The Distant Hours (35 page)

She rested her bicycle on the ground and lay beside it on the night-cooled grass. Smoked another cigarette. Then another, her last. Percy curled onto her side and pressed her ear to the ground, listened as Daddy had shown her. Her family, her home, was built on a foundation of words, he’d said, time and again; the family tree laced together with sentences in place of limbs. Layers of expressed thought had soaked into the soil of the castle gardens so that poems and plays, prose and political treatises, would always whisper to her when she needed them. Ancestors she would never meet, who had lived and died before her birth, left behind them words, words, words, chattering to one another, to her, from beyond the grave, so she was never lonely, never alone.

After a time Percy stood, picked up her things and continued in silence towards the castle. Dusk had been swallowed by dark and the moon had arrived, the beautiful, traitorous moon, stretching her pale fingers over the landscape. A brave harvest mouse fled across a silver spill of lawn, fine grass quivered on the gentle rises of the fields, and beyond the woods shrugged blackly.

She could hear voices inside as she drew nearer: Saffy’s and Juniper’s, and another, a child’s voice, a girl. Allowing herself a moment’s hesitation, Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she’d run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

As she stood there, hand poised to open the door of her home, as the tallest trees of Cardarker Wood bore witness, she made a promise: she was Persephone Blythe of Milderhurst Castle. There were other things in life she loved – not many, but there were some: her sisters, her father, and their castle, of course. She was the eldest – if only by a matter of minutes – she was Daddy’s heir, the only one of his children who shared his love for the stones, the soul, the secrets of their home. She would pick herself up and carry on. And she would make it her duty, from this moment forth, to ensure no harm befell any of them, that she did whatever was necessary to keep them all safe.

1992

Milderhurst Castle was almost lost to the Sisters Blythe in 1952. The castle needed urgent repair, the Blythe family finances were dire, and the National Trust was keen to acquire the property and begin its restoration. It seemed that the sisters had little choice but to move somewhere smaller, sell the estate to strangers, or sign it over to the Trust so they might get on with ‘preserving the crowning glory of the building and gardens’. Only they did none of those things. Percy Blythe opened the castle to visitors instead, sold a few parcels of surrounding farmland, and somehow managed to scrape together sufficient funds to keep the old place standing.

I know this because I spent the better part of a sunny weekend in August trawling through the local library’s micro- film records of the
Milderhurst Mercury
. In retrospect, telling my dad that the origin of
The True History of the Mