
The tapping came again, louder this time, suggestive of movement. A little like the wind sneaking through cracks, blowing grit along surfaces, only heavier somehow. And, I felt certain, coming from above.
I scanned the ceiling, the dull electric light hanging from a greying rose, a lightning-bolt fissure in the plaster. It struck me then that the noise I heard might well be the only warning we were to get that the ceiling’s collapse was forthcoming. ‘That noise-’
‘Oh, you mustn’t mind that,’ said Percy Blythe, waving a thin hand. ‘That’s just the caretakers, playing in the veins.’
I suspect I looked confused; I certainly felt it.
‘They’re the best-kept secret in a house as old as this one.’
‘The caretakers?’
‘The veins.’ She frowned, looking up, followed the line of the cornice as if tracing the progress of something I couldn’t see. When she spoke again, her voice was slightly changed. A hairline crack had appeared in her composure, and for a moment I felt that I could see and hear her more clearly. ‘In a cupboard in a room at the very top of the castle there lies a secret doorway. Behind the doorway is the entrance to an entire scheme of hidden passages. It’s possible to crawl along them, room to room, attic to vault, just like a little mouse. If one goes quietly enough, it’s possible to hear all manner of whispered things; to get lost inside if one isn’t careful. They’re the castle’s veins.’
I shivered, overcome by a sudden and pressing image of the castle as a giant, crouching creature. A dark and nameless beast, holding its breath; the big, old toad of a fairy tale, waiting to trick a maiden into kissing him. I was thinking of the Mud Man, of course, the Stygian, slippery figure emerging from the lake to claim the girl in the attic window.
‘When we were girls, Saffy and I liked to play pretend. We imagined that a family of previous owners inhabited the passages and refused to move on. We called them the caretakers, and whenever we heard a noise we couldn’t explain, we knew it must be them.’
‘Really?’ Barely a whisper.
She laughed at the expression on my face, a strangely humourless ack-ack that stopped as suddenly as it had started. ‘Oh, but they weren’t real. Certainly not. Those noises you hear are mice. Lord knows we’ve enough of them.’ A twitch at the corner of her eye as she considered me. ‘I wonder. Would you like to see the cupboard in the nursery that holds the secret door?’
I believe I actually squeaked. ‘I’d love to.’
‘Come along then. It’s quite a climb.’
The Empty Attic and the Distant Hours
She was not exaggerating. The staircase turned in upon itself, doubling back again and again, narrowing and darkening with each flight. Just when I thought I was going to be plunged into a state of utter blindness, Percy Blythe flicked a switch and a bare light bulb fired dully, swinging on a cord suspended from the ceiling high above. I could see then that at some point in the past a rail had been attached to the wall to assist with the final steep assault. Sometime in the 1950s, I guessed; the metal cylinder had a dull utility feel about it. Whomever and whenever, I saluted. The stairs were perilously worn, all the more so now that I could see them, and it was a relief to have something onto which I could clutch. Less happily, the light meant I could also see the webs. No one had been up those stairs in a long time and the castle spiders had noticed.
‘Our nurse used to carry a tallow candle when she took us to bed at night,’ said Percy, starting up the final flight. ‘The glow would glance against the stones as we went and she’d sing that song about oranges and lemons. You know it, I’m sure: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.’
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head: yes, I knew it. A grey beard brushed my shoulder, sparking a wave of affection for my plain little shoebox bedroom at Mum and Dad’s. No webs there: just Mum’s bi-weekly dusting schedule and the reassuring whiff of disinfectant.
‘There was no electricity in the house back then. Not until the mid-thirties, and then only half voltage. Father couldn’t abide all those wires. He was terrified of fire, and understandably so considering what happened to Mother.
‘He devised a series of drills after that. He’d ring a bell, down on the lawn, and time us on his old stopwatch. Shouting all the while that the place was about to go up like a mighty pyre.’ She laughed, that glass-cutting ack-ack, then stopped again suddenly when she reached the top step. ‘Well,’ she said, holding the key in the lock a moment before turning it. ‘Shall we?’
She pushed open the door and I almost fell backwards, bowled over by the flood of light that came rolling towards me. I blinked and squinted, gradually regaining my vision as the room’s contrasting shapes sharpened into view.
After the journey to reach it, the attic itself might have seemed an anticlimax. It was very plain, with little of the Victorian nursery about it. Indeed, unlike the rest of the house, in which rooms had been preserved as if the return of their inhabitants was imminent, the nursery was eerily empty. It had the look of a room that had been scrubbed, whitewashed even. There was no carpet, and the twin iron beds wore no covers, jutting out from the far wall each side of a disused fireplace. There were no curtains, either, which accounted for the brightness, and the single set of shelves beneath one of the windows was naked of books and toys.
A single set of shelves beneath an attic window.
I needed nothing more to make me thrill. I could almost see the young girl from the Mud Man’s prologue, woken in the night and drawn to the window; climbing quietly onto the top shelf and gazing out across her family’s estate, dreaming of the adventures she would one day have, utterly unaware of the horror that was about to claim her.
‘This attic housed generation after generation of Blythe family children,’ said Percy Blythe, her eyes making a slow sweep of the room. ‘Centuries of peas in a pod.’
She made no mention of the room’s bare state or its place in literary history and I didn’t press her. Since the moment she’d turned the key and led me in, her spirits seemed to have sunk. I wasn’t sure whether it was the nursery itself that was having such an enervating effect, or whether the increased light of the stark room simply allowed me to see her age writ clearly within the lines of her face. Whatever the case, it seemed important to follow her lead. ‘Forgive me,’ she said finally. ‘I haven’t been upstairs in a time. Everything seems… smaller than I remember.’
That I understood. It was strange enough for me to lie down on my childhood bed and find that my feet had grown past the end, to look sideways and see the unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where Blondie had once been pasted and remember my nightly worship of Debbie Harry. I could only imagine the dissonance for someone standing in a bedroom they’d outgrown some eighty years before. ‘All three of you slept up here as children?’
‘Not all of us, no. Not Juniper; not until later.’ Percy’s mouth contorted a little, as if she’d tasted something bitter. ‘Her mother had one of the rooms off her own chamber converted to a nursery instead. She was young, unfamiliar with the way things were done. It wasn’t her fault.’
It seemed an odd choice of words and I wasn’t sure that I understood.
‘Tradition in the house was that children were permitted to move downstairs to a single room when they turned thirteen, and although Saffy and I felt very important when our time finally came I must confess to missing the attic room. Saffy and I were used to sharing.’
‘I suppose that’s common for twins.’
‘Indeed.’ An almost smile. ‘Come. I’ll show you the caretakers’ door.’
The mahogany cupboard stood quietly against the far wall, in a tiny box-like room that opened out beyond the twin beds. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck to enter, and the fruity smell entrapped within the walls was almost suffocating.
Percy didn’t seem to notice, bending her wiry frame to pull at a low handle on the cupboard, creaking the mirrored door open. ‘There it is. Right in there at the back.’ She eye-balled me, hovering near the doorway, and her blade-thin brows drew down. ‘But surely you can’t see; not from all the way over there?’
Manners forbade me actually covering my nose so I took a deep breath, holding it as I moved quickly towards her. She stepped aside, indicating that I should come closer still.
Suppressing the image of Gretel at the witch’s oven, I climbed, waist-deep, into the cupboard. Through the grim darkness, I spotted the small door cut into the back. ‘Wow,’ I said on the last of my breath. ‘There it is.’
‘There it is,’ came the voice from behind me.
The smell, now I had no choice but to breathe it, didn’t seem so bad and I was able to appreciate the Narnia thrill of a hidden doorway in the back of a cupboard. ‘So that’s where the caretakers get in and out.’ My voice echoed around me.
‘The caretakers perhaps,’ said Percy wryly. ‘As to the mice, that’s another story. The little wretches have taken over; they don’t need a fancy door like that one.’
I climbed out, dusted myself off, and couldn’t help but notice the framed picture hanging on the facing wall. Not a picture: a page of religious script, I could see when I went a little closer. It had been behind me on the way in and I’d missed it. ‘What was this room?’
‘This was our nurse’s room. When we were very small,’ said Percy. ‘Back then it seemed like the nicest place on earth.’ A smile flickered briefly before failing. ‘It’s little more than a closet, though, isn’t it?’
‘A closet with a lovely outlook.’ I’d drifted towards the nearby window. The only one, I noted, whose faded curtains remained.
I drew them to one side and was struck immediately by the number of heavy-duty locks that had been fitted to the window. My surprise must have shown because Percy said, ‘My father had concerns about security. An incident in his youth that had stuck with him.’
I nodded and peered through the window, experiencing, as I did so, a frisson of familiarity; I realized that it wasn’t for something I’d seen, but for something I’d read about and envisaged. Directly below, skirting the footings of the castle and spanning twenty feet or so, was a swathe of grass, thick and lush, an entirely different green from that beyond. ‘There used to be a moat,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ Percy was beside me now, holding the curtains aside. ‘One of my earliest memories is of being unable to sleep and hearing voices down there. It was full moon and when I climbed up to look out of the window our mother was swimming on her back, laughing in the silvered light.’
‘She was a keen swimmer,’ I said, remembering what I’d read about her in Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst.
Percy nodded. ‘The circular pool was Daddy’s wedding gift to her, but she always preferred the moat, so a fellow was engaged to improve it for her. Daddy had it filled in when she died.’
‘It must have reminded him of her.’
‘Yes.’ Her lips twitched, and I realized I was exploring her family’s tragedy in a rather thoughtless way. I pointed at a stone protrusion that cut into the moat’s petticoat, and changed the subject. ‘Which room’s that? I don’t remember noticing a balcony.’
‘It’s the library.’
‘And over there? What’s that walled garden?’
‘That’s not a garden.’ She let the curtain fall closed again. ‘And we should be getting on.’
Her tone and her body had stiffened beside me. I felt sure I’d offended her in some way but couldn’t think how. After scrolling quickly over our recent conversation, I decided it was far more likely she was just upset by the press of old memories. I said softly, ‘It must be incredible to live in a castle that’s belonged to your family for so long.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t always been easy. There have been sacrifices. We’ve been forced to sell much of the estate, most recently the farmhouse, but we’ve managed to hold onto the castle.’ She very pointedly inspected the window frame, smoothed a piece of flaking paint. Her voice, when she spoke, was wooded with the effort of keeping strong emotion at bay. ‘It’s true what my sister said. I do love this house as others might love a person. I always have.’ A glance sideways. ‘I expect you find that rather peculiar.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’
Those scar-like eyebrows arched, dubious; but it was true. I didn’t find it peculiar at all. The great heartbreak in my dad’s life was his separation from the home of his childhood. It was a simple enough story: a small boy fed on fables of his family’s grand history, an adored and moneyed uncle who made promises, a death-bed change of heart.
‘Old buildings and old families belong to one another,’ she continued. ‘That’s as it’s always been. My family lives on in the stones of Milderhurst Castle and it’s my duty to keep them. It is not a task for outsiders.’
Her tone was searing; agreement seemed to be required. ‘You must feel as if they’re still around you – ’ as the words left my lips, I had a sudden image of my mum, kneeling by the dolls’ houses – ‘singing in the walls.’
A brow leaped half an inch. ‘What’s that?’
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the last aloud.
‘About the walls,’ she pressed. ‘You said something just now, about the walls singing. What was it?’
‘Just something my mother told me once,’ I swallowed meekly, ‘about ancient walls that sing the distant hours.’
Pleasure spread across Percy’s face in stark and brilliant contrast to her usual dour expression. ‘My father wrote that. Your mother must have read his poetry.’
I was sincerely doubtful. Mum had never gone in much for reading, and certainly never for poems. ‘Possibly.’
‘He used to tell us stories when we were small, tales of the past. He said that if he didn’t go carefully about the castle, sometimes the distant hours forgot to hide.’ As she warmed to recounting the memory Percy’s left hand drifted forth like the sail of a ship. It was a curiously theatrical movement, out of character with her thus-far clipped and efficient manner. Her way of speaking had altered, too: the short sentences had lengthened, the sharp tone softened. ‘He would come upon them, playing out in the dark, deserted corridors. Think of all the people who’ve lived within these walls, he’d say, who’ve whispered their secrets, laid their betrayals…’
‘Do you hear them too? The distant hours?’
Her eyes met mine, held them earnestly for just a moment. ‘Silly nonsense,’ she said, breaking into her hairpin smile. ‘Ours are old stones, but they’re still just stones. They’ve no doubt seen a lot but they’re good at keeping secrets.’
Something crossed her face then, a little like pain: she was thinking of her father, I supposed, and her mother, the tunnel of time and voices that must chatter to her down the ages. ‘No matter,’ she said, more for her own sake than mine. ‘It doesn’t do to brood on the past. Calculating the dead can make one feel quite alone.’
‘You must be glad to have your sisters.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve always imagined that siblings must be a great comfort.’
Another pause. ‘You haven’t any of your own?’
‘No.’ I smiled, shrugged lightly. ‘I’m a lonely only.’
‘Is it lonely?’ She considered me as if I were a rare specimen deserving of study. ‘I’ve always wondered.’
I thought of the great absence in my life, and then of the rare nights spent in company with my sleeping, snoring, muttering cousins, my guilty imaginings that I was one of them, that I belonged with somebody. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s lonely.’
‘Liberating, too, one would expect.’
I noticed for the first time a small vein quivering in her neck. ‘Liberating?’
‘There’s none like a sister for remembering one’s ancient sins.’ She smiled at me then, but its warmth fell short of transforming her sentiment to humour. She must have suspected as much, for she let the smile fall away, nodding towards the staircase. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘Let’s go down. Careful, now. Make sure you hold the rail. My uncle died on those stairs when he was just a boy.’
‘Oh, dear.’ Hopelessly inadequate, but what else does one say? ‘How awful.’
‘A great storm blew up one evening and he was frightened, or so the story goes. Lightning sliced open the sky and struck right by the lake. The boy cried out in terror, but before his nurse could reach him, he leaped from his bed and fled the room. Silly lad: he stumbled and fell, landed at the bottom like a rag doll. We used to imagine we heard him crying in the night sometimes, when the weather was particularly bad. He hides beneath the third step, you know. Waiting to trip someone up. Hoping for someone to join him.’ She pivoted on the step below me, the fourth. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Burchill?’
‘I don’t know. Sort of.’ My gran had seen ghosts. A ghost, at any rate: my uncle Ed after he came off his motorbike in Australia. He didn’t realize he was dead, she’d told me. My poor lamb. I held out my hand and told him it was all right, that he’d made it home and that we all loved him. I shivered, remembering, and, just before she turned, Percy Blythe’s face took on a cast of grim satisfaction.
The Mud Man, the Muniment Room, and a Locked Door
I followed Percy Blythe down flights of stairs, along gloomy corridors, then down further still. Deeper, surely, than the level from which we’d climbed initially? Like all buildings that have evolved over time, Milderhurst was a patchwork. Wings had been added and altered, had crumbled and been restored. The effect was disorientating, particularly for someone with no natural compass whatsoever. It seemed as if the castle folded inwards, like one of those drawings by Escher, where you might continue walking the stairs, round and round, for eternity, without ever reaching an end. There were no windows – not since we’d left the attic – and it was exceedingly dark. At one stage I could have sworn I heard a drifting melody skating along the stones – romantic, wistful, vaguely familiar – but when we turned another corner it was gone, and perhaps it had never been. Something I certainly did not imagine was the pungent smell, which strengthened as we descended and was saved from being unpleasant by sheer virtue of its earthiness.
Even though Percy had pooh-poohed her father’s notion of the distant hours, I couldn’t help running my hand against the cool stones as we walked, wondering about the imprints Mum might have left when she was at Milderhurst. The little girl still walked beside me but she didn’t say much. I considered asking Percy about her, but having gone this far without announcing my connection to the house, anything I thought to say carried the stench of duplicity. In the end I opted for classic passive-aggressive subterfuge. ‘Was the castle requisitioned during the war?’
‘No. Dear God. I couldn’t have borne it. The damage that was done to some of the nation’s finest houses – no.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Thank goodness. I’d have felt it as a pain to my own body. We did our bit though. I was with the Ambulance Service for a time, over in Folkestone; Saffy stitched clothing and bandages, knitted a thousand scarves. We took in an evacuee, too, in the early years.’
‘Oh?’ My voice trilled slightly. Beside me the little girl skipped.
‘At Juniper’s urging. A young girl from London. Goodness, I’ve forgotten her name. Isn’t that a pip? – Apologies for the smell along here.’
Something inside me clenched in sympathy for that forgotten girl.
‘It’s the mud,’ Percy went on. ‘From where the moat used to be. The groundwater rises in summer, seeps through the cellars and brings the smell of rotting fish with it. Thankfully there’s nothing down here of much value. Nothing except the muniment room, and it’s watertight. The walls and floor are lined with copper, the door is made from lead. Nothing gets in or out of there.’
‘The muniment room.’ A chill rippled fast up my neck. ‘Just like in the Mud Man.’ The special room, deep within the uncle’s house, the room where all the family’s documents were lodged, where he unearthed the mouldy old diary that unravelled the Mud Man’s past. The chamber of secrets in the house’s heart.
Percy paused, leaned on her cane and turned her eyes on me. ‘You’ve read it then.’
It wasn’t a question exactly, but I answered anyway. ‘I adored it growing up.’ As the words left my lips I felt a stirring of old deflation, the inability to express adequately my love for the book. ‘It was my favourite,’ I added, and the phrase hung hopefully before disintegrating into specks, powder from a puff that drifted unseen into the shadows.
‘It was very popular,’ said Percy, starting again down the corridor. No doubt she’d heard it all before. ‘It still is. Seventy-five years in print next year.’
‘Really?’
‘Seventy-five years,’ she said again, pulling open a door and issuing me up another flight of stairs. ‘I remember it like yesterday.’
‘The publication must have been very exciting.’
‘We were pleased to see Daddy happy.’ Did I notice the tiny hesitation then, or am I letting things learned later colour my earliest impressions?
A clock somewhere began its weary chime and I realized with a stab of regret that my hour was up. It seemed impossible, I’d have sworn black and blue that I’d only just arrived, but time is an odd, ungraspable thing. The hour that sagged between breakfast and my setting out for Milderhurst had taken an age to pass, but the sixty brief minutes I’d been granted inside the castle walls had fled like a flock of frightened birds.
Percy Blythe checked her own wristwatch. ‘I’ve dallied,’ she said with mild surprise. ‘I apologize. The grandfather is ten minutes fast, but we must get on nonetheless. Mrs Bird will be here to collect you on the hour and it’s quite a walk back to the entrance hall. There’ll be no time to see the tower, I’m afraid.’
I made a gasping noise, a cross between ‘Oh!’ and a sharp reaction to pain, and then I recovered myself: ‘I’m sure Mrs Bird won’t mind if I’m a little late.’
‘I was under the impression you had to be back in London?’
‘Yes.’ Though it seems unfathomable, for a moment I’d actually forgotten: Herbert, his car, the appointment he had to make in Windsor. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Never mind,’ said Percy Blythe, striding after her cane. ‘You’ll see it next time. When you visit us again.’ I noticed the assumption, but I didn’t think to query it, not at the time. Indeed, I gave it little thought other than to pass it off as a rather fun and meaningless rejoinder, for as we emerged from the stairwell I was distracted by a rustling sound.
The rustling, like the caretakers, was only very faint and I wondered at first if I’d imagined it, all that talk of the distant hours, people trapped in the stones, but when Percy Blythe also glanced around, I knew that I had not.
From an adjoining corridor, the dog lumbered into view. ‘Bruno,’ said Percy, surprised, ‘what are you doing all the way down here, fellow?’
He stopped right beside me and looked up from beneath his droopy lids.
Percy leaned forward to scratch him behind the ears. ‘Do you know what the word “lurcher” means? It’s from the Romany for thief. Isn’t that right, boy? Terribly cruel name for such a good old boy as you.’ She straightened slowly, one hand in the small of her back. ‘They were bred by the gypsies originally, used for poaching: rabbits and hares, other small creatures. Pure breeds were forbidden to anyone who didn’t belong to the nobility and the penalties were severe; the challenge was to retain the hunting skills whilst breeding in sufficient variation that they didn’t look like a threat.
‘He’s my sister’s, Juniper’s. Even as a small girl she loved animals specially; they seemed to love her too. We’ve always kept a dog for her, certainly since the trauma. They say everyone needs something to love.’
As if he knew and resented being made the topic of discussion, Bruno continued on his way. In his wake, the rustling came again faintly, only to be drowned out when a nearby phone began to ring.
Percy stood very still, listening the way people do when they’re awaiting confirmation that someone else has picked up.
The ringing continued until disconsolate silence closed around its final echo.
‘Come along,’ said Percy, a note of agitation clipping her voice. ‘There’s a shortcut through here.’
The corridor was dim, but no more so than the others; indeed, now that we’d emerged from the basement, a few diffuse ribbons of light had appeared, threading their way through the castle knots to spill across the flagstones. We were two-thirds of the way along when the phone began again.
This time Percy didn’t wait. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, clearly flustered. ‘I can’t think where Saffy is. I’m expecting an important telephone call. Will you excuse me? I shan’t be a moment.’
‘Of course.’
And with a nod she disappeared, turning at the end of the corridor and leaving me stranded.
I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained, twiddling my thumbs, until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.
The handle was black and smooth, shaped like a shin bone and cool beneath my palm. Indeed, a general coldness seemed to leach from the other side of the door; though how, I couldn’t tell.
My fingers tightened around the handle, I started to twist, then-
‘We don’t go in there.’
My stomach, I don’t mind saying, just about shot through the roof of my mouth.
I spun on my heel, scanned the gloomy space behind. I could see nothing, yet clearly I wasn’t alone. Someone, the owner of the voice, was in the corridor with me. Even if she hadn’t spoken I’d have known: I could feel another presence, something moving and hiding in the drawing shadows. The rustling was back now, too: louder, closer, definitely not in my head, definitely not mice.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the cloaked passage. ‘I-’
‘We don’t go in there.’
I smothered the panicky surge in my throat. ‘I didn’t know-’
‘That’s the good parlour.’
I saw her then, Juniper Blythe, as she stepped from the chill darkness and slowly crossed the corridor towards me.
Say You’ll Come Dancing
Her dress was incredible, the sort you expect to see in films about wealthy debutantes before the war, or hidden on the racks of upmarket charity shops. It was organza, the palest of pink, or it had been once, before time and grime had got busy, laying their fingers all over it. Sheets of tulle supported the full skirt, pushing it out as it fell away from her tiny waist, wide enough for the netted hemline to rustle against the walls when she moved.
We stood facing one another across the dull corridor for what felt like a very long time. Finally, she moved. Slightly. Her arms had been hanging by her sides, resting on her skirt, and she lifted one a little, leading from the palm, a graceful movement as if an unseen thread stitched to her inner wrist had been plucked from the ceiling behind me.
‘Hello,’ I said, with what I hoped was warmth. ‘I’m Edie. Edie Burchill. We met earlier, in the yellow parlour.’
She blinked at me and tilted her head sideways. Silvered hair draped over her shoulder, long and lank; the front strands had been pinned rather haphazardly with a pair of baroque combs. The unexpected translucence of her skin, the rake-like figure, the fancy frock: all combined to create the illusion of a teenager, a young girl with gangly limbs and a self-conscious way of holding them. Not shy, though, certainly not that: her expression was quizzical, curious, as she took a small step closer into a stray patch of light.
And then it was my turn for curiosity, for Juniper must have been seventy years old and yet her face was miraculously unlined. Impossible, of course; ladies of seventy do not have unlined faces, and she was no exception – in our later meetings I would see that for myself – but in that light, in that dress, through some trick of circumstance, some strange charm, it was how she appeared. Pale and smooth, iridescent like the inside of a pearl shell, as if the same passing years that had so busily engraved deep imprints on her sisters had somehow preserved her. And yet she wasn’t timeless; there was something unmistakably olden days about her, an aspect that was utterly fixed in the past, like an old photograph viewed through protective tissue in one of those albums with the sepia-clouded pages. The image came to me again of the spring flowers pressed by Victorian ladies in their scrapbooks. Beautiful things, killed in the kindest of ways, carried forward into a time and place, a season, no longer their own.
The chimera spoke then, and the sensation was compounded: ‘I’m going in to dinner now.’ A high, ethereal voice that made the hair on my neck stand to attention. ‘Would you like to come too?’
I shook my head, coughed to clear a tickle from my throat. ‘No. No, thank you. I have to go home soon.’ My voice was not itself and I realized I was standing very rigidly, as if I was afraid. Which, I suppose, I was, though of what I couldn’t say.
Juniper didn’t seem to notice my discomfort: ‘I have a new dress to wear,’ she said, plucking at her skirts so that the top layer of organza pulled up a little at each side, like the wings of a moth, white and powdery with dust. ‘Not new exactly, no, that isn’t right, but altered. It belonged to my mother once.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘I don’t think you ever met her.’
‘Your mother? No.’
‘Oh, she was lovely, so lovely. Just a girl when she died, just a girl. This was her pretty dress.’ She swirled coyly this way and that, peered up at me from beneath her lashes. The glassy gaze of earlier was gone, replaced by keen blue eyes, knowing somehow, the eyes of that bright child I’d seen in the photograph, disturbed while she was playing alone on the garden steps. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I do. Very much.’
‘Saffy altered it for me. She’s a wonder with a sewing machine. If you show her any picture you fancy she can work out how it’s made, even the newest Parisian designs, the pictures in Vogue. She’s been working on my dress for weeks but it’s a secret. Percy wouldn’t approve, on account of the war, and on account of her being Percy, but I know you won’t tell.’ She smiled then, and it was so enigmatic that my breath caught.
‘I won’t say a word.’
We stood for a moment, each observing the other. My earlier fear had dissipated now, and for that I was glad. The reaction had been unfounded, an instinct only, and I was embarrassed by its memory. What was there to fear, after all? This lost woman in the lonely corridor was Juniper Blythe, the same person who had once upon a time chosen my mother from a clutch of frightened children, who had given her a home when the bombs were falling on London, who had never stopped waiting and hoping for a long-ago sweetheart to arrive.
Her chin lifted as I watched her, and she exhaled thoughtfully. Apparently, as I’d been reaching my conclusions she’d been drawing her own. I smiled, and it seemed to decide her in some way. She straightened, then started towards me again, slowly but with clear purpose. Feline, that’s what she was. Her every movement contained the same elastic mixture of caution and confidence, languor that masked an underlying intent.
She stopped only when she was close enough that I could smell the naphthalene on her dress, the stale cigarette smoke on her breath. Her eyes searched mine, her voice was a whisper. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
I nodded, which made her smile; the gap between her two front teeth was impossibly girlish. She took my hands in hers as if we were friends in the schoolyard, her palms were smooth and cool. ‘I have a secret but I’m not supposed to tell.’
‘OK.’
She cupped her hand like a child and leaned in close, pressing it against my ear. Her breath tickled. ‘I have a lover.’ And when she pulled away her old lips formed a youthful expression of lustful excitement that was grotesque and sad and beautiful all at once. ‘His name is Tom. Thomas Cavill, and he’s asked me to marry him.’
The sadness I felt for her came upon me in a rush, almost too great to bear, as I realized she was stuck in the moment of her great disappointment. I longed for Percy to return so that our conversation might be ended.
‘Promise you won’t breathe a word of it?’
‘I promise.’
‘I’ve told him yes, but shhh – ’ a finger pressed against her smiling lips – ‘my sisters don’t know yet. He’s coming soon to have dinner.’ She grinned, old lady teeth in a powder-smooth face. ‘We’re going to announce our engagement.’
I saw then that she wore something around her finger. Not a ring, not a real one. This was a crude impostor, silver but dull, lumpy, like a piece of aluminium foil rolled and pressed into shape.
‘And then we’re going to dance, dance, dance…’ She started to sway, humming along to music that was playing, perhaps, in her head. It was the same tune I’d heard earlier, floating in the cold pockets of the corridors. The name eluded me then, no matter how tantalizingly close it came. The recording, as it must have been, had stopped some time ago, but Juniper listed regardless, her eyelids closed, her cheeks coloured with a young woman’s anticipation.
I worked on a book once for an elderly couple writing a history of their life together. The woman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but was yet to begin the final harrowing descent, and they’d decided to record her memories before they blew away like bleached leaves from an autumn tree.
The project took six months to complete, during which time I watched her slip helplessly through forgetting towards emptiness. Her husband became ‘that man over there’ and the vibrant, funny woman with the fruity language, who’d argued and grinned and interrupted, was silenced.
No, I’d seen dementia, and this wasn’t it. Wherever Juniper was, it wasn’t empty, and she’d forgotten very little. Yet there was something the matter; she clearly wasn’t well. Every elderly woman I’ve known has told me, at some point, and with varying degrees of wistfulness, that she’s eighteen years old on the inside. But it isn’t true. I’m only thirty and I know that. The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.
Juniper wasn’t like that, though. She genuinely didn’t realize she was old. In her mind the war still raged and, judging by the way she was swaying, so did her hormones. She was such an unnatural hybrid, old and young, beautiful and grotesque, now and then. The effect was breathtaking and it was eerie and I suffered a sudden surge of revulsion, followed immediately by deep shame at having felt such an unkind thing-
Juniper seized my wrists; her eyes had reeled wide open. ‘But of course!’ she said, catching a giggle in a net of long, pale fingers. ‘You already know about Tom. If it weren’t for you, he and I would never have met!’
Whatever I might have said in reply was swallowed then as every clock within the castle began to chime the hour. What an uncanny symphony it was, room after room of clocks, calling to one another as they marked the passing time. I felt those chimes deep within my body and the effect spread icy and instant across my skin, utterly unnerving me.
‘I really do have to go now, Juniper,’ I said, when finally they stopped. My voice, I noticed, was hoarse.
A slight noise behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to see Percy returning.
‘Go?’ Juniper’s face sagged. ‘But you’ve just arrived. Where are you going?’
‘Back to London.’
‘London?’
‘Where I live.’
‘London.’ A change came over her then, swift as a storm cloud and just as dark. She reached out, gripping my arm with surprising strength and I saw something I hadn’t before: spider-web scars, silvered with age, scribbled along her pale wrists. ‘Take me with you.’
‘I… I can’t do that.’
‘But it’s the only way. We’ll go and find Tom. He might be there, up in his little flat, sitting by the windowsill…’
‘Juniper -’
‘You said you’d help me.’ Her voice was tight, hateful. ‘Why didn’t you help me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t-’
‘You’re supposed to be my friend; you said you’d help me. Why didn’t you come?’
‘Juniper, I think you’re confusing me-’
‘Oh, Meredith,’ she whispered, her breath smoky and ancient. ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing.’
Meredith. My stomach turned like a rubber glove pulled inside out too fast.
Hurried footsteps and the dog appeared, followed closely by Saffy. ‘Juniper! Oh, June, there you are.’ Her voice was drenched with relief as she reached her sister’s side. She wrapped Juniper in a gentle embrace, drawing back at length to scan her face. ‘You mustn’t run off like that. I’ve been so worried; I looked everywhere. I didn’t know where you’d got to, my little love.’
Juniper was shaking; I expect I was too. Meredith… The word rang in my ears, sharp and insistent as a mosquito drone. I told myself it was nothing, a coincidence, the meaningless ravings of a sad, mad old woman, but I’m not a good liar and I had no chance of fooling myself.
As Saffy brushed stray hair from Juniper’s forehead, Percy arrived. She stopped abruptly, leaning on her cane for support as she surveyed the scene. The twins exchanged a glance, similar to the one I’d witnessed earlier in the yellow parlour that had so perplexed me: this time, however, it was Saffy who broke away first. She’d managed, somehow, to penetrate the knot of Juniper’s arms and was holding her little sister’s hand tightly in her own. ‘Thank you for staying with her,’ she said to me, voice quavering. ‘It was kind of you, Edith – ’
‘E-dith,’ Juniper echoed, but she didn’t look my way.
‘ – she gets confused and wanders sometimes. We watch her closely, but…’ Saffy shook her head shortly, the gesture communicating the impossibility of living one’s life for another.
I nodded, unable to find the right words to reply. Meredith. My mother’s name. My thoughts, hundreds of them, swarmed at once against the current of time, picking over the past few months for meaning, until finally they arrived en masse at my parents’ home. A chilly afternoon in February, an uncooked chicken, the arrival of a letter that made Mum cry.
‘E-dith,’ said Juniper again. ‘E-dith, E-dith…’
‘Yes, darling,’ said Saffy, ‘that’s Edith, isn’t it? She’s come to visit.’
I knew then what I’d suspected all along. Mum had been lying when she told me Juniper’s message was little more than a greeting, just as she’d lied about our visit to Milderhurst. But why? What had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe? If Juniper was to be believed, Mum had made a promise that she’d failed to keep; something to do with Juniper’s fiancé, with Thomas Cavill. If that was the case, and if the truth really was as dreadful as Juniper suggested, the letter might have been an accusation. Was that it? Was it suppressed guilt that had made my mother cry?
For the first time since I’d arrived at Milderhurst I longed to be free of the house and its old sorrow, to see the sun and feel the wind on my face and smell something other than rancid mud and mothballs. To be alone with this new puzzle, so that I might begin to unpick it.
‘I hope she didn’t offend you…’ Saffy was still speaking; I could hear her through my own reeling thoughts as though she was far away, on the other side of a thick and heavy door. ‘Whatever she said, she didn’t mean it. She says things sometimes, funny things, meaningless things…’
Her voice tapered off but the silence left behind it was unsettled. She was watching me, unspoken sentiments in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn’t concern alone that weighted her features. There was something else hiding in her face, particularly when she glanced again at Percy. Fear, I realized. They were frightened, both of them.
I looked at Juniper, hiding behind her own crossed arms. Did I imagine she was standing especially still, listening carefully, waiting to see how I’d answer, what I’d tell them?
I braved a smile, hoping against hope that it might pass for casual. ‘She didn’t say anything,’ I said, then shrugged my shoulders for good measure. ‘I was just admiring her pretty dress.’
The surrounding air seemed to shift with the force of the twins’ relief. Juniper’s profile registered no change, and I was left with a strange, creeping sensation, the vague awareness that I’d somehow made a mistake. That I ought to have been honest, to have told the twins all that Juniper had said, the cause of her upset. But having failed thus far to mention my mum and her evacuation, I wasn’t sure that I could find the necessary words-
‘Marilyn Bird has arrived,’ said Percy bluntly.
‘Oh, but things do have a habit of happening all at once,’ said Saffy.
‘She’s come to drive you back to the farmhouse. You’re due in London, she says.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Thank God.
‘Such a shame,’ said Saffy. Through sterling effort and, I suppose, many years of practice, she managed to sound completely normal. ‘We had hoped to offer you tea. We have so few visitors.’
‘Next time,’ said Percy.
‘Yes,’ Saffy agreed. ‘Next time.’
It seemed unlikely, to say the least. ‘Thank you again, for the tour…’
And as Percy led me back along a mysterious route, to Mrs Bird and the promise of normality, Saffy and Juniper retreated in the opposite direction, their voices skirting back along the cold stones.
‘I’m sorry, Saffy, I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. I just… I forgot…’ The words broke then into sobs. A weeping so wretched I wanted to slam my hands against my ears.
‘Come along now, dearest, there’s no need for all that.’
‘But I’ve done a terrible thing, Saffy. A terrible, terrible thing.’
‘Nonsense, little dear, put it out of your mind. Let’s have our tea, shall we?’ The patience, the kindness in Saffy’s voice made a small chamber within my chest clench tight. I think that’s when I first grasped the interminable length of time that she and Percy had been making such reassurances, wiping the confusion from their younger sister’s ageing brow with the same judicious care a parent gives their child, but without the promise that the burden would some day ease. ‘We’ll get you back into something sensible, and then we’ll all have tea. You and Percy and I. Things always look better after a cup of nice, strong tea, don’t they?’
Mrs Bird was waiting beneath the domed ceiling at the entrance to the castle, puffed up with apologies. She fawned on Percy Blythe, grimacing dramatically as she lambasted the poor unwitting villagers who’d held her up.
‘It is of no matter, Mrs Bird,’ said Percy in the same imperious tone a Victorian nanny might use to address a tiresome charge. ‘I enjoyed leading the tour myself.’
‘Well of course you did. For old times’ sake. It must be lovely for you to-’
‘Indeed.’
‘Such a shame that the tours were ended. Understandable, of course, and it’s a credit to you and Miss Saffy that you managed to keep them going for so long, especially with so much else on your-’
‘Quite.’ Percy Blythe straightened and I became aware suddenly that she didn’t like Mrs Bird. ‘Now if you’ll both excuse me.’ She bowed her head towards the open door, through which the outside world seemed a brighter, noisier, faster place than when I’d left it.
‘Thank you,’ I said before she could disappear, ‘for showing me your beautiful home.’
She eyed me a moment longer than seemed necessary, then retreated along the corridor, cane beating softly beside her. After a few paces she stopped and turned, barely visible in the cloaking dim. ‘It was beautiful, you know. Once upon a time. Before.
October 29th, 1941
One thing was certain: there’d be no moon tonight. The sky was thick, a roiling mass of grey, white and yellow, folded together like victims of a painter’s palette knife. Percy licked the tobacco paper and tamped it shut, rolling the cigarette between her fingertips to seal it. An aeroplane droned overhead, one of theirs, a patrol plane heading south towards the coast. They had to send one, of course, but there’d be nothing to report, not on a night like this, not now.
From where she leaned, her back against the van, Percy followed the plane’s progress, squinting as the brown insect grew small and smaller. The glare brought on a yawn and she rubbed her eyes until they stung pleasantly. When she opened them again the plane was gone.
‘Oi! Don’t you go marking my polished bonnet and wings there with your lounging.’
Percy turned and rested her elbow on the van’s roof. It was Dot, grinning as she loped from the station door.
‘You should be thanking me,’ Percy called back. ‘Save you twiddling your thumbs next shift.’
‘True enough. Officer’ll have me washing tea towels otherwise.’
‘Or giving another round of stretcher demonstrations to the wardens.’ Percy cocked a brow. ‘What could be better?’
‘Mending the blackout curtains, for one.’
Percy winced. ‘That is dire.’
‘Stick around here much longer and you’ll be needle in hand,’ warned Dot, arriving to lean beside Percy. ‘Not much else doing.’
‘He’s heard then?’
‘RAF boys sent word just now. Nothing on the horizon, not tonight.’
‘Guessed as much.’
‘Not just the weather, neither. Officer says the stinking Bosch are too busy marching for Moscow to bother much with us.’
‘More fool them,’ said Percy as she inspected her cigarette. ‘Winter’s advancing faster than they are.’
‘I suppose you’re planning on hanging about anyway, making a nuisance of yourself in the hopes Jerry gets confused and drops a load nearby?’
‘Thought about it,’ said Percy, tucking the cigarette into her pocket and swinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Decided against. Not even an invasion could keep me here tonight.’
Dot’s eyes widened. ‘What’s this then? Handsome fellow asked you to go dancing, has he?’
‘No such luck; good news all the same.’
‘Oh?’
The bus arrived and Percy had to shout to be heard over its motor as she climbed aboard. ‘My little sister’s coming home tonight.’
Percy had no greater lust for warfare than the next person – indeed, she’d had more occasion than most to witness its horrors – which was why she never, ever, acknowledged aloud the strange kernel of disappointment that had festered deep inside her since the cessation of nightly raids. It was utterly absurd, she knew, to feel nostalgia for a period of abject danger and destruction; anything other than cautious optimism was damn near sacrilege and yet an appalling temper had kept her awake these past months, ears trained on the quiet night skies above her.
If there was one thing on which Percy prided herself it was her ability to exercise pragmatism in all matters – Lord knew, someone had to – thus she’d determined to Get to the Bottom of Things. To find a way to still the little clock that threatened to tick away inside her without opportunity ever to strike. Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to reveal her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy.
It was only to be expected; madness was something of a family condition, as surely as the gift for artistry and the likelihood of long limbs. Percy had hoped to avoid it, but there you are. Inheritance was a damn good shot. And if she was honest, hadn’t she always supposed it a mere matter of time before her own unhinging?
It was Daddy’s fault, of course, in particular the terrific stories he’d told them when they were girls, small enough to be lifted, green enough to curl themselves perfectly within his wide, warm lap. Tales from his family’s past, about the plot of land that had become Milderhurst, that had starved and flourished, twisted and turned throughout the centuries, been flooded and farmed and fabled. About buildings that had burned and been rebuilt, rotted and been sacked, thrilled and been forgotten. About the people who had called the castle home before them, the chapters of conquest and sublimation that layered the soil of England and that of their own beloved home.
History in the storyteller’s hands was a potent force indeed, and for an entire stretch of summer after Daddy left for the Great War, when she was a girl of eight or nine years old, Percy’s dreams had been vivid with invaders storming the fields towards them. She’d coerced Saffy into helping establish forts in the treetops of Cardarker Wood, building stockpiles of weapons, and beheading the saplings that displeased her. Practising, so that when the time came for them to do their duty, to defend the castle and its lands from the invading hordes, they’d be ready…
The bus rattled round a corner and Percy rolled her eyes at her own reflection. It was ridiculous, of course. Girlish fancies were one thing, but for a grown woman’s moods still to hinge on their echo? It really was too sad. With a huff of disgust, she turned her back on herself.
It had been a long trip, far longer than usual, and at this rate she’d be lucky to make it home for pudding. Whatever that might be. The storm clouds were amassing, darkness threatened to drop on them at any moment and the bus, with no headlights to speak of, clung to the verge in readiness. She checked her watch: already half past four. Juniper was expected at six thirty, the young man at seven, and Percy had promised to be back by four. Doubtless the Air Raid Precautions fellow had acted on good authority when he’d waved the bus over for random inspection, but tonight of all nights she had better things to be doing. Lending temperance to the preparations at Milderhurst, for one.
What were the odds that Saffy hadn’t worked herself into a state during the day? Not good, Percy decided. Not good at all. No one submitted so willingly to the tumult of occasion as Saffy, and ever since word had arrived from Juniper that she’d invited a mysterious guest to join them, there’d been little chance of the Event, as it was thereafter known, being spared the full Seraphina Blythe treatment. There’d been talk at one stage of unpacking Grandmother’s leftover coronation stationery and writing out table places, but Percy had suggested that a party of four, three of whom were sisters, made such fuss unnecessary.
A tap on her forearm and Percy realized that the little old lady beside her was holding an open tin, gesturing that she should take something from within. ‘My own recipe,’ she said in a bright, piping voice. ‘No butter to speak of but not bad at all, even if I do say so myself.’
‘Oh,’ said Percy. ‘No. Thank you. I couldn’t. You keep them for yourself.’
‘Go on.’ The lady rattled the tin a little closer to Percy’s nose, nodding approval at her uniform.
‘Well, all right.’ Percy selected a biscuit and took a bite. ‘Delicious,’ she said, with a silent lament for the glorious days of butter.
‘You’re with the FANYs then?’
‘Driving an ambulance. That is, I was during the bombing. Cleaning them for the most part lately.’
‘You’ll be finding yourself some other way to help the efforts now, I don’t doubt. There’s no stopping you young folk.’ An idea dawned, making saucers of her eyes. ‘But of course, you should join one of those sewing bees! My granddaughter belongs to the Stitching Susans, back home in Cranbrook, and oh, but they do a mighty job, those girls.’
Needle and thread aside, Percy had to concede the notion was not a bad one. Perhaps she should channel her energies elsewhere: find a government official to chauffeur, learn how to defuse bombs, pilot a plane, become a salvage adviser. Something. Maybe then the ghastly restlessness would abate. Much as she hated to admit it, Percy was coming to suspect that Saffy had been right all these years: she was a fixer. No instinct for creation, but a habit of restoration and never happier than when she was put to good use, patching up holes. What a thoroughly depressing thought.
The bus lumbered around another corner and at last the village came into view. As they drew nearer, Percy spied her bicycle, leaning against the old oak by the post office, where she’d left it that morning.
Giving thanks again for the biscuit and solemnly promising to look in to the local sewing bee, she disembarked, waving at her old lady as the bus trundled on towards Cranbrook.
The breeze had picked up since they’d left Folkestone and Percy shoved her hands into her trouser pockets, smiling at the dour Misses Blethem, who drew collective breath and gathered their string shopping bags close, before nodding a greeting and scurrying away home.
Two years of war, and there were still some for whom the sight of a woman in trousers heralded the dawn of the apocalypse; never mind the atrocities at home and afar. Percy felt a welcome resurrection of spirits and wondered whether it was wrong to adore her uniform all the more for the effect it had on the Misses Blethem of the world.
It was late in the day, but every chance remained that Mr Potts hadn’t yet made his delivery to the castle. There were few men in the village – across the country, Percy was willing to bet – who had taken to the office of Home Guard with a zest to match that of Mr Potts. So zealously did he seek to protect the nation that one was liable to feel quite neglected if not stopped at least once monthly for an identity check. That such dedication left the village without a reliable postal service, Mr Potts seemed to regard as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice.
The bell tinkled above the door as Percy entered, and Mrs Potts looked up sharply from a pile of papers and envelopes. Her manner was that of a rabbit caught unawares in a gardener’s patch, and she obliged the image further by giving a little sniff. Percy managed to conceal her amusement beneath stern congeniality, which was, after all, something of a speciality.
‘Well, well,’ said the postmistress, recovering herself with the speed of one well practised in mild deception. ‘If it isn’t Miss Blythe.’
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Potts. Anything to collect?’
‘I’ll just have a look now, shall I?’
The very notion that Mrs Potts wasn’t intimately acquainted with every piece of correspondence that had come or gone that day was laughable, but Percy played along. ‘Why, thank you,’ she said, as the postmistress repaired to the boxes on the back desk.
After much officious riffling, Mrs Potts pulled free a small clutch of assorted envelopes and held them aloft. ‘Here we are then,’ she said, making a triumphant return to the counter. ‘There’s a parcel for Miss Juniper – from your young Londoner, by the looks; happy to be back home, is she, young Meredith? – ’ Percy nodded impatiently as Mrs Potts continued – ‘A letter hand-addressed to yourself and one for Miss Saffy alone, typed.’
‘Excellent. One hardly needs bother reading them.’
Mrs Potts lined the letters up neatly on the counter top but didn’t release them. ‘I trust all is well up at the castle,’ she said, with rather more feeling than such an innocuous query seemed to warrant.
‘Very well, thank you. Now if I-’
‘Indeed, I hear congratulations are in order.’
Percy let out an exasperated sigh. ‘Congratulations?’
‘Wedding bells,’ said Mrs Potts, in that irksome manner she’d perfected, managing both to crow at her ill-gained knowledge while greedily digging for more. ‘Up at the castle,’ she repeated.
‘I thank you kindly, Mrs Potts, but alas I’m no more engaged today than I was yesterday.’
The postmistress stood a while computing, before breaking into pealing laughter. ‘Oh! But you are a one, Miss Blythe! No more engaged today than yesterday – I must remember that.’ After much mirth she sobered, pulling a small lace-trimmed handkerchief from her skirt pocket to dab beneath her eyes. ‘But of course,’ she said between blots, ‘I never meant you.’
Percy feigned surprise. ‘No?’
‘Oh no, for heaven’s sake, not you or Miss Saffy. I know neither of you have any plans to leave us, bless you both.’ She wiped her cheeks once more. ‘It was Miss Juniper I was speaking of.’
Percy couldn’t help but notice the way her little sister’s name crackled on the gossip’s lips. There was electricity in the very sounds, and Mrs Potts a natural conductor. People had always liked to talk about Juniper, even when she was a girl. The little sister had done nothing to help matters; a child with a habit of blacking out at times of excitement tended to lower people’s voices and get them talking about gifts and curses. So it was throughout her childhood, that no matter what strange or unaccountable situation arose in the village – the curious disappearance of Mrs Fleming’s laundry, the consequent outfitting of Farmer Jacob’s scarecrow in bloomers, an outbreak of mumps – just as surely as bees were drawn to honey, loose talk turned itself eventually to Juniper.
‘Miss Juniper and a certain young fellow?’ Mrs Potts pressed. ‘I hear there’ve been quite some preparations up at the castle? A fellow she met in London?’
The very notion was preposterous. Juniper’s destiny lay elsewhere than marriage: it was poetry that made her little sister’s heart sing. Percy considered having fun with Mrs Potts’s eager attention, but a glance at the wall clock made her think better of it. A sensible decision: the last thing she needed was to be drawn into a discussion about Juniper’s removal to London. The chance was all too real that Percy might inadvertently reveal the trouble Juniper’s escapade had caused at the castle. Pride would never allow such a thing. ‘It’s true that we’re having a guest to dinner, Mrs Potts, but although it is a he, he is nobody’s suitor. Merely an acquaintance from London.’
‘An acquaintance?’
‘That is all.’
Mrs Potts’s eyes narrowed. ‘Not a wedding then?’
‘No.’
‘Because I heard it on good authority that there’s been both a proposal and an acceptance.’
It was no secret that Mrs Potts’s ‘good authority’ was obtained by careful monitoring of letters and telephone calls, the details of which were then cross-referenced against a healthy catalogue of local gossip. Though Percy didn’t go so far as to suspect the woman of steaming envelopes open before sending them on their merry way, there were those in the village who did. In this case, however, there had been very little post to steam (and not of the sort to get Mrs Potts excited, Meredith being Juniper’s only correspondent) just as there was no truth to the rumour. ‘I believe I would know if that were the case, Mrs Potts,’ she said. ‘Rest assured, it’s just a dinner. ’
‘A special dinner?’
‘Oh, but aren’t they all at a time like this?’ said Percy, breezily. ‘One never knows when one might be sitting down to eat one’s last.’ She plucked the letters from the postmistress’s hand and as she did so spied the cut-glass jars that had once stood on the counter. The acid drops and butterscotch were all but gone, but a small, rather sad pile of Edinburgh rock had solidified in the base of one. Percy couldn’t stand Edinburgh rock, but it was Juniper’s favourite. ‘I’ll take what you have left of the rock, if you don’t mind.’
With a sour expression, Mrs Potts broke the mass free from the jar’s glass base and scooped it into a brown paper bag. ‘That’ll be sixpence.’
‘Why, Mrs Potts,’ said Percy, inspecting the small, sugary bag, ‘if we weren’t such firm friends, I’d suspect you of trying to fleece me.’
Outrage suffused the postmistress’s face as she spluttered a denial.
‘I’m joking, of course, Mrs Potts,’ said Percy, handing over the money. She tucked the letters and the rock into her bag and donated a brief smile. ‘Good afternoon now. I shall enquire after Juniper’s plans on your behalf, but I suspect when there’s anything to know, you’ll be the first to know it.’
Onions were important, of course, but that did nothing to alter the fact that their leaves brought absolutely nothing to a flower arrangement. Saffy inspected the feeble green shoots she’d just cut, turned them this way and that, squinted in case it helped, and applied whatever creative power she could muster to imagining them in place at table. In Grandmother’s heirloom French crystal vase they stood a fleeting chance; perhaps with a splash of something colourful to disguise their origin? Or else – her thoughts gathered mo mentum and she chewed her lip as was her habit when a grand idea was breaking – she might surrender herself to the theme, throw in some fennel leaves and marrow flowers and claim it a humorous comment on the shortages?
With a sigh she let her arm drop, hand still clutching the flagging fronds. Her head shook sadly, seemingly of its own accord. Onto what mad thoughts did a desperate person latch? Clearly the onion shoots would never do: not only were they hopelessly ill suited to the task, but the longer she held them the more potently their odour struck her as remarkably similar to that of old socks. A smell the war, in particular her twin sister’s occupation in it, had given Saffy ample opportunity with which to become familiar. No. After four months in London, mixing in the smartest Bloomsbury circles, no doubt, braving the air raid warnings, sleeping some nights in a shelter, Juniper deserved better than eau de filthy laundry.
Not to mention the guest she had mysteriously invited to join them. Juniper was not one to gather friends – young Meredith being the single surprising exception – but Saffy had an instinct for reading between the lines and, despite Juniper’s lines being squiggly at the best of times, she’d gathered that the young man had performed some act of gallantry to earn Juniper’s good favour. The invitation, therefore, was a show of the Blythe family’s gratitude and everything must be perfect. The onion sprouts, she confirmed with a second glance, were decidedly less than perfect. Once picked they mustn’t be wasted though – such sacrilege! Lord Woolton would be horrified – Saffy would find a dish to take them, just not from tonight’s menu. Onions and their after-effects could make for rather poor society.
Sounding a disconsolate huff, then doing the same again because the sensation so pleased her, Saffy started back towards the house, glad as always that her path didn’t take her through the main gardens. She couldn’t bear it; they’d been glorious once. It was a tragedy that so many of the nation’s flower gardens had been abandoned or given over to vegetable cultivation. According to Juniper’s most recent letter, not only had the flowers by Rotten Row in Hyde Park been flattened beneath great piles of wood and iron and brick – the bones of Lord only knew how many homes – the entire southern side was given over now to allotments. A necessity, Saffy acknowledged, but no less tragic for it. Lack of potatoes left a person’s stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.
Directly before her a late butterfly hovered, wings drawing in and out like the mirrored edges of a set of fireside bellows. That such perfection, such natural calm, should continue while mankind was bringing the world’s ceiling down around it – why, it was nothing short of miraculous. Saffy’s face lightened; she held out a finger but the butterfly ignored her, lifting then falling, darting to inspect the brown fruits of the medlar tree. Completely oblivious – what wonder! With a smile, she continued her trudge towards the castle, ducking beneath the knobbled wisteria arbour, careful not to catch her hair.
Mr Churchill would do well to remember that wars were not won by bullets alone, and to reward those who managed to sustain beauty when the world was being blasted into ugly pieces around them. The Churchill Medal for the Maintenance of Beauty in England had a lovely ring to it, Saffy thought. Percy had smirked when she’d said so at breakfast the other morning, with the inevitable smugness of one who’d spent months climbing in and out of bomb craters, earning her very own bravery medal in the process, but Saffy had refused to feel foolish. Indeed, she was working on a letter to The Times on the subject. The thrust of it: that beauty was important, as were art and literature and music; never more so than when civilized nations seemed intent upon goading one another into increasingly barbarous acts.
Saffy adored London, she always had. Her future plans depended upon its survival and she took each bomb dropped as a personal attack. When the raids had been in full swing and the crump of distant anti-aircraft guns, the screaming sirens, the miserable explosions had been nightly companions, she’d chewed her nails feverishly – a terrible habit and one whose blame she laid squarely at Hitler’s feet – wondering whether the lover of a city might suffer its plight all the more for being absent when disaster struck, in the same way a mother’s anxiety for a wounded son was magnified by distance. Even as a girl Saffy had glimpsed that her life’s path lay not in the miry fields or within the ancient stones of Milderhurst, but amidst the parks and cafes, the literate conversations of London. When she and Percy were small, after Mother was burned but before Juniper was born, when it was still just the three of them, Daddy had taken the twins up to London each year to live for a time at the house in Chelsea. They were young; time hadn’t yet rubbed away at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions, and they were treated – indeed they behaved between themselves – as a pair of duplicates. Yet when they were in London, Saffy had felt the early stirrings of division, deep but strong, within herself. Where Percy, like Daddy, pined for the vast, green woods of home, Saffy was enlivened by the city.
An earthy rumble sounded behind her and Saffy groaned, refusing to turn and acknowledge the heavy clouds she knew were gloating over her shoulder. Of all the war’s personal privations, the loss of a regular wireless weather forecast had been a particularly cruel blow. Saffy had faced the shrinkage of quiet reading time with equanimity, agreeing that Percy should bring her one book a week from the lending library instead of the usual four. On the matter of retiring her silk dresses in favour of practical pinafores she’d been positively sanguine. The loss of staff, like so many fleas from a drowning rat, and the consequent adjustment to her new status as head cook, cleaner, laundress and gardener, she’d taken in her stride. But in Saffy’s attempts to master the vagaries of the English weather she had met her match. Despite a lifetime in Kent, she had none of the countrywoman’s instincts for weather: she had discovered, in fact, a curious antithetical knack for hanging out washing and braving the fields on the very days rain was whispering in the wings.
Saffy marched faster, almost at a canter, trying not to mind the odour of the onion leaves, which seemed to be gaining strength as she gained pace. One thing was certain: when the war ended, Saffy was giving up country life for good. Percy didn’t know it yet – the timing must be right before the news was broached – but Saffy was going up to London. There she intended to find herself a flatlet, just for one. She had no furniture of her own, but that was a small impediment: such matters Saffy entrusted to providence. One thing was certain, though, she’d be taking nothing with her from Milderhurst. Her accoutrements would all be new; it would be a fresh start, nearly two decades later than she’d initially planned, but that could not be helped. She was older now, stronger, and this time she wouldn’t be stopped no matter how overwhelming the opposition.
Though her intentions were secret, Saffy made a habit of reading the letting pages in The Times each Saturday so that when opportunity presented, she’d be ready. She’d considered Chelsea and Kensington but decided in favour of one of the Georgian squares in Bloomsbury, in walking distance of both the British Museum and the shops of Oxford Street. Juniper, she hoped, might also remain in London and set up in a place nearby, and Percy would, of course, come to visit. She’d stay no longer than a single night though, due to strong feelings about sleeping in her own bed and being on hand to prop up the castle, bodily if need be, should it begin to crumble.
In the privacy of her own thoughts, Saffy visited her little flatlet often, especially when Percy was stalking up and down the castle corridors, raging about the flaking paint, the sinking beams, decrying each new crack in the walls. Saffy would close her eyes and open the door to her very own home. It would be small and simple, and very clean – she’d take care of that herself – and the overriding smell would be one of beeswax polish. Saffy clenched her fist around the onion sprigs and walked even faster.
A desk beneath the window, her Olivetti typewriter at its centre and a miniature glass vase – an old but pretty bottle would do at a pinch – in the corner, with a single flower in the prime of its bloom, to be replaced daily. The wireless would be her only companion, and throughout the day she’d pause in her typing to listen to the weather reports, leaving briefly the world she was creating on the page to gaze through the window at the smokeless London sky. Sunlight would brush her arm, spilling into her tiny home and setting the beeswax on the furniture to sparkling. In the evenings, she’d read her library books, write a little more of her own work in progress, and listen to Gracie Fields on the wireless, and no one would grumble from the other armchair that it was a load of sentimental rubbish.
Saffy stopped, pressed her palms to her warm cheeks and gave a sigh of deep contentment. Dreams of London, of the future, had brought her all the way back to the rear of the castle: what was more, she’d beaten the rain.
A glance at the henhouse, and her pleasure was curdled somewhat by regret. How she’d live without her girls she didn’t know; she wondered if it would be possible to take them with her. Surely there’d be space in her building’s little garden for a small run – she would just have to add this necessity to her list.
Saffy opened the gate and held out her arms. ‘Hello, darlings. How are you this afternoon?’
Helen-Melon ruffled her feathers but didn’t shift from the roosting bench, and Madame refused even to look up from the dirt.
‘Chin up, girls. I’m not going anywhere yet. Why, there’s a whole war to win first.’
This rallying call did not have the cheering effect Saffy had hoped for and her smile staled. It was the third day in as many that Helen had been downcast, and Madame was ordinarily nothing if not vocal. The younger hens took their cue from the older two, so the mood in the coop was decidedly grey. Saffy had become accustomed to such low spirits during the raids; chickens were every bit as sensitive as humans, just as susceptible to anxiety, and the bombers had been relentless. In the end, she’d taken all eight down into the shelter with her at night. The air had suffered, it was true, but the arrangement had suited all concerned: the hens returned to laying and, with Percy out most nights, Saffy had been glad of the company.
‘Come now,’ she cooed, scooping Madame into her arms. ‘Don’t be stroppy, my lovely. It’s just a storm gathering, nothing more.’ The warm feathered body relaxed, but only briefly, before wings flapped and the hen staged a clumsy escape, back to the dirt she’d been scratching.
Saffy dusted off her hands and set them on her hips. ‘As bad as that, is it? I suppose there’s only one thing for it then.’
Dinner. The only move in her arsenal guaranteed to brighten their spirits. They were greedy, her girls, and that was no bad thing. Would that all the world’s problems were solved with a tasty dish. It was earlier than usual, but these were critical times: the parlour table was still not set, the serving spoon was missing in action, Juniper and her guest would be at the door in no time at all – with Percy’s spirits to manage, the last thing she needed was a clutch of cranky hens. There. It was a practical decision, to keep them sweet, and nothing whatever to do with Saffy being a hopelessly soft touch.
The steam of a day spent conjuring dinner from what could be found in the larder or begged from the adjoining farms had collected in the upper nooks of the kitchen and Saffy tugged at her blouse in an effort to cool down. ‘Now,’ she flustered, ‘where was I?’ She lifted the saucepan lid to satisfy herself the custard had gone nowhere in her absence, guessed by the oven huffing that the pie was still cooking, then spotted an old wooden crate that had outlived its original purpose but would suit her current one perfectly.
Saffy dragged it into the furthest corner of the larder and climbed aboard, standing on tiptoes right at its edge. She spider-walked her hand along the larder shelf until her fingers grazed the darkest patch and a small tin reached out to meet them. Wrapping her hand around it, Saffy smiled to herself and clambered back down. Months of dust had settled, grease and steam had formed a glue, and she had to wipe the top with her thumb to read the label beneath: sardines. Perfect! She grasped it tightly, relishing the thrill of the illicit.
‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ sang Saffy, digging the tin opener from the drawer of clunky kitchen utensils, shutting it again with a bump of her hip. ‘They’re not for me.’ It had been one of her father’s ruling tenets: tinned food was a conspiracy and they were to submit themselves to willing starvation sooner than allow a spoonful to pass their lips. A conspiracy by whom and to what effect Saffy did not purport to know, but Daddy had been forceful on the matter and that had been enough. He wasn’t one to brook much opposition and for a long time she’d possessed no desire to give him any. Throughout her girlhood he had been the sun that shone for Saffy, and the moon at night; the idea that he might ever disappoint her belonged in a counter-realm of ghouls and nightmares.
Saffy mashed the sardines in a porcelain bowl, noticing the hairline crack in its side only after she’d rendered the fish utterly unrecognizable. It was of no consequence as far as the hens were concerned, but along with the wallpaper she’d discovered peeling away from the chimney in the good parlour it was the second sign of decline in as many hours. She made a mental note to check carefully the plates they’d put aside for tonight, to hide any that were similarly marred; it was just the sort of wear and tear to get Percy fuming, and although Saffy admired her twin’s commitment to Milderhurst and its maintenance, her ill mood would not be conducive to the atmosphere of convivial celebration she was hoping for.
A number of things happened then at once. The door creaked ajar, Saffy jumped, and a remnant of sardine spine dropped from the fork’s tine onto the flagstones.
‘Miss Saffy!’
‘Oh, Lucy, thank God!’ Saffy clutched the fork against her staccato heart. ‘You shaved ten years off my life!’
‘I’m sorry. I thought you were out fetching flowers for the parlour… I only meant… I came to check – ’ The housekeeper’s sentence broke into tatters as she drew closer, took in the fishy mash, the open tin and she dropped her train of thought completely when she met Saffy’s gaze. Her lovely violet eyes widened. ‘Miss Saffy!’ she said. ‘I didn’t think-’
‘Oh-no-no-no – ’ Saffy flapped a hand for silence, smiling as she lifted a finger to her lips. ‘Shh, Lucy dear. Not for me, certainly not. I keep them for the girls.’
‘Oh.’ Lucy was visibly relieved. ‘Well, that’s different, isn’t it. I wouldn’t like to think of Himself,’ her eyes raised reverentially towards the ceiling, ‘being upset, even now.’
Saffy agreed, ‘The last thing we need tonight is Daddy turning in his grave.’ She nodded at the first-aid box. ‘Pass me a couple of aspirin, will you?’
Lucy’s brow rumpled with concern. ‘Are you unwell?’
‘It’s the girls. They’re nervy, poor darlings, and nothing smoothes a frazzled temperament quite like aspirin, except perhaps a sharp swig of gin, but that would be rather irresponsible.’ Saffy used the back of a teaspoon to grind the tablets to powder. ‘You know, I haven’t seen them so bad since the raid on May the tenth.’
Lucy paled. ‘You don’t think they sense a fresh wave of bombers?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. Mr Hitler’s far too busy marching into winter to trouble much about us. At least, that’s what Percy says. According to her, we should be left alone until Christmas at least; she’s terribly disappointed.’ Saffy was still stirring the fishy concoction and had drawn breath to go on when she noticed that Lucy had moved away to the stove. Her posture gave no indication that she was listening any more and all of a sudden Saffy felt silly, like one of her hens when they were in the mood for clucking and the garden gate would do for company. After an embarrassed little cough she said, ‘Anyway, I’m prattling. You didn’t come to the kitchen to hear about the girls and I’m keeping you from whatever it was you were doing.’
‘Not at all.’ Lucy closed the range door and stood tall, but her cheeks were a deeper pink than the oven alone might cause and Saffy knew that she hadn’t imagined the previous moment’s discomfort; something she’d said or done had spoiled Lucy’s good humour and she felt beastly about it. ‘I was coming to check on the rabbit pie,’ Lucy continued, ‘which I’ve now done, and to let you know that I didn’t find the silver serving spoon you wanted but I’ve put another at table that should do just as well. I’ve also brought down some of the records Miss Juniper sent back from London.’
‘To the blue parlour?’
‘Of course.’
‘Perfect.’ It was the good parlour, and therefore they would entertain Mr Cavill there. Percy had disagreed, but that was to be expected. She’d been in a temper for weeks, stomping along the corridors, forecasting doom and gloom about the coming winter, grumbling about the shortage of fuel, the extravagance of heating another room when the yellow parlour was already warmed daily. But Percy would come round: she always did. Saffy tapped the fork on the side of the bowl with determination.
‘You did very well with your custard. It’s lovely and thick, even without the milk.’ Lucy was peeping beneath the saucepan lid.
‘Oh, Lucy, you’re a darling. I made it with water in the end, a little honey as sweetener so I could save my sugar for marmalade. I never thought I’d thank the war for anything, but I wonder that I might have lived my entire life without knowing the satisfaction of creating the perfect milk-less custard!’
‘There’s many in London would be grateful for the recipe. My cousin writes that they’re down to two pints each a week. Can you imagine? You ought to jot down the steps to your custard in a letter and send it to the Daily Telegraph. They publish them, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Saffy thoughtfully. It would be another publication to add to her little collection. Not a particularly salubrious addition, but a clipping nonetheless. It would all help when the time came to send off her manuscript, and who knew what else might come of it? Saffy quite liked the idea of a regular little column, ‘Sew-a-lot Saffy’s Advice to Ladies’ or some such, a small illustrated emblem in the corner – her Singer 201K, or even one of her hens! She smiled, as pleased and amused by the fantasy as if it were a fait accompli.
Lucy, meanwhile, was still talking about her cousin in Pimlico and the single egg they were allowed each fortnight. ‘Hers was rotten the other week, and can you imagine? – they wouldn’t replace it for her.’
‘But that’s just mean spirited!’ Saffy was aghast. Sew-a-lot Saffy, she suspected, would have much to say on such matters and wouldn’t be afraid to make magnanimous gestures of her own as recompense. ‘Why, you must send her some of mine. And take half a dozen for yourself.’
Lucy’s expression could not have been more delighted had Saffy begun handing out lumps of solid gold, and Saffy felt embarrassed suddenly, forcing the spectre of her newspaper doppelganger to dissolve. It was with an air of apology that she said, ‘We’ve more eggs than we can eat, and I’ve been looking for a way to show you my gratitude – you’ve come to my aid so often since the war began.’
‘Oh, Miss Saffy.’
‘Let’s not forget I’d still be laundering in caster sugar if it weren’t for you.’
Lucy laughed and said, ‘Well, thank you kindly. I accept your offer most gratefully.’
They started wrapping the eggs together, tearing small squares from the salvaged newspapers stacked by the stove, and Saffy thought for the hundredth time that day how much she enjoyed their former housekeeper’s company and how unfortunate it was that they’d lost her. When she moved into the flatlet, Saffy decided, Lucy should be given the address and encouraged to call for tea whenever she came up to London. Percy would no doubt have something to say about that – she had rather traditional ideas about the classes and their intermingling – but Saffy knew better: companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.
A grumble of thunder menaced from outside and Lucy ducked her head to spy through the grimy windowpane above the small sink. She took in the darkening sky and frowned. ‘If there’s nothing else, Miss Saffy, I’ll finish up in the parlour and be on my way. The weather looks like settling in and I’ve a meeting to attend this evening.’
‘WVS is it?’
‘Canteen tonight. Got to keep those brave soldiers fed.’
‘That we do,’ Saffy said. ‘Speaking of which, I’ve stitched some children’s dollies for your fund-raising auction. Take them tonight if you’re able: they’re upstairs, as is – ’ a pause for theatrical effect – ‘the Dress.’
Lucy gasped and her voice dropped to a whisper, even though they were alone. ‘You finished it!’
‘Just in time for Juniper to wear tonight. I’ve hung it in the attic so it’s the first thing she sees.’
‘Then I shall certainly pop upstairs before I go. Tell me – is it beautiful?’
‘It’s divine.’
‘I’m so pleased.’ A moment’s hesitation and Lucy reached out to take Saffy’s hands lightly in her own. ‘Everything’s going to be perfect, you see if it isn’t. Such a special night, having Miss Juniper back from London at last.’
‘I just hope the weather doesn’t hold up the trains too long.’
Lucy smiled. ‘You’ll be relieved to have her home safe and sound.’
‘I haven’t slept a single night through since she’s been away.’
‘The worry.’ Lucy shook her head sympathetically. ‘You’ve been a mother to her, and a mother never sleeps easy when she’s worried for her babe.’
‘Oh, Lucy – ’ Saffy’s eyes glazed – ‘I have been worried. So worried. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for months.’
‘There haven’t been any episodes, though, have there?’
‘Mercifully not, and I’m sure she would have told us if there had. Even Juniper wouldn’t be untruthful about something so serious-’
The door blasted open and they each straightened as sharply as the other. Lucy squealed and Saffy almost did, remembering this time to swipe the tin and hide it behind her back. It was only the wind picking up outside, but the interruption was sufficient to sweep away the pleasant atmosphere inside and take Lucy’s smile with it. And then Saffy knew what it was that had Lucy on tenterhooks.
She considered saying nothing, the day was almost over and sometimes least said really was soonest mended, but the afternoon had been so companionable, the two of them working side by side in the kitchen and in the parlour, and Saffy was eager to set things to rights. She was allowed to have friends – she needed to have friends – no matter what Percy felt. She cleared her throat gently. ‘How old were you when you started here, Lucy?’
The answer came quietly, almost as if she’d expected it: ‘Sixteen.’
‘Twenty-two years ago, was it?’
‘Twenty-four. It was 1917.’
‘You were always one of Father’s favourites, you know.’
Within the oven, the pie filling had begun to simmer inside its pastry casing. The former housekeeper’s back straightened and then she sighed, slowly and deliberately. ‘He was good to me.’
‘And you must know that Percy and I are both very fond of you.’
With the eggs all bundled, Lucy could find no further occupation at the far bench. She crossed her arms and spoke softly. ‘It’s kind of you to say, Miss Saffy, and unnecessary.’
‘Only that if you ever changed your mind, when things are more settled, if you decided you’d like to come back in a more official-’
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘No. Thank you.’
‘I’ve made you uncomfortable,’ Saffy started. ‘Forgive me, Lucy dear. I wouldn’t have said a word, only I don’t like to think of you misunderstanding. Percy doesn’t mean anything by it, you see. It’s just her way.’
‘Really, there’s no need-’
‘She doesn’t like change. She never has. She almost died pining when she was sent away to hospital with scarlet fever as a girl.’ Saffy made a weak attempt to lighten the mood: ‘I sometimes think she’d be happy for we three sisters to remain together here at Milderhurst forever. Can you imagine? All of us old ladies with hair so long and white we could sit on it?’
‘I should think Miss Juniper would have something to say about that.’
‘Quite.’ As would Saffy herself. She had a sudden urge to tell Lucy all about the flatlet in London, the desk beneath the window, the wireless on the shelf, but she suppressed it. This wasn’t the time. Instead, she said, ‘Anyway, we were both sorry to see you leave us after so many years.’
‘It was the war, Miss Saffy, I needed to be doing something to help, then with Mother passing as she did and Harry-’
Saffy waved her hand. ‘There’s no need to explain; I understand completely. Affairs of the heart and all that. We all of us have lives to lead, Lucy, particularly at a time like this. War makes one see what’s important, doesn’t it?’
‘I should get on.’
‘Yes. All right. And we’ll see each other again soon. Next week perhaps, to make some piccalilli for the auction? My marrows-’
‘No,’ said Lucy, a fresh note tightening her voice. ‘No. Not again. I shouldn’t have come today, only you sounded beside yourself.’
‘But Lucy-’
‘Please don’t ask me again, Saffy. It isn’t right.’
Saffy was at a loss for words. Another gust of angry wind and a distant rumble of thunder sounded. Lucy gathered up the tea towel of eggs. ‘I should get on,’ she said, more gently this time, which was somehow worse and brought Saffy to the brink of tears. ‘I’ll fetch the dollies, take a look at Juniper’s dress, and be on my way.’
And then she was gone.
The door swung shut and Saffy was alone again in the steaming kitchen, clutching a bowl of mushy fish and racking her brains, wondering what had happened to drive her friend away.
Percy coasted down the slope of the Tenterden Road, across the rattle of stones at the base of the driveway, and jumped off her bicycle. ‘Home again, home again, jiggety jig’, she recited under her breath, gravel crunching beneath her boots. Nanny had taught them the rhyme when they were very small, decades ago now, yet it always came to mind when she crossed from the road onto the driveway. Some tunes, some chains of words were like that; they lodged and refused to dislodge no matter how a person might wish it. Not that Percy cared to rid herself of ‘Jiggety Jig’. Dear Nanny with her tiny, pink hands, her certainty in all things, the clickety needles as she sat by the attic fire at night, knitting them to sleep. How they’d wept when she celebrated her ninetieth birthday by retiring to live with a great-niece in Cornwall. Saffy had gone so far as to threaten a death plummet from the attic window in protest but, alas, the pronouncement had been dulled by previous deployment and Nanny was not swayed.
Even though she was already late, Percy walked rather than rode her bicycle up the drive, letting the familiar fields welcome her home as they fanned out on either side. The farm and its oast houses to the left, the mill beyond, the woods to the distant right. Memories of a thousand childhood afternoons roosted in the trees of Cardarker Wood blinking at her from the cooling shadows. The exhilarating terror of hiding from the white slavers; hunting for dragon bones; hiking with Daddy in search of the ancient Roman roads…
The driveway wasn’t particularly steep and it wasn’t for lack of ability that Percy chose to proceed on foot, rather that she enjoyed walking. Daddy had been a first-rate walker, too, particularly after the Great War. Before he published the book, and before he left them to go up to London; before he met Odette and remarried and was never really theirs again. The doctor had advised that a daily walk would help his leg and he’d taken to roaming the fields with the stick Mr Morris had left behind after one of Grandmother’s weekends. ‘You see the way the end swings out before me with each stride?’ he’d said as they strolled along Roving Brook together one autumn afternoon. ‘That’s as it should be. Good and solid. It’s a reminder.’
‘Of what, Daddy?’
He’d frowned at the slippery bank as if the right words might be hidden there, between the reeds. ‘Why… That I, too, am solid, I expect.’
She hadn’t understood his meaning then; had only presumed him enamoured of the stick’s weight. She certainly hadn’t probed further: Percy’s position as walking mate was tenuous, the rules governing its continuation firm. Walking was, according to the doctrine of Raymond Blythe, a time for contemplation; on rare occasions, when both parties were amenable, for the discussion of history or poetry or nature. Chatterboxes were certainly not tolerated and the label once given was never lost, much to poor Saffy’s chagrin. Many was the time Percy had glanced back towards the castle as she and Daddy set off on their ramble, to see Saffy scowling from the nursery window. Percy had always twinged in sympathy with her sister, but never sufficiently to stay behind. She figured that the favour was just reward for the countless times Saffy held Daddy’s ear, making him smile with amusement as she read aloud the clever little stories she’d written; more recently it was for the months they’d spent together, the two of them, immediately after his return from war, when Percy had been sent away with scarlet fever.
Percy came to the first bridge and stopped, resting her bicycle against the railing. She couldn’t see the castle from here, not yet; it remained hidden in the clutch of its woods and wouldn’t appear fully until she reached the second, smaller bridge. She leaned over the edge and scanned the shallow brook below. The water swirled and whispered where the banks widened, hesitating a little before continuing on towards the woods. Percy’s reflection, dark against the white-reflected sky, wavered in the smoother, deeper middle.
Beyond was the hop field in which she’d smoked her first cigarette. She and Saffy together, giggling over the stolen case, pinched from one of Daddy’s more pompous friends while he roasted his hammy ankles by the lake on a stifling summer’s day.
A cigarette…
Percy felt the breast pocket of her uniform, the firm cylinder beneath her fingertips. Having rolled the damned thing, it was as well to enjoy it, surely? She had a feeling that once she entered the castle’s fray a quiet smoke would be but a distant dream.
She turned, resting against the railing, struck a match and inhaled, holding her breath for a moment before letting go. God, how she adored tobacco. Percy sometimes suspected she would be happy to live alone, to never speak another word to a single living soul, on condition she could do so here at Milderhurst with a lifetime’s supply of cigarettes for company.
She hadn’t always been so wretchedly solitary. And even now she knew the fantasy – though certainly not without its comforts – to be just that. A fantasy. She could never bear to be without Saffy, not for long. Nor Juniper. It had been four months since their little sister took herself to London, and the two of them left at home had behaved in the interim like a pair of handkerchief-twisting old dearies: speculating as to whether she had sufficient warm socks, sending fresh eggs to London with whomever they knew was making the journey, reading her letters aloud over the breakfast table in an attempt to discern her mood, her health, her mind. Letters, incidentally, in which no mention – veiled or otherwise – was made of the possibility of marriage, thank you very much, Mrs Potts! The suggestion was laughable to anyone who knew Juniper. While some women were formed for marriage and prams in the hallway, others, most decidedly, were not. Daddy had known that, which is why he’d arranged things the way he had, to ensure that Juniper would be taken care of after he was gone.
Percy huffed with distaste and flattened her spent cigarette beneath her boot. Thoughts of the postmistress reminded her of the items she’d collected and she pulled them from her bag, an excuse to linger in the calm of her own company a little longer.
There were three pieces in total, just as Mrs Potts had advised: a parcel from Meredith to Juniper, a typed envelope addressed to Saffy, and another letter with her own name written across its front. The script, with its dizzy loops, could belong to none other than Cousin Emily, and Percy tore open the envelope eagerly, angling the top page so it caught the remaining light and she could make out the words.
With the exception of the time she’d dyed Saffy’s hair blue, Emily had borne the esteemed title of Favourite Cousin throughout the Blythe twins’ childhood. That her only challenge came from the pompous Cambridge cousins, the strange, thin cousins from the north, and her own younger sister, Pippa, whose unfortunate tendency to weep at the slightest provocation earned her immediate disqualification, rendered the honour no less heartfelt. A visit from Emily had been cause for great celebration at Milderhurst and without her the twins’ childhood would have been a rather more stagnant place. Percy and Saffy were very close, as twins couldn’t help but be, but they were not the sort whose bond excluded all others. Indeed, they were a pair whose friendship was improved by the incorporation of a third. Growing up, the village had been full of children with whom they might have played if not for Daddy’s suspicion of outsiders. Darling Daddy, he’d been a terrible snob in his way, only he’d have been shocked to be labelled as such. It wasn’t money or status that he admired, but brains; talent was the currency with which he sought to surround himself.
Emily, blessed with both, had received the Raymond Blythe stamp of approval and had thus been summoned to stay at Milderhurst every summer. She’d even earned inclusion in the Blythe Family Evenings, a semi-regular tournament instituted by Grandmother when Daddy was a boy. The call would go out on the auspicious morning – ‘Blythe Family Evening!’ – and anticipation would animate the household all day. Dictionaries were located, pencils and wits were sharpened, and finally, when dinner was done with, everyone would gather in the good parlour. Contestants would take up position at the table or in a favourite armchair, and finally Daddy would make his entrance. He always withdrew from general activity on tournament day, secreting himself away in the tower to produce his list of challenges, and their announcement was something of a ceremony. The specifics of the game varied, but at its most general a location, a character type, and a word would be supplied, then Cook’s largest egg-timer flipped, and the race would be on to craft the most entertaining fiction.
Percy, who was bright but not a wit, who loved to listen but not to tell, who wrote slowly and punctiliously when she was nervous and made everything sound impossibly starched, had dreaded and despised these evenings until, quite by accident, when she was twelve years old, she discovered the amnesty accorded to the game’s official score-keeper. While Emily and Saffy – whose devotion to one another only fuelled their competition – sweated over their stories, furrowed their brows, bit their lips, and raced their pencils across pages, vying hotly for Daddy’s praise, Percy sat serenely awaiting entertainment. For written expression they were evenly matched, Saffy perhaps a little stronger in vocabulary; however, Emily’s wicked humour gave her a distinct advantage and for a time it had been clear that Daddy suspected the family’s gift of flowering specially in her. That was before Juniper was born, of course, with a precocious talent that swept all other claims aside.
If Emily felt the chill when Daddy’s attention shifted orbit, her recovery had been swift. Her visits had continued happily and regularly for many years, long beyond childhood, until that last summer in 1925, the last before she was married and it all ended. It was to Emily’s great advantage, Percy had always supposed, that despite her talents she’d never possessed the artist’s temperament. She was too even-tempered, too good at sports, too jolly and well liked to walk the writer’s path. Not even the merest whiff of neuroses. Much better for Emily the fate that had found her after Daddy’s focus waned: marriage to a good sort, a clutch of freckle-nosed sons, a grand house overlooking the sea, and now, according to her correspondence, a pair of amorous pigs. The entire letter was little more than a collection of anecdotes from Emily’s Devonshire village: news about her husband and boys, adventures of the local ARP officers, her elderly neighbour’s obsession with her stirrup pump, yet Percy laughed as she read it. She was still smiling when she reached the end, folded the letter neatly and tucked it back into its envelope.
Then she tore it in half and in half again, pushing it deep within her pocket as she continued up the driveway. She made a mental note to remove the shreds to her wastepaper bin before her uniform found its way into the laundry pile. Better yet, she’d burn the pieces that very afternoon and Saffy would be none the wiser.
That Juniper, the only known Blythe not to occupy the nursery in childhood, should wake on the morning of her thirteenth birthday, toss a few valued possessions into a pillowcase, then head upstairs to stake her claim on the sleeping attic, had surprised no one. The perfect contrariness of the event was so in keeping with the Juniper they knew and loved that whenever anyone spoke of it, in years to come, the progression seemed utterly natural and they found themselves debating the very suggestion that the whole thing hadn’t been planned in advance. For her part, Juniper said very little on the subject, either at the time or later: one day she slept in her small annexed room on the second floor, the next she presided over the attic. What more could one say?
More telling than Juniper’s removal to the nursery, Saffy always thought, was the way in which she’d dragged an invisible cape of curious glamour after her. The attic, an outpost in the castle, the place to which children had traditionally been banished until by age or attribute they were deemed worthy of adult regard, a room of low ceilings and feisty mice, skull-freezing winters and simmering summers, the outlet through which all chimneys passed on their way to freedom, suddenly seemed to hum. People with no reason at all to subject themselves to the climb began to gravitate to the nursery. ‘Just going to pop my head in,’ they would say, before disappearing up the staircase, only to reappear somewhat sheepishly an hour or so later. Saffy and Percy would exchange an amused glance and entertain one another with guesses as to what on earth the poor unwitting guest had been doing up there when one thing was certain: Juniper had not been playing hostess. It wasn’t that their little sister was rude, only that she wasn’t particularly affable either, and there was no company she enjoyed as much as her own. Which was a good thing, given that she’d been afforded very little opportunity to meet anyone else. There were no cousins her age, no family friends, and Daddy had insisted she should be educated at home. The best Saffy and Percy could figure out was that Juniper ignored her visitors completely, leaving them to potter unfettered in the busy chaos of her room until finally they tired sufficiently and took it upon themselves to leave. It was one of Juniper’s strangest, most indefinable gifts and one she’d possessed all her life: a magnetism so strong it was worthy of study and medical categorization. Even people who didn’t like Juniper wanted to be liked by her.
The last thing on Saffy’s mind, however, as she climbed the uppermost staircase for the second time that day, was unravelling the mysteries of her little sister’s charm. The storm was gathering faster than Mr Potts’s Home Guard patrol, and the attic windows were wide open. She’d noticed them when she was sitting in the henhouse, stroking Helen-Melon’s feathers and fretting over Lucy’s sudden sternness. A light’s ignition had drawn her attention and she’d glanced up to see Lucy collecting the hospital dollies from the sewing room. She’d followed the housekeeper’s progress – a shadow as she passed the second-floor window, the spill of lingering daylight as she opened the hallway door, then a minute or so’s passing before a light flickered in the upper staircase that led to the attic. And that’s when Saffy had remembered the windows. She’d opened them herself that morning in the hope that a day’s fresh air might clear away months of stagnation. It had been a fond hope and one whose fulfilment Saffy doubted, but it was better, surely, to try and fail than to throw one’s hands in the air. Now, though, with the smell of rain on the breeze, she needed to get them shut. She’d watched for the light to be extinguished in the stairwell, waited another five minutes, then, judging it safe to venture upstairs without fear of meeting Lucy, headed inside.
Taking great care to avoid the third step from the top – the last thing Saffy needed tonight was the little uncle’s ghost making mischief – she pushed open the nursery door and switched on the light. It glowed dully, as did all the Milderhurst electrics, and she paused a while in the doorway. Murky light aside, it was her custom when considering a foray into Juniper’s domain. There were few rooms on earth, Saffy suspected, where it was as prudent to plot a course before attempting entry. Squalor was perhaps going a little too far, but only a little.
The smell, she noticed, remained; the blend of stale tobacco smoke and ink, wet dog, and feral mouse, had been too stubborn for a single day’s breeze. The doggy odour was easily explained – Juniper’s mutt Poe had languished in her absence, splitting his moping between the top of the driveway and the end of her bed. As to the mice, Saffy wasn’t sure whether Juniper had been feeding them on purpose or if the little opportunists were merely benefiting from her slatternly occupation of the attic. Either was possible. And, although she wouldn’t confess it too widely, Saffy quite liked the mousy smell; it reminded her of Clementina, whom she’d bought from the Harrods pet department on the morning of her eighth birthday. Tina had been a dear little companion, right up until the unfortunate altercation with Percy’s snake, Cyrus. Rats were a much-maligned breed, cleaner than people gave them credit for and truly companionable, the nobility of the rodent world.
Having glimpsed the clear-ish passage to the far window – a legacy of her previous expedition – Saffy started gingerly through the jumble. If Nanny could only see the place now! Gone were the clean, clear days of her reign, the supervised milky suppers, the little broomette pulled out at night for crumbs, the twin desks against the wall, the lingering scent of beeswax and Pears soap. No, Nanny’s epoch had been ended well and truly; replaced, it seemed to Saffy, by anarchy. Paper, paper everywhere, inked with odd instructions, illustrations, questions Juniper had written to herself; clusters of dust gathering contentedly, lining the skirting boards like chaperones at a dance. There were things stuck to walls, pictures of people and places and oddly assembled words that had, for some inexplicable reason, captured Juniper’s imagination; and the floor was a sea of books, articles of clothing, cups with dubiously grimy insides, makeshift ashtrays, favourite dolls with blinking eyes, old bus tickets with scribble around their edges. The whole made Saffy lightheaded and decidedly queasy. Was that a bread crust beneath the quilt? If so, it had hardened by now into a museum piece.
Though tidying up after Juniper was a nasty habit and one against which Saffy had long ago waged war and won, on this occasion she couldn’t help herself. Mess was one thing, comestibles quite another. With a shudder she reached down, wrapped the granite-hard crust in the quilt and hurried to the closest window, releasing the crust and listening for the dull thud as it hit the old moat grass below. Another shudder as she shook out the quilt, then she pulled the window closed and sealed the blackout curtains.
The tatty quilt would need washing and patching, but that was for another day; for now Saffy would have to content herself with giving it a thorough folding. Not too neatly, of course – though Juniper, it was safe to assume, would neither notice nor care – just enough to restore to it some semblance of dignity. The quilt, Saffy thought fondly, drawing the corners to arm’s length, deserved better than a four-month furlough on the floor playing shroud to a stale lump of bread. It had been a gift originally, one of the estate farmer’s wives had sewn it for Juniper many years before, that being the sort of unsolicited affection Juniper tended to inspire. Although most people would be touched by such a gesture, bound by it to take special care of the item, Juniper was not most people. She placed no greater value on the creations of others than she placed on her own. This was one of the aspects of her little sister’s character Saffy found most difficult to understand, and she sighed as she took in the autumn of discarded papers on the floor.
She looked for a place to leave the folded quilt and settled on a nearby chair. A book lay open atop a pile of others and Saffy, pathologically literate, couldn’t help flicking back to the title page to see what it was. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, inscribed to Juniper by T. S. Eliot after he came to visit and Daddy showed him some of June’s poems. Saffy wasn’t sure about Thomas Eliot; she admired him, of course, as a wordsmith, but there was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before. Not so much with the cats, who were whimsy itself, as with his other poems. His obsession with ticking clocks and passing time, it seemed to Saffy, was a recipe for depression and one she could quite do without.
Juniper’s feelings on the matter were unclear. This was not a surprise. If Juniper were a character in a book, Saffy often thought, she’d be the sort whose evocation was best limited to the reactions of others, whose point of view was impossible to enter without risk of turning ambivalence into absolutes. Words like ‘disarming’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘beguiling’ would be invaluable to the author, along with ‘fierce’ and ‘reckless’, and even on odd occasion – though Saffy knew she must never say so aloud – ‘violent’. In Eliot’s hands, she’d be Juniper, the Cat au Contraire. Saffy smiled, pleased by the notion, and dusted her fingers on her knees. Juniper was rather catlike, after all: the wide-apart eyes with their fixed gaze, the lightness of foot, the resistance to attention she hadn’t sought.
Saffy began wading through the sea of papers towards the other windows, permitting herself a brief detour past the cupboard where the Dress was hanging. She’d brought it upstairs that morning, as soon as Percy was safely out of the house; pulled the dress from its hiding place and draped it over her arms like the sleeping princess of a fairy tale. She’d had to bend a coat hanger out of shape so that the silk might swathe against the outside of the wardrobe, facing the door, but it was necessary. The dress must be the first thing Juniper saw when she pushed open the door that evening and switched on the light.
Now the dress: there was the perfect example of the unknowable Juniper. The letter, when it arrived from London, had been such a surprise that if Saffy hadn’t witnessed a lifetime of her sister’s abrupt about-turns, she’d have believed it a prank. If there was one thing about her sister she’d have put money on, it was this: Juniper Blythe did not give two hoots about clothing. She’d spent her childhood in plain white muslin and bare feet and had a curious knack for reducing any new dress, no matter how smart, into a shapeless sack within two hours of wear. Although Saffy had held out some hope, maturity had not changed her. Where other girls of seventeen longed to go up to London for their first season, Juniper hadn’t even mentioned it, shooting Saffy a stare of such withering intensity when she so much as hinted at the possibility that the after-burn had pained for weeks. Which was just as well, seeing as Daddy would never have allowed it. She was his ‘creature of the castle’, he used to say, there was no need ever for her to leave it. What would a girl like her want with a round of debutante balls anyway?
The hurried postscript in Juniper’s letter, then, asking whether Saffy minded putting a dress together, something a person might wear to a dance – wasn’t there an old frock of her mother’s somewhere, something she’d worn to London, just before she died, perhaps it could be altered? – had been utterly bemusing. Juniper had made a point of addressing the letter to Saffy alone, so although she and Percy usually worked in partnership where Juniper was concerned, Saffy had pondered the request privately. After much consideration she’d come to the conclusion that city life must have changed her little sister; she wondered whether Juniper had been changed in other ways, whether she’d want to move to London for good after the war. Away from Milderhurst, no matter what Daddy had wanted for her.
Regardless of why Juniper had made the request, it was Saffy’s delight to fulfil it. Along with her typewriter, Saffy’s Singer 201K – undoubtedly the finest model ever made – was her pride and joy and although she’d done copious sewing since the war began, all of it had been practical. The opportunity to set aside the stacks of blankets and hospital pyjamas for a time and work on a fashion project had been thrilling, particularly the project that Juniper had suggested. For Saffy had immediately known the dress of which her sister spoke; she’d admired it even then, on that unforgettable night in 1924 when her stepmother had worn it to the London premiere of Daddy’s play. It had been in storage ever since, down in the muniment room, which was airtight and therefore the one place in the castle where moths and rot couldn’t find it.
Saffy ran her fingertips lightly down the sides of the silk skirt. The colour really was exquisite. A lustrous almost-pink, like the underside of the wild mushrooms that grew by the mill, the sort of colour a careless glance might mistake for cream, but which rewarded close attention. Saffy had worked on the alteration for weeks, always in secret, and the duplicity, the effort, had been worth it. She lifted the hem to check again the neatness of her handiwork, then, satisfied, smoothed it. She took a small step backwards, all the better to admire the full effect. Yes, it was glorious; she’d taken an item that was beautiful but dated and, armed with favourite editions from her collection of Vogue magazines, turned it into a piece of art. And if that sounded immodest, so be it. Saffy was well aware that this might be her last opportunity to see the dress in all its glory (the sad truth: once Juniper took possession there was no telling what dreadful fate awaited it); she wasn’t about to waste the moment by adhering to the dreary strictures of false modesty.
With a glance behind her, Saffy slipped the gown from its hanger and felt its weight in her hands; all the best dresses had a pleasing weight. She inserted a finger beneath each of the shoulder straps and held it up in front of her, chewing her bottom lip as she regarded herself in the mirror. There she stood, head tilted to the side, a childhood mannerism she’d never managed to shed, and from this distance and in this half-light, the passage of the years might never have been. If she squinted a little, smiled more broadly, she might still be the nineteen-year-old who’d stood beside her stepmother at the London premiere of Daddy’s play, coveting the pale pink dress and promising herself that one day she too would wear such a wondrous thing, maybe even at her own wedding.
Saffy put it back on the hanger, tripping on a discarded glass tumbler in the process, one from the set Daddy and Mother had received from the Asquiths on their marriage. She sighed; Juniper’s irreverence really knew no bounds. Which was all well and good for Juniper, but Saffy, having seen the tumbler, couldn’t very well ignore it. She bent to pick it up and was halfway to standing again when she glimpsed a Limoges teacup beneath an old newspaper; before she knew it she’d trespassed all over her own golden rule and was down on all fours, cleaning. The pile of crockery she’d assembled within a minute didn’t make a dent in the clutter. All that paper, all those scribbled words.
The mess, the impossibility of ever reasserting order, of reclaiming an old thought, was almost a physical pain for Saffy. For while she and Juniper were both writers, their methods were quite opposed. It was Saffy’s habit to set aside precious hours each day in which to sit quietly, her only companions a notebook, the fountain pen Daddy had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and a freshly brewed pot of strong tea. So arranged, she would carefully, slowly, craft her words into pleasing order, writing and rewriting, editing and perfecting, reading aloud and relishing the pleasure of bringing her heroine Adele’s story to life. Only when she was absolutely happy with the day’s work would she retire to her Olivetti and type up the new paragraph.
Juniper, on the other hand, worked like someone trying to write themselves free of entanglement. She did so wherever inspiration found her, writing on the run, spilling behind her scraps of poems, fragmented images, adverbs out of place, but somehow the stronger for it; all littered the castle, dropped like breadcrumbs, leading the way to the gingerbread nursery at the top of the stairs. Saffy would find them sometimes when she was cleaning – ink-splotched pages on the floor, behind the sofa, under the rug – and she’d surrender herself to the conjured image of an ancient Roman trireme, sail hoisted, wind beating it full, an order shouted on deck whilst in the bows the secreted lovers hid, on the brink of capture… Only for the story then to be abandoned, victim of Juniper’s fleeting, shifting interest.
At other times, whole stories were begun and completed in wild fits of composition; manias, Saffy sometimes thought, though that was not a word any of the Blythes used lightly, certainly not in relation to Juniper. The littlest sister would fail to appear at table and light would be found streaking through the nursery floorboards, a hot strip beneath the door. Daddy would order them not to disturb her, saying that the needs of the body were secondary to the demands of genius, but Saffy always sneaked a plate up when he wasn’t looking. Not that it was ever touched; Juniper just kept scribbling all night long. Sudden, burning, like those tropical fevers people seemed always to be getting, and short-lived, so that by next day all would be calm. She would emerge from the attic: tired, dazed and emptied. Yawning and lounging in that feline manner of hers, the demon exorcised and quite forgotten.
And that was the strangest aspect of all for Saffy, who filed her own compositions – drafts and finals – in matching lidded boxes that were stacked prettily for posterity in the muniment room, who had always worked towards the thrill of binding her work and pressing it into a reader’s hands. Juniper had no interest whatsoever in whether or not her writing was read. There was no false modesty in her failure to show her work to others; she simply couldn’t have cared less. Once the thing was written, it was no longer of any interest to her. Percy, when Saffy mentioned it, had been nonplussed, but that was to be expected. Poor Percy, without a creative bone in her body-
Well, well! Saffy paused, still on hands and knees; what should appear beneath the underbrush of papers but Grandmother’s silver serving spoon! The very thing she’d spent half the day looking for. She sat back on her haunches, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, forcing the kink from her lower spine. To think that all the while, as she and Lucy had turned drawers inside out, the spoon had been tucked beneath the rubble in Juniper’s room. Saffy was about to pluck it from its resting place – there was a curious stain on the handle that would need attention – when she saw that it had been acting as a bookmark of sorts. She opened the notebook – more of Juniper’s scratchy handwriting, but this page was dated. Saffy’s eyes, trained by a lifetime of voracious reading, were faster than her manners, and within the split second it took to blink she’d discerned that the book was a journal, the entry recent. May 1941, just before Juniper left for London.
It was simply dreadful to read another person’s journal and Saffy would be mortified if her own privacy were invaded in such a fashion, but Juniper had never cared for rules of conduct and in some way that Saffy understood but couldn’t formulate into words, that fact made it all right for her to take a peek. Indeed, Juniper’s habit of leaving personal papers lying flagrantly in the open was an invitation, surely, for her older sister, a mother figure really, to ensure that all was in order. Juniper was almost nineteen, but she was a special case: not responsible for herself like most adults. How else were Saffy and Percy to act as Juniper’s guardians other than by making it their business to know hers? Nanny wouldn’t have thought twice about leafing through diaries and letters left in view by her charges, which was precisely why the twins had gone to such great lengths to rotate their hiding spots. That Juniper didn’t bother was evidence enough to Saffy that her baby sister welcomed maternal interest in her affairs. And she was here now, and Juniper’s notebook was lying right there in front of her, open to a relatively recent page. Why – it was almost uncaring, wasn’t it, not to take a tiny little peek?
There was another bicycle leaning against the front steps, where Percy had taken to leaving her own when she was too tired, too lazy, or too plain rushed to put it in the stables. Which was often. This was unusual – Saffy hadn’t mentioned guests other than Juniper and the fellow, Thomas Cavill, each of whom would be arriving off buses and definitely not by bicycle.
Percy climbed the stairs and dug about in her satchel, searching for the key. Saffy had become very particular about keeping the doors locked since war started, convinced that Milderhurst would be circled in red on Hitler’s invasion map and the Blythe sisters marked out for arrest, which was fine with Percy except for the fact that her front-door key seemed always intent on hiding from her.
Ducks spluttered on the pond behind; the dark mass of Cardarker Wood quivered; thunder grumbled, closer now; and time seemed to stretch like elastic. Just as she was about to give up and start pounding on the door, it swung open and Lucy Middleton was there, a scarf over her hair and a weak-beamed bicycle lamp in her hand.
‘Oh my!’ The former housekeeper’s free hand leaped to her chest. ‘You frightened me.’
Percy opened her mouth, but finding no words closed it again. She stopped rummaging and swung her satchel over her shoulder. Still no words.
‘I – I’ve been helping in the kitchen.’ Lucy’s face was flushed. ‘Miss Saffy gave me a ring. On the telephone, earlier. Neither of her dailies was available.’
Percy cleared her throat and regretted the action immediately. The resulting croak connoted nervousness, and Lucy Middleton was the very last person before whom she wished to seem uncertain. ‘Everything’s set then, is it? For tonight?’
‘The pie’s in the oven and I’ve left Miss Saffy with instructions.’
‘I see.’
‘The dinner will cook slowly. I’d be expecting Miss Saffy to boil over first.’
It was a joke, an amusing one, but Percy left it too long to laugh. She sought something else to say, but there was too much and too little and Lucy Middleton, who had been standing, waiting for something further, must have realized that it wasn’t coming because she moved now, somewhat awkwardly, around Percy to retrieve her bicycle.
No, it wasn’t Middleton any more. Lucy Rogers. It had been over a year since she and Harry had wed. Almost eighteen months.
‘Good day, Miss Blythe.’ Lucy climbed onto her bicycle.
‘Your husband?’ said Percy quickly, despising herself as she did so. ‘Is he well?’
Lucy didn’t meet her eyes. ‘He is.’
‘And you too, of course?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the babe.’
Almost a whisper: ‘Yes.’
Her posture was that of a child expecting to be scolded or, worse, thrashed, and Percy was overcome with the sudden, hot desire to fulfil the expectation. She didn’t, of course, adopting instead a casual tone, less precipitate than before, almost light, and saying, ‘You might mention to your husband that the grandfather in the hall is still gaining. We arrive at the hour ten minutes sooner than we should.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I don’t think I imagined that he bore some special sentiment towards our old clock?’
Lucy refused to meet her eyes but uttered a vague reply before mounting her bicycle and pushing off towards the top of the driveway, lamplight scribbling a shaky message on the ground before her.
At the shudder of the front door downstairs Saffy clapped the journal shut. Her blood thrummed warm beneath her temples, her cheeks, the skin stretched taut above her breasts. Her pulse beat faster than a small bird’s heart. Well. She stood shakily, pushing herself up from the ground. That certainly took away some of the guesswork: the mystery of the evening ahead, the alteration of the dress, the young male guest. Not a gallant stranger at all. No. Not a stranger.
‘Saffy?’ Percy’s voice cut sharp and angry through the layers of floorboards.
Saffy pressed a hand to her forehead, steeling herself to the task ahead. She knew what she had to do: she needed to get herself dressed and downstairs, she needed to assess how much cajoling Percy was going to require, then she needed to make sure the evening was a great success. And there was the grandfather chiming six o’clock so she had to do it at once. Juniper and her young man – whose name, Saffy was sure she remembered correctly, was the same as that she’d glimpsed in the journal entry – would be arriving within the hour, the strength with which Percy had slammed the front door foretold a dark mood, and Saffy herself was still dressed like someone who’d spent the day digging for victory.
Pile of liberated crockery forgotten, she waded hurriedly through the paper so she could close the remaining windows and draw the blackout curtains. Movement on the driveway caught her eye – Lucy crossing the first bridge on her bicycle – but Saffy looked away. A flock of birds soared across the distant sky, way over by the hop fields, and she watched them go. ‘Free as a bird’ was the expression, and yet they weren’t free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight. What Saffy wouldn’t give sometimes to spread her wings and fly, right now, drifting from the window to soar above the fields, over the top of the woods, following the planes towards London.
She’d tried once, when she was a girl. She’d climbed out of the attic window, walked along the ridge of the roof, and scrambled down to the ledge below Daddy’s tower. She’d made herself a pair of wings first, the most glorious pair of silken wings, bound with twine to fine, light sticks she’d salvaged from the woods; she’d even sewn elastic loops on the back so she could wear them. They’d been so beautiful – neither pink nor red but vermilion, gleaming in the sun, just like the plumage on real birds – and for a few seconds after she’d launched herself into the air she’d really flown. The wind had buffeted her from beneath, whipping up through the valley to push her arms behind her, and everything had slowed, slowed, slowed, briefly but brilliantly, and she’d glimpsed what heaven it was to fly. Then things had begun to speed up, her descent had been rapid, and when she’d hit the ground, her wings and her arms had been broken.
‘Saffy?’ The shout came again. ‘Are you hiding from me?’
The birds disappeared into the swollen sky and Saffy pulled the window shut, sealing the blackouts so not a chink of light would be seen. Outside, the storm clouds rumbled like a full stomach, the gluttonous belly of a gentleman who’d escaped the frugalities of a rationed pantry. Saffy smiled, amusing herself, and made a mental note to jot down the description in her journal.
It was quiet inside, too quiet, and Percy’s lips tightened with familiar agitation; Saffy had always been the sort to hide when confrontation reared its bitter head. Percy had been fighting her twin’s battles all their lives, something she excelled at and actually quite enjoyed, and which worked very well indeed until dispute arose between them and Saffy, woefully out of practice, was ill equipped to meet it. Incapable of fight, she was left with only two options: flight or abject denial. In this instance, judging by the emphatic silence which met Percy’s attempts to find her, Saffy had chosen the former. Which was frustrating, exceedingly frustrating, for there was a fierce, spiky ball inside Percy, just waiting to get out. With no one to scowl at or take to task, however, Percy was stuck nursing it, and the fierce, spiky ball wasn’t the sort of affliction to shrivel of its own accord. With nowhere to fling it, she would need to seek satisfaction elsewhere. Whisky perhaps would help: it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
There was a moment each afternoon at which the sun reached a particular low point in the sky and light vanished, immediately and drastically, from within the castle. That moment passed as Percy went down the corridor from the entrance hall. When she emerged in the yellow parlour it was almost too dark to see her way across the room, which might have been hazardous had Percy not been able to navigate the castle blindfolded. She edged around the sofa into the bay window, pulled the blackout curtains across the glass and switched on the table lamp. As usual it made no practicable dent in the gloom. She pulled out a match to light the paraffin lamp’s wick but found, with mild surprise and strong annoyance, that after the encounter with Lucy her hand was shaking too much to strike it.
Ever the opportunist, the mantel clock chose that moment to step up its ticking. Percy had never liked that damned clock. It had been Mother’s and Daddy had insisted it was dear to him; thus its tenure was secure. There was something in the nature of its tick, though, that set Percy’s teeth on edge, a malicious suggestion that it took far more joy than a china object should at sweeping aside the passing seconds. This afternoon her dislike verged on hatred.
‘Oh, shut up, you stupid bloody clock,’ said Percy. Forgetting about the lamp, she tossed the unspent match into the bin.
She’d pour herself a drink, roll a cigarette, and then she’d head outside before the rain came, make sure there was sufficient firewood in the pile; see if she couldn’t rid herself of that spiky ball in the process.
Despite the turmoil of the day, Saffy had left a small portion of her brain free to devote itself to wardrobe rummaging; sorting through the options in her head so that come evening she wouldn’t be waylaid by indecision and forced to make a careless choice. Truthfully, it was one of her favourite pastimes even when she wasn’t hosting a special dinner: she visualized first this dress, with those shoes and that necklace, and then started again, cycling blissfully through the countless permutations. Today, combination after combination had presented itself only to be dismissed because it didn’t meet the final, essential criterion. Which was probably where she ought to have started, only it would have limited so direly the options. The winning outfit was always going to be the one that worked best with her finest nylon stockings: that was, the only pair whose six darned holes could happily be concealed by careful selection of the right shoes and a dress of the right length and persuasion. Cue the peppermint silk Liberty gown.
Back in the order and cleanliness of her own bedroom, as Saffy climbed out of her pinafore and did battle with her underwear, she was glad she’d already made the difficult decisions. She had neither the time nor the focus to make them now. As if deciphering the implications of Juniper’s journal entry wasn’t enough to contend with, Percy was downstairs and she was angry. As always, the whole house glowered with her; the slam of the front door had travelled all the way along the house’s veins, up four storeys and into Saffy’s own body. Even the lights – never bright – seemed to be sulking in sympathy, and the castle cavities were dirty with shadows. Saffy reached into the very back corner of the top drawer and retrieved her best stockings. They were tucked inside their paper packaging, wrapped inside a piece of tissue paper, and she unfolded them carefully, running her thumb lightly over the most recent repair.
The problem, as Saffy saw it, was that the nuances of human affection were lost on Percy, who was far more sympathetic to the needs of the walls and floors of Milderhurst than to those of her fellow inhabitants. They’d both been sorry to see Lucy go, after all; and it was Saffy who was more apt to feel her absence, alone in the house all day, washing and scrubbing and patching meals together with only Clara or half-witted Millie for company. But while Saffy understood that a woman, given the choice between her work and her heart, would always choose the latter, Percy had refused to accept the changed household with any grace. She’d taken Lucy’s marriage as a personal slight and there was no one like Percy for holding a grudge. Which was why Juniper’s journal entry and what it might portend was so disquieting.
Saffy slowed in her inspection of the stocking. She wasn’t naive and she wasn’t a Victorian; she’d read Third Act in Venice and Cold Comfort Farm and The Thinking Reed, and she knew about sex. Nothing she’d read before, though, had prepared her for Juniper’s thoughts on the matter. Typically frank; visceral, but lyrical too; beautiful and raw and frightening. Saffy’s eyes had raced across the page, taking the whole lot in at once, an enormous glass of water tossed at her face. It was unsurprising, she supposed, given the pace at which she’d read, her confusion at meeting such vivid sentiments, that she couldn’t now bring to mind a single line; only fragments of feeling, unwanted images, occasional forbidden words and the hot shock of having met them.
Perhaps it hadn’t been the words themselves that had so astonished Saffy as much as to whom they belonged. Not only was Juniper her far younger sister, but she was a person who had always seemed emphatically sexless; her burning talent, her eschewal of all things feminine, her just plain oddness – all seemed to elevate Juniper above such basic human desires. What was more, and perhaps it was this which stung most, Juniper had never so much as hinted to Saffy that she was contemplating a love affair. Was the young male guest this evening the man in question? The journal entry had been penned six months ago, before June went to London, and yet the name Thomas had been mentioned. Was it possible that Juniper had met him earlier, at Milderhurst? That there had been more to her leaving than met the eye? And if so, were they still, after all this time, in love? Such a brilliant and exciting development in her little sister’s life, and not a word had been shared. Saffy knew why, of course: Daddy, if he were alive, would be furious – sex too often led to children, and Daddy’s theories on the incompatibility of art and child-rearing were no secret. Percy, as his self-elected emissary, must therefore remain none the wiser; Juniper had been right in that. But not to tell Saffy? Why, she and Juniper were close, and as secretive as Juniper was, they’d always been able to talk. This matter should be no different. She rolled the stocking off her hand, resolving to rectify matters as soon as Juniper arrived and they could snatch a few private moments together. Saffy smiled; the evening wasn’t merely a welcome home, or a show of gratitude. Juniper had a special friend.
Satisfied that the stockings were in good order, Saffy hung them on the bedrail and prepared to take on the wardrobe. Good Lord! She stopped still, turned her underwear-clad self this way and that, glancing back over her shoulder to get a rear view. Either the mirror had developed some sort of reflection disorder or she’d gained a few more pounds. Really, she ought to donate herself to science: to gain weight despite the grave state of England’s pantries? Saffy couldn’t decide whether it was downright un-British or a clever victory against Hitler’s U-boats. Not worthy perhaps of the Churchill Medal for the Maintenance of Beauty in England, but a triumph nonetheless. Saffy pulled a face at herself, cinched in her stomach, and opened the wardrobe door.
Behind the selection of dull pinafores and cardigans hanging at the front was a wonderland of vibrant neglected silks. Saffy clapped her hands to her cheeks; it was like revisiting old friends. Her wardrobe was her pride and joy, each dress a member of an esteemed club. It was a catalogue of her past, too, as she’d once thought during a fit of maudlin self-pity: the dresses she’d worn as a debutante, the silk gown she’d worn to the Milderhurst Midsummer Ball of 1923, even the blue frock she’d made to attend Daddy’s play’s premiere the following year. Daddy had maintained that daughters should be beautiful and they’d all continued to dress for dinner as long as he was alive; even when he was confined to his chair in the tower they’d made the effort to please him. After his death, however, there hadn’t seemed much point, not with the war. Saffy had kept it up for a time, but once Percy joined the ambulance service and started spending nights on duty they’d agreed, wordlessly, to let the custom slip away.
One by one, Saffy swept the gowns aside, until finally she glimpsed the peppermint silk. She held the others clear a moment, taking stock of its lustrous green front: the beading on the décolletage, the ribbon sash, the bias-cut skirt. She hadn’t worn it in years, could barely recall the previous occasion, but she could remember Lucy helping to mend it. It had been Percy’s fault; with those cigarettes and her careless manner of smoking them she was a menace to fine fabrics everywhere. Lucy had done a neat repair job though; Saffy had to hunt along the bodice to find the singe mark. Yes, it would do nicely; it would have to. Saffy drew it from the wardrobe, draped it across the bedspread, and took up her stockings.
The biggest mystery, she thought, spidering her fingers down the sides of the first stocking and easing her toes in, was how someone like Lucy could possibly have fallen in love with Harry the clock man in the first place. Such a plain little man, not at all a romantic hero, scuttering about the passages with his shoulders hunched and his hair always a little longer, a little thinner, a little less kempt than it should be-
‘Oh Lord; no!’ Saffy’s big toe caught and she began to topple sideways. There was a split second in which she might have righted herself, but her toenail had snagged in the fibre and to plant her foot would have risked a new ladder. Thus, she took the fall bravely, whacking her thigh painfully on the dressing-table corner. ‘Oh dear,’ she gasped. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ She slid onto the upholstered stool and scrambled to inspect the precious stocking: why, oh why, hadn’t she concentrated better on the task at hand? There would be no new stockings when these ones tore beyond repair. Fingers trembling she turned them over and over, running her finger-tips lightly across the surface.
All seemed in order; it had been a narrow escape. Saffy let out the sigh she’d been holding, and yet she wasn’t wholly relieved. She met her pink-cheeked reflection in the mirror and held it: there was more at stake here than the last remaining pair of stockings. When she and Percy were girls they’d had plenty of opportunity to observe adults up close and what they saw had mystified them. The ancient grotesques behaved, for the most part, as if they’d no inkling at all that they were old. This perplexed the twins, who agreed that there was nothing so unseemly as an old person who refused to acknowledge his or her limitations, and they’d made a pact never to let it happen to them. When they were old, they swore, they would jolly well act the part. ‘But how will we know?’ Saffy had said, dazzled by the existential knot at the question’s core. ‘Perhaps it’s one of those things, like sunburn, that can’t be felt until it’s too late to do anything about it.’ Percy had agreed on the problem’s tricksy nature, sitting quietly with her arms wrapped around her knees as she gave herself over to its consideration. Ever the pragmatist, she’d reached a solution first, saying slowly, ‘I suppose we must make a list of things that old people do – three ought to be enough. And when we find ourselves doing them, then we’ll know.’
Gathering the candidate habits had been simple – there was a lifetime’s observation of Daddy and Nanny to consult; more difficult was limiting their number to three. After much deliberation they’d settled on those leaving least room for equivocation: first, professing strong and repeated preference for England when Queen Victoria was on the throne; second, mentioning one’s health in any company other than that which included a medical professional; and third, failure to put on one’s undergarments whilst standing.
Saffy groaned, remembering that very morning when she’d been making up the bed in the guest chamber and caught herself detailing her lower-back pain to Lucy. The conversation’s topic had warranted the description and she’d been prepared to let it slide, but now this: felled by a pair of stockings? The prognosis was dismal indeed.
Percy had almost made it safely to the back door when Saffy finally appeared, gliding down the stairs as if she had nothing in the world to answer for. ‘Hello there, sister mine,’ she said. ‘Save any lives today?’
Percy inhaled. She needed time, space and a sharp swinging implement in order to clear her head and exorcise her anger. Otherwise, she was as likely as not to hurl it. ‘Four kittens from a drain and a clump of Edinburgh rock.’
‘Oh, well! Victory all round. Marvellous work indeed! – Shall we have a cup of tea?’
‘I’m going to chop some wood.’
‘Darling – ’ Saffy came a step closer – ‘I think that’s rather unnecessary.’
‘Better sooner than later. It’s about to pour with rain.’
‘I understand that,’ said Saffy, with exaggerated calm, ‘but I’m quite sure we’ve sufficient in the pile. Indeed, after your efforts this month, I estimate we’re set until approximately 1960. Why don’t you take yourself upstairs instead, get dressed for dinner – ’ Saffy paused as a loud noise sheeted from one side of the castle’s roof to the other – ‘there now, saved by the rain!’
Some days even the weather could be counted on to take the other side. Percy pulled out her tobacco and started rolling a cigarette. Without looking up she said, ‘Why did you ask her here?’
‘Who?’
A hard stare.
‘Oh that.’ Saffy waved her hand vaguely. ‘Clara’s mother was taken ill, Millie’s as daft as ever and you’re always so jolly busy: it was simply too much for me on my own. Besides, there’s no one who can sweet-talk Agatha quite like Lucy.’
‘You’ve done all right in the past.’
‘Darling of you to say so, Percy dear, but you know Aggie. I wouldn’t put it past her to cut out tonight, just to spite me. Ever since I let the milk boil over she’s held a mighty grudge.’
‘She’s – it’s – an oven, Seraphina.’
‘My point exactly! Who’d have thought her capable of such a ghastly temperament?’
Percy was being managed; she could feel it. The affected lightness in her sister’s voice, being cut off at the pass on her way to the back door, then shooed upstairs where she was willing to bet a dress – something wretchedly fancy – had already been laid out for her: it was as if Saffy feared she couldn’t be trusted to maintain civility in company. The suggestion made Percy want to roar, but such a reaction would only confirm her sister’s concerns, so she didn’t. Swallowing the urge, she dampened her paper and sealed the cigarette.
‘Anyway,’ Saffy continued, ‘Lucy’s been a darling, and with nothing decent to roast I decided we needed whatever help we could get.’
‘Nothing to roast?’ said Percy breezily. ‘Last I looked there were eight contenders fattening up nicely in the bird-house.’
Saffy drew breath. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I dream of drumsticks.’
A gratifying tremor had insinuated itself into Saffy’s voice, travelling all the way down to the tip of her pointed finger: ‘My girls are good little providers; they are not dinner. I will not have you looking at them and thinking of gravy. Why, it’s… it’s barbarous.’
There were a great many things Percy wanted to say, but as she stood there in the dank corridor, rain pounding the earth on the other side of the stone wall, her twin sister standing before her, shifting uncomfortably on the stair – hips and stomach stretching her old green dress in all the wrong places – Percy glimpsed the thread of time and all their various disappointments along it. It formed a block against which her present frustration slammed, concertinaing behind. She was the dominant twin, she always had been, and no matter how angry Saffy made her, fighting subverted some basic principle of the universe.
‘Perce?’ Saffy’s voice still trembled. ‘Do I need to put my girls under guard?’
‘You should have told me,’ Percy said with a short sigh, snatching the matches from her pocket. ‘That’s all. You should have told me about Lucy.’
‘I wish you’d just put the whole thing behind you, Perce. For your own sake. Servants have done worse to their employers than leave them. It’s not as if we found her with her fingers in the silver drawer.’
‘You should have told me.’ Percy’s throat ached as she spoke. She fumbled a single match from the deck.
‘If it matters so much, I won’t ask her back. For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine she’ll put up much argument; she struck me as rather keen to avoid your society. I think you frighten her.’
A snap as the matchstick broke between Percy’s fingers.
‘Oh, Perce – now look, you’re bleeding.’
‘It’s nothing.’ She wiped it on her trousers.
‘Not on your clothing, not blood, it’s impossible to clean.’ Saffy held up a crumpled item of clothing she’d brought with her from upstairs. ‘In case you failed to notice, the laundry staff left us some time ago. I’m all that’s left, boiling and stirring and scouring.’
Percy rubbed at the bloodstain on her leg, smudging it further.
Saffy sighed. ‘Leave your trousers for now; I’ll see to them. Go on upstairs, darling, and make yourself tidy.’
‘Yes.’ Percy was looking at her finger in mild surprise.
‘You put on a nice party frock and I’ll put on the kettle. Make us a pot of tea. Better yet, I’ll fix us a cocktail, shall I? It is a celebration, after all.’
Celebration was taking it a bit far, but Percy’s fight had left her. ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Good idea.’
‘Bring your trousers down to the kitchen when you’re done; I’ll put them in to soak right away.’
Percy clenched and unclenched her hand as she started slowly up the stairs, and then she stopped and turned. ‘I almost forgot,’ she said, taking the typed envelope from her bag. ‘A letter for you in today’s post.’
Saffy hid inside the butler’s pantry to read the letter. She’d known immediately what it would be and it had taken all her efforts to conceal her excitement from Percy. She’d snatched at the envelope, then stood watch at the bottom of the stairs, making sure her sister didn’t suffer a last-minute change of heart and head for the woodpile instead. Only when she’d heard Percy’s bedroom door close behind her had she finally allowed herself to relax. She’d all but lost hope that a reply would ever come and, now that it had, she almost wished it hadn’t. The anticipation, the tyranny of the unknown, was nearly too much to bear.
Downstairs in the kitchen, she hurried into the windowless butler’s pantry, which had once swollen with the indomitable presence of Mr Broad but now contained little more to evidence his reign of terror than the desk and a wooden cabinet of old, impossibly tedious daily records. Saffy pulled the string that fired the light bulb and leaned against the desk. Her fingers turned to thumbs as she fumbled with the envelope.
Without her letter opener, which was sitting in its cradle on her writing desk upstairs, Saffy had to resort to tearing the envelope open. Which she didn’t like doing and therefore did as neatly as possible, almost enjoying the prolonged agony such extreme caution brought. She slipped the folded paper from within – very fine paper, she noted; cotton fibre, embossed, warm white – and, with a deep breath, opened it out flat. Eyes scanning quickly, she drank in the letter’s meaning, then went back to the beginning again, forcing herself to read more slowly, to believe what she was seeing, as incredible joyous lightness of being spread from deep within her body, turning even the outermost tips of her fingers to stardust.
She’d first glimpsed the advertisement in The Times when she was leafing through the lettings. Female companion and governess sought to accompany Lady Dartington and her three children to America for the duration of the war, it had read. Educated, unmarried, cultured, experienced with children. The advertisement might have been written with Saffy in mind. Though she had no children of her own, it was certainly not for lack of desire. There had been a time when her future thoughts had been filled – surely like most women’s? – with babies. It seemed they were not to be had, however, without a husband, and therein lay the sticking point. As to the other criteria, Saffy was quite confident she could claim without immodesty to possess both education and culture. So, she’d set out immediately to win the position, composing a letter of introduction, including a pair of splendid references, and putting together an application demonstrating Seraphina Blythe to be the ideal candidate. And then she’d waited, trying as best she could to keep her dreams of New York City to herself. Having long ago learned that there was no point ruffling Percy’s feathers unnecessarily, she hadn’t mentioned the position to her twin, allowing her mind to fill privately, and vividly, with possibilities. She’d imagined the journey in rather embarrassing detail, casting herself as a sort of latter-day Molly Brown, keeping the Dartington children’s spirits buoyed as they braved the U-boats en route for the great American port…
Telling Percy would be the hardest part; she wasn’t going to be pleased, and as to what would become of her, marching the corridors alone, mending walls and chopping wood, forgetting to bathe or launder or bake – well, it didn’t bear thought. This letter, though, this offer of employment Saffy held in her hand, was her chance and she wasn’t about to let a bad habit of sentiment stop her from taking it. Like Adele, in her novel, she was going to ‘seize life by the throat and force it to meet her eyes’ – Saffy was very proud of that line.
She closed the pantry door quietly behind her and noticed immediately that the oven was steaming. In all the excitement she’d almost forgotten the pie! What a thing! She’d be lucky if the pastry weren’t burnt to a cinder.
Saffy slid on her oven mitts and squinted inside, breathing a great sigh of relief when she saw that the pie’s top, though golden, was not yet brown. She shifted it into the bottom oven, where the temperature was lower and it could sit without spoiling, then stood to leave.
And that’s when she saw that Percy’s stained uniform trousers had joined her own pinafore on the kitchen table. Why, they must have been deposited when Saffy was in the pantry. What luck that Percy hadn’t discovered her reading the letter.
Saffy gave the trousers a shake. Monday was her official washing day, but it was just as well to leave the clothes to steep a while, especially where Percy’s uniform was concerned; the number and variety of stains Percy managed to collect would’ve been impressive if they weren’t so jolly difficult to remove. Still, Saffy enjoyed a challenge. She stuck her hand into first one pocket, then the other, in search of forgotten odds and sods that would spoil her load. And it was just as well she did.
Saffy pulled out the pieces of paper – goodness, such a number! – and laid them beside her on the work top. She shook her head wearily; she’d lost count of how many times she’d tried to train Percy to clear her pockets before putting clothes out for laundering.
But how strange – Saffy shifted the shreds about with her finger, located one with a stamp. It was, or had been once, a letter, torn now into pieces.
But why would Percy do such a thing? And who was the letter from?
A slamming noise above and Saffy’s gaze swung to the ceiling. Footsteps, another slam.
The front door! Juniper had arrived. Or was it him, the fellow from London?
Saffy glanced again at the tattered pieces of paper, chewed the inside of her cheek. Here was a mystery, and one she needed to resolve. But not now; there simply wasn’t time. She needed to be upstairs, to see Juniper and to greet their guest; Lord only knew what Percy’s state was now. Perhaps the torn letter would shed some light on her sister’s foul mood of late.
With a short nod of decision, Saffy concealed her own secret letter carefully beneath her bodice and stashed the pieces she’d pulled from Percy’s pocket under a saucepan lid. She would investigate properly later.
And, with a last check of the rabbit pie, she straightened her dress about the bust, discouraged it from clinging quite so closely to her middle, and started upstairs.
Perhaps Percy only imagined the rotting odour? It had been an unfortunate phantom lately; it turned out there were some things, once smelled, that could never be escaped. They hadn’t been in the good parlour for over six months, not since Daddy’s funeral, and despite her sister’s best efforts a musty edge still clung. The table had been pulled into the centre of the room, right atop the Bessarabian rug, then laid with Grandmother’s finest dinner service, four glasses apiece, and a carefully printed menu at each place. Percy picked one up for closer inspection, noted that parlour games were scheduled and put it down again.
A jolt of memory took her back to a shelter she’d found herself in during the first weeks of the Blitz, when a planned visit to Daddy’s solicitor in Folkestone had been scotched by Hitler’s fighters. The forced gaiety, the songs, the horrid, acrid smell of fear…
Percy shut her eyes then and saw him. The figure dressed all in black, who’d appeared midway through the bombing and leaned, unnoticed, against the wall, speaking to no one. Head deeply bowed beneath his dark, dark hat. Percy had watched him, fascinated by the way he stood somehow outside the others. He’d looked up only once, just before he gathered his coat around him and walked out into the blazing night. His eyes had met her own, briefly, and she’d seen nothing inside them. No compassion, no fear, no determination; just a cold emptiness. She’d known then that he was Death and she’d thought of him plenty since. When she was working a shift, climbing into bomb craters, pulling bodies from within, she’d remember the ghastly, otherworldly calm he’d carried wrapped around him as he strode from the shelter out into the chaos. She’d signed up with the ambulances soon after their encounter, but it wasn’t bravery that drove her, it wasn’t that at all: it was simply easier to take one’s chances with Death on the flaming surface than to remain trapped beneath the shaking, moaning earth with nothing but desperate cheer and helpless fear for company…
There was an inch or so of amber liquid in the bottom of the decanter and Percy wondered vaguely when it had been put there. Years ago, certainly – they used the bottles in the yellow parlour for themselves these days – but it hardly mattered, liquor was the better for ageing. With a glance over her shoulder, Percy dropped a shot into a glass, then doubled it. Rattled the crystal stopper back into place as she took a swig. And another. Something in the middle of her chest burned and she welcomed the ache. It was vivid and real and she was standing here right now feeling it.
Footsteps. High-heeled. Distant but ticking rapidly along the stones towards her. Saffy.
Months of anxiety balled up like a leaden weight in Percy’s gut. She needed to take herself in hand. There was nothing to be gained by ruining Saffy’s evening – Lord knew, her twin had little enough opportunity to exercise her zest for entertaining. Oh, but Percy felt giddy at the ease with which she might. A sensation similar to that when a person stands right on the precipice overlooking a great height, when the knowledge that one must not jump is so strong that an odd compulsion almost overtakes one, whispering that to jump is the very thing that must be done.
God she was a hopeless case. There was something fundamentally broken at the heart of Percy Blythe, something queer and defective and utterly unlikable. That she should contemplate, even for a second, the ease with which she might deprive her sister, her infuriating, beloved twin, of happiness. Had she always been so mired in perversity? Percy sighed deeply. She was ill, clearly, and it wasn’t a recent condition. Throughout their lives it had been thus: the more enthusiasm Saffy showed for a person or an object or an idea, the less Percy was able to give. It was as if they were one being, split into two, and there was a limit to the amount of combined feeling they could exhibit at any one time. And at some point, for some reason, Percy had appointed herself the balance keeper: if Saffy were anguished, Percy opted for glib merriment; if Saffy were excited, Percy did her best to douse it with sarcasm. How bloody cheerless she was.
The gramophone had been opened and cleaned and a pile of records stacked beside it. Percy picked one up, a new album sent by Juniper from London. Obtained God knew where and by what means; Juniper, it might be guessed, had her ways. Music would surely help. She dropped the needle and Billie Holiday started to croon. Percy exhaled, whisky warm. That was better: contemporary music without previous associations. Many years ago, decades before, during one of the Blythe Family Evenings, Daddy had given the word ‘nostalgia’ in a challenge. He’d read out the definition, ‘an acute homesickness for the past’, and Percy had thought, with the gauche certainty of the young, what a very strange concept it was. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would seek to re-inhabit the past when the future was where all the mystery lay.
Percy drained her glass, tilted it idly this way and that, watching the remaining droplets congeal into a single entity. It was the meeting with Lucy that had her nerves prickling, she knew that, but a pall had spread across all the day’s events and Percy found her thoughts drawn back again to Mrs Potts in the post office. Her suspicions, her insistence almost, that Juniper was engaged to be married. Gossip attached itself to Juniper, but it was Percy’s experience that where rumour nested there was always a shred of truth. Though not in this case, surely.
Behind her, the door sighed as it was opened and a cooler gust crept in from the passage.
‘Well?’ came her sister’s breathless voice. ‘Where is she? I heard the door.’
If Juniper were to speak of private matters it would be to Saffy. Percy tapped the rim of her glass thoughtfully.
‘Is she upstairs already?’ Saffy’s voice dropped to a whisper as she said, ‘Or was it him? What’s he like? Where is he?’
Percy straightened her shoulders. If she expected any cooperation from Saffy she needed to offer an unreserved mea culpa. ‘They’re not here yet,’ she said, turning to her twin and smiling – she hoped – guilelessly.
‘They’re late.’
‘Only a little.’
Saffy had that look, the transparent, nervy face she used to wear when they were children putting on plays for Daddy’s friends and no one had yet arrived to fill out the chairs for the audience. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘I could have sworn I heard the door-’
‘Check under the chairs if you like,’ said Percy lightly. ‘There’s no one else here. It was just the shutter you heard, the one on the window over there. It came loose in the storm, but I fixed it.’ She nodded at the wrench on the sill.
Saffy’s eyes widened as she took in the wet marks on the front of Percy’s dress. ‘It’s a special dinner, Perce. Juniper will-’
‘Neither notice nor care,’ Percy finished. ‘Come on now. Forget about my dress. You look good enough for both of us. Sit down, won’t you? I’ll make us a drink while we wait.’
Given that neither Juniper nor her gentleman friend had arrived, what Saffy really wanted to do was scurry back downstairs, put the pieces of torn letter back together, and learn Percy’s secret. To find her twin in such placatory spirits, though, was an unexpected boon and one she couldn’t afford to squander. Not tonight, not with Juniper and the special guest expected any minute. On that note, it was as well to remain as close as possible to the front door, all the better to catch Juniper alone when she finally arrived. ‘Thank you,’ she said, accepting the proffered glass, taking a healthy sip to signal goodwill.
‘So,’ said Percy, returning to perch on the edge of the gramophone table, ‘how was your day?’
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might have said. Percy, as a rule, did not peddle in small talk. Saffy hid behind another sip of her drink and decided it was wise to proceed with extreme caution. She fluttered her hand and said, ‘Oh, fine. Although I did fall over putting on my underwear.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Percy, with a genuine crack of laughter.
‘I most certainly did; I’ve got the bruise to prove it. I’ll see every colour of the rainbow before it’s gone.’ Saffy prodded her bottom delicately, shifting her weight as she sat on the end of the chaise longue. ‘I suppose that means I’m getting old.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Oh?’ Saffy perked up slightly, despite herself. ‘Do tell?’
‘Simple. I was born first; technically I’ll always be older than you are.’
‘Yes, I know, but I don’t see-’
‘And I can assure you I’ve never so much as teetered when getting dressed. Even during a raid.’
‘Hmm…’ Saffy frowned, considering. ‘I see your point. Shall we ascribe my misadventure to a momentary lapse then, unrelated to age?’
‘I expect we must; to do otherwise would be to script our own demise.’ It had been one of Daddy’s favourite expressions, uttered in the face of many and varied obstacles, and they both smiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ Percy continued. ‘About before, on the stairs.’ She struck a match and lit her cigarette. ‘I didn’t mean to quarrel.’
‘Let’s blame the war, shall we?’ Saffy said, twisting to avoid the oncoming smoke. ‘Everybody else does. Tell me, what’s new in the big, wide world?’
‘Not a lot. Lord Beaverbrook’s talking about tanks for the Russians; there’s no fish to be had in the village; and it appears that Mrs Caraway’s daughter is expecting.’
Saffy inhaled greedily. ‘No!’
‘Yes.’
‘But she’d be what, fifteen?’
‘Fourteen.’
Saffy leaned closer. ‘A soldier was it?’
‘Pilot.’
‘Well, well.’ She shook her head dazedly. ‘And Mrs Caraway such a pillar. How terrible.’ It didn’t pass beneath Saffy’s notice that Percy was smirking around her cigarette, almost as if she suspected her twin of enjoying Mrs Caraway’s misfortune. Which she was, a little, but only because the woman was an eternal bossy-breeches who picked fault with everybody and everything including, word had made its way to the castle, Saffy’s very own stitching. ‘What?’ she said, flushing. ‘It is terrible.’
‘But not surprising though,’ said Percy, tapping away ash. ‘Girls these days and their missing morals.’
‘Things are different since the war,’ Saffy agreed. ‘I’ve seen it in the letters to the editor. Girls playing up while their husbands are away, having babies out of wedlock. It seems they barely have to know a fellow and they’re walking down the aisle.’
‘Not our Juniper though.’
Saffy’s skin cooled. There it was, the snag she’d been waiting for: Percy knew. Somehow she knew about Juniper’s love affair. That explained the sudden lightening of mood; this was a fishing expedition, a sneaky one, and Saffy had been caught on a hook threaded with tasty village gossip. Mortifying. ‘Of course not,’ she said as smoothly as she could manage. ‘Juniper’s not like that.’
‘Of course not.’ They sat for a moment, each regarding the other, matching smiles applied to matching faces, sipping their drinks. Saffy’s heart was ticking louder than Daddy’s favourite clock and she wondered that Percy couldn’t hear it; she knew now what it was to be an insect in a web, awaiting the great spider’s approach.
‘Although,’ Percy said, dropping ash into the crystal tray, ‘I did hear something funny today. In the village.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’
Silence stretched uneasily between them as Percy smoked and Saffy concentrated on biting her tongue. How maddening it was, not to mention underhanded: her own twin, using her predilection for local chatter in hopes of tempting her to give away her secrets. Well, she refused to fall into line: what did Saffy need with Percy’s village gossip anyway? She already knew the truth: it was she, after all, who had read Juniper’s journal, and she wasn’t about to be tricked into sharing its contents with Percy.
With as much poise as she could muster, Saffy stood, straightened her dress, and began an inspection of the table’s setting, aligning knives and forks with assiduous care. She even managed to hum mindlessly beneath her breath and affect a small, blameless smile. Which was a comfort of sorts when the doubts came creeping from the shadows.
That Juniper had a lover was surprising, certainly, and it had been hurtful to Saffy not to have been told, but the fact itself didn’t change things. Did it? Not things that Percy cared about; not things that mattered. Surely nothing ill could come from Saffy keeping the news to herself? Juniper had a lover, that was all. She was a young woman, it was natural; a small matter and one that was bound to be temporary. Like all of Juniper’s various fascinations, this fellow would fade and thin and be blown away on the same breeze that brought the next attraction.
Outside, the wind had picked up and the claws of the cherry tree scratched against the loose shutter. Saffy shivered, though she was not cold; her own small movement was caught by the mirror above the hearth and she glanced to meet herself. It was a grand mirror, gilt framed, and hung on a chain from a hook at great height. It leaned, therefore, away from the wall, angling towards the ground, and the effect as Saffy looked up, was of the glass glaring down, foreshortening her like a stumpy green dwarf beneath its thumb. She sighed, short and unintentional, alone suddenly and tired of obfuscating. She was about to look away, to return her attention to the table, when she noticed Percy, hunched on the mirror’s glass rim, smoking as she watched the green dwarf at its centre. Not merely watched, scrutinized. Searching for evidence, for confirmation of something she already suspected.
The realization that she was being observed made Saffy’s pulse quicken and she had the sudden urge to speak, to fill the room with conversation, with noise. She drew a short, cool breath and began. ‘Juniper’s late, of course, and I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised; no doubt it’s the weather keeping her, some sort of holdup on the line; she was due off the five forty-five, and even allowing for the bus from the village I’d have expected her home by now… I do hope she packed an umbrella, only you know what she’s like when it comes to-’
‘Juniper’s engaged,’ Percy interrupted sharply. ‘That’s what they’re saying. That she’s engaged.’
The entrée knife clinked high and metallic against its mate. Saffy’s lips parted, she blinked: ‘Pardon, dearest?’
‘To be married. Juniper’s engaged to be married.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. Of course she’s not.’ Saffy was genuinely stunned. ‘Juniper?’ She laughed a little, a tinny sound. ‘Married? Wherever did you hear such a thing?’
A stream of smoky exhalation.
‘Well? Who’s been talking such nonsense?’
Percy was busy rescuing a piece of stray tobacco from her bottom lip and for a moment said nothing. She frowned instead at the speck on her fingertip. Finally, she flicked her hand on its way to the ashtray. ‘It was probably nothing. I was just in the post office and-’
‘Ha!’ said Saffy, with rather more triumph than was perhaps warranted. Relief, too, that Percy’s gossip was just that: village talk with no grounding in truth. ‘I might have known. That Potts woman! Really, she’s an utter menace. We must all be thankful that she hasn’t turned her loose talk yet to matters of state.’
‘You don’t believe it then?’ Percy’s voice was woody, no modulation at all.
‘Of course I don’t believe it.’
‘Juniper hasn’t said anything to you?’
‘Not a word.’ Saffy came to where Percy was sitting, reached out and touched her sister’s arm. ‘Really, Percy dear. Can you imagine Juniper as a bride? Dressed all in white lace; agreeing to love and obey somebody else as long as they both shall live?’
The cigarette lay withered and lifeless in the ashtray now, and Percy steepled her fingers beneath her chin. Then she smiled slightly, lifting her shoulders, settling them again, shaking the notion away. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Silly gossip, nothing more. I only wondered…’ But what precisely she wondered, Percy let taper to its own conclusion.
Although there was no music playing, the gramophone needle was still tracing dutifully around the record’s centre and Saffy put it out of its misery, lifting it back to the cradle. She was about to excuse herself to check on the rabbit pie, when Percy said, ‘Juniper would have told us. If it were true; she would’ve told us.’
Saffy’s cheeks warmed, remembering the journal on the floor upstairs, the shock of its most recent entry, the hurt at having been kept in the dark.
‘Saffy?’
‘Certainly,’ she said quickly. ‘People do, don’t they? They tell each other things like that.’
‘Yes.’
‘Especially their sisters.’
‘Yes.’
And it was true. Keeping a love affair secret was one thing, an engagement quite another. Even Juniper, Saffy felt sure, would not be so blind to the feelings of others, the ramifications that such a decision would have.
‘Still,’ said Percy, ‘we should speak with her. Remind her that Daddy-’
‘Isn’t here,’ Saffy finished gently. ‘He isn’t here, Percy. We’re all of us free now to do exactly as we please.’ To leave Milderhurst behind, to set sail for the glamour and excitement of New York City and never look back.
‘No.’ Percy said it so sharply that Saffy worried for a moment that she’d spoken her intentions out loud. ‘Not free, not completely. We each of us have duties towards the others. Juniper understands that; she knows that marriage-’
‘Perce-’
‘Those were Daddy’s wishes. His conditions.’
Percy’s eyes were searching her own and Saffy realized it was the first time in months that she’d had the opportunity to study her twin’s face so closely; she saw that her sister wore new lines. She was smoking a lot and worrying, and no doubt the war itself was taking its toll, but whatever the cause the woman sitting before her was no longer young. Neither was she old, and Saffy understood suddenly – though surely she had known it before? – that there was something, some place, in between. And that they were both in it. Maidens no more, but a way yet from being crones.
‘Daddy knew what he was doing.’
‘Of course, darling,’ Saffy said tenderly. Why hadn’t she noticed them before – all those women in the great in-between? They were not invisible surely, they were merely going about their business quietly, doing what women did when they were no longer young but not yet old. Keeping neat houses, wiping tears from their children’s cheeks, darning the holes in their husband’s socks. And suddenly Saffy understood why Percy was behaving this way, almost as if she were jealous of the possibility that Juniper, who was only eighteen, might some day marry. That she still had her entire adult life ahead of her. She understood, too, why tonight of all nights Percy should lose herself in such sentimental thoughts. Though driven by concern for Juniper, motivated by gossip in the village, it was the encounter with Lucy that had her behaving this way. Saffy was drenched then by a wave of crashing affection for her stoic twin, a wave so strong it threatened to leave her breathless. ‘We were unlucky, weren’t we, Perce?’
Percy looked up from the cigarette she was rolling. ‘What’s that?’
‘The two of us. We were unfortunate when it came to matters of the heart.’
Percy considered her. ‘I shouldn’t think that luck had much to do with it. A basic matter of mathematics, wasn’t it?’
Saffy smiled; it was just as the governess who replaced Nanny had told them, right before she went away, returning to Norway to marry her widower cousin. She’d taken them for a lesson by the lake, her habit when she wasn’t in the mood for teaching but wanted to escape Mr Broad’s scrutiny; she’d looked up from where she was sunning herself to say, in that lazy, accented manner of hers, eyes glinting with malicious pleasure, that they’d do well to put all thought of marriage aside; that the same Great War that had wounded their father had also killed their chances. The thirteen-year-old twins had merely stared blankly, an expression they’d perfected, knowing it drove adults to agitation. What did they care? Marriage and suitors were the last things on their minds back then.
Saffy said softly, ‘Well, that’s a sorry luck of sorts, isn’t it? To have all one’s future husbands die on the French battlefields?’
‘How many were you planning on having?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Husbands. You said, “To have all one’s future”…’ Percy lit her cigarette and waved her hand. ‘Never mind,’ she said.
‘Only one.’ Saffy felt suddenly light-headed. ‘There was only one I wanted.’
The silence that followed was agonizing and Percy, at least, had the dignity to look uncomfortable. She didn’t say anything though, offered no words of comfort or understanding, no kind gestures, merely pinched the tip of her cigarette, sending it to sleep, and made for the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘A headache. It’s come on quickly.’
‘Sit down then; I’ll fetch you a couple of aspirin.’
‘No – ’ Percy refused to meet Saffy’s gaze – ‘no, I’ll fetch them myself from the medicine box. The walk will do me good.’
Percy hurried along the hallway, wondering how she could have been so bloody stupid. She’d meant to burn the pieces of Emily’s letter immediately, and instead she’d allowed the encounter with Lucy to flummox her so that she’d left them in her pocket. Worse yet, she’d delivered them directly to Saffy, the very person from whom the correspondence must be kept concealed. Percy drummed down the stairs, through the door and into the steam-filled kitchen. When, she wondered, might she have remembered the letter herself, if not for Saffy’s allusion to Emily’s husband, Matthew, just now? Was it too premature to lament the loss of her reliable mind; to wonder at the sorts of demonic deals she’d have to make to get it back?
Percy stopped abruptly before the table. Her trousers were no longer where she’d left them. Her heart lurched, a hammer against her ribs; she forced it back inside its cage where it belonged. Panic would not help; besides, this wasn’t of itself a terrible thing. Percy was quite sure Saffy hadn’t yet read the letter: her manner upstairs had been far too measured, too calm, for it to be otherwise. For, dear God, if Saffy knew that Percy was still in touch with their cousin, there’d be no masking that tantrum. Which meant all was not yet lost. Find the trousers, remove the evidence, and everything would be all right.
There had been a dress on the table too, she remembered, which meant there was a pile of laundry somewhere. How difficult could that be to find? More difficult, certainly, than if she had the vaguest notion how laundry was done, but unfortunately Percy had never paid much attention to Saffy’s housekeeping routine, an oversight she promised silently to amend just as soon as the letter was safely in her possession. She began with the baskets on the shelf beneath the table, rummaging through tea towels and baking trays, saucepans and rolling pins, one ear trained on the stairs in case Saffy should come searching. Which was unlikely, surely? With Juniper already late, Saffy would be loath to venture far from the front door. Percy wanted to get back there herself: as soon as Juniper arrived she intended to ask plainly about Mrs Potts’s rumour.
For although Percy had gone along with her twin’s certainty that Juniper, if engaged, would have told them the news, in reality she had no such confidence. It was the sort of thing that people did tell one another, that was true enough, but Juniper wasn’t like other people: she was beloved but she was also undeniably singular. And it wasn’t only the lost time, the episodes: this was the little girl who’d comforted herself by rubbing objects on her naked eyeball – smooth stones, the end of Cook’s rolling pin, Daddy’s favourite fountain pen; who’d driven away countless nannies with her incurable obstinacy and refusal to abandon imaginary cohorts; who, on the rare occasions she was induced to wear shoes, insisted on wearing them wrong-footed.
Oddness, of itself, was of no concern to Percy: as the family argument went, which person of value didn’t have a good pinch of strangeness in them? Daddy had his ghosts, Saffy had her panics, Percy herself made no claims on the pedestrian. No, oddness was neither here nor there; Percy cared only about doing her duty: protecting Juniper from herself. Daddy had given her the task. Juniper was special, he’d said, and it was up to all of them to keep her safe. And they had, so far, they had. They’d become expert at recognizing occasions when the very aspects that fuelled her talent were at risk of tipping over into fearsome rage. Daddy, when he was alive, had allowed her to rampage without restraint: ‘It’s passion,’ he’d said, admiration burnishing his voice, ‘unaffected, unbridled passion.’ But he’d made sure to talk to his lawyers. Percy had been surprised when she’d first discovered what he’d done; her immediate reaction had been the heat of betrayal, the sibling’s mantra of ‘It isn’t fair!’, but she’d soon enough come to heel. She’d understood that Daddy was right, that what he proposed would work out best for all of them. And she adored Juniper, they all did. There was nothing Percy wouldn’t do for her baby sister.
A noise from upstairs and Percy froze, scrutinizing the ceiling. The castle was full of noises so it was a matter of sorting through the usual suspects. Too loud for the caretakers, surely? There it was again. Footsteps, she figured; but were they getting closer? Was Saffy coming downstairs? A long, breath-held moment in which Percy remained absolutely still; motionless until she was satisfied, finally, that the footsteps were moving away.
She stood up then, carefully, and scanned the kitchen with rather more desperation than she had before; still no sign of the bloody laundry. Brooms and a mop in the corner, wellington boots by the back door, the sink containing nothing more than soaking bowls, and on the stovetop a saucepan and a pot-
A pot! Of course. Surely she’d heard Saffy talking before about pots and washing, right before the topic turned to immovable stains and a lecture on Percy’s own lack of care. Percy hurried to the stove, peered inside the large steel container, and bingo! What relief – the trousers.
With a grin, she heaved out the sodden uniform, twisted it back and forth to find the collapsed pockets and squirrelled her hand into first one, then the other…
Blood drained instantly from her face: the pockets were empty. The letter was gone.
More noise from upstairs: footsteps again; Saffy pacing. Percy swore under her breath, berated herself again for her stupidity, then shut the hell up as she tracked her sister’s whereabouts.
The footsteps were coming nearer. Then there was a banging sound. The footsteps changed direction. Percy strained harder. Was someone at the door?
Silence. In particular, no urgent call from Saffy. Which meant no one had knocked, for one thing was certain – Percy’s absence would not be tolerated once guests arrived.
Perhaps it was the shutter again; she’d only tapped it lightly back into place with the small wrench – without a tool set handy there’d been little else she could do – and it was still blowing a gale outside. Add that to the list of things to mend tomorrow.
Percy took a deep breath and let out a dispirited sigh. She watched the trousers sink back into the pot. It was after eight o’clock, Juniper was already late, the letter could be anywhere. Maybe – her spirits lifted – Saffy had taken it for rubbish? It was torn, after all; perhaps the letter had already been burned, and was little more now than ashes in the Aga.
Short of running a fine-tooth comb over the entire house, or asking Saffy directly what had become of it – Percy winced just to imagine that conversation – she couldn’t see that there was anything more she could do. Which meant she might as well go back upstairs and wait for Juniper.
A great crash of thunder then, loud enough that even in the bowels of the house Percy shivered. In its wake, another, softer noise, closer. Outside perhaps, almost like someone scratching along the wall, hammering periodically, looking for the back door.
Juniper’s guest was due about now.
It was possible, Percy supposed, that a person unfamiliar with the castle, approaching it by night, during the blackout, in the midst of a great rain storm, might find themselves seeking entrance elsewhere than the front door. Slim though the possibility was, once she’d considered it Percy knew she had to check. She couldn’t jolly well leave him floundering out there.
Stitching her lips tight, she took a last glance about the kitchen – dry pantry goods ready for use on the bench, a scrunched tea towel, a saucepan lid: nothing even resembling a stack of torn paper – then she dug the battery torch from the emergency kit, pulled a mackintosh over her dress, and opened the back door.
Juniper was almost two hours late and Saffy was officially worried. Oh, she knew it was bound to be a delay on the train line, a punctured bus tyre, a roadblock, something ordinary, and certainly there’d be no enemy planes complicating matters on a sodden night like this; nonetheless, sensible reasoning had no place in the worries of a big sister. Until Juniper walked through that front door, life and limbs intact, a significant part of Saffy’s mind would remain encased by fear.
And what news, she wondered with a nibble on her bottom lip, would her baby sister bring with her when she did, finally, spill across the threshold? Saffy had believed it when she’d reassured Percy that Juniper wasn’t engaged to be married, she really had, but in the time since Percy had disappeared so abruptly, leaving her alone in the good parlour, she’d grown less and less certain. The doubts had started when she’d joked about the dubious spectacle of Juniper in white lace. Even as Percy was nodding agreement, the frou-frou image that had flashed into Saffy’s mind was undergoing transmutation – a reflection in rippling water – into another, far less unlikely vision. One Saffy already held within her imagination and had done since she’d started work on the dress upstairs.
From there, the pieces had fallen quickly into place. Why else had Juniper asked her to alter the dress? Not for something as ordinary as a dinner, but for a wedding. Her own wedding, to this Thomas Cavill who was coming tonight to meet them. A man they hitherto had known nothing about. Indeed, the extent of their knowledge now was limited to the letter Juniper had sent advising that she’d invited him to dinner. They’d met during an air raid, they shared a mutual friend, he was a teacher and a writer; Saffy racked her brains to remember the rest, the precise words Juniper had used, the turn of phrase that had left them with the impression that the gentleman in question had been responsible, in some way, for saving her life. Had they imagined that detail, she wondered? Or was it one of Juniper’s creative untruths, an embellishment designed to predispose their sympathies?
There had been a little more about him in the journal, but that information was not in a biographical vein. What had been written there were the feelings, the desires, the longings of a grown woman. A woman Saffy didn’t recognize, of whom she felt shy; a woman who was becoming worldly. And if Saffy found the transition difficult to reconcile herself to, Percy was going to need a great deal of coaxing. As far as her twin was concerned, Juniper would always be the baby sister who’d come along when they were almost fully grown, the little girl who needed spoiling and protecting. Whose spirits could be lifted, her loyalties won, with nothing more weighty than a bag of sweets.
Saffy smiled with sad fondness for her barnacled twin, who was, no doubt, even at this minute, arming herself so that their father’s wishes might be respected. Poor, dear Percy: intelligent in so many ways, courageous and kind, tougher than leather, yet unable ever to unshackle herself from Daddy’s impossible expectations. Saffy knew better; she’d stopped trying to please Himself a long time ago.
She shivered, cold suddenly, and rubbed her hands together. Then she crossed her arms, determined to find steel within them. Saffy needed to be strong for Juniper now; it was her turn. For she could understand, where Percy would not, the burden of romantic passion.
The door sucked open and Percy was there. A draught pulled the door closed with a slam behind her. ‘It’s bucketing down.’ She chased a drip from the end of her nose, her chin, shook her wet hair. ‘I heard a noise up here. Before.’
Saffy blinked, greatly perplexed. Spoke as if by rote: ‘It was the shutter. I think I fixed it, though of course I’m not much use with tools – Percy, where on earth have you been?’ And what had she been doing? Saffy’s eyes widened as she took in her twin’s wet, muddy dress, the – were they leaves? – in her hair. ‘Headache gone then, has it?’
‘What’s that?’ Percy had collected their glasses and was at the drinks table pouring them each another whisky.
‘Your headache. Did you find the aspirin?’
‘Oh. Thank you. Yes.’
‘Only you were gone a long time.’
‘Was I?’ Percy handed a glass to Saffy. ‘I suppose I was. I thought I heard something outside; probably Poe, frightened of the storm. I did wonder at first if it might be Juniper’s friend. What’s his name?’
‘Thomas.’ Saffy took a sip. ‘Thomas Cavill.’ Did she imagine that Percy was avoiding her eyes? ‘Percy, I hope-’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be nice to him when he arrives.’ She swirled her glass. ‘If he arrives.’
‘You mustn’t prejudge him for being late, Percy.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘It’s the fault of the war. Nothing runs on time any more. Juniper’s not here either.’
Percy reclaimed the cigarette she’d left earlier, propped against the rim of the ashtray. ‘That’s hardly a surprise.’
‘He’ll be here eventually.’
‘If he exists.’
What an odd thing to say; Saffy tucked a wayward curl behind her ear, confused, concerned, wondering if Percy was making some sort of joke, one of the trademark ironies that Saffy had a habit of taking literally. Though her stomach had begun to churn, Saffy ignored it, choosing to take the remark as humour. ‘I do hope so; such a great shame to learn he’s a mere figment. The table will look terribly unbalanced minus a setting.’ She perched on the edge of the chaise longue, but no matter how she strove for ease, a peculiar nervousness seemed to have transplanted itself from Percy to her.
‘You look tired,’ said Percy.
‘Do I?’ Saffy tried to affect an amiable tone. ‘I suppose I am. Perhaps activity will perk me up. I might just slip down to the kitchen and-’
‘No.’
Saffy’s glass dropped. Whisky spilled across the rug, beading brown on the blue and red surface.
Percy picked up the glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just meant-’
‘How silly of me.’ Saffy fussed at a wet spot on her dress. ‘Silly, silly…’
And then it came, a knock on the door.
They stood as one.
‘Juniper,’ said Percy.
Saffy swallowed, noting the assumption. ‘Or Thomas Cavill.’
‘Yes. Or Thomas Cavill.’
‘Well,’ said Saffy with a stiff smile. ‘Whoever it is, I expect we’d better let them in.’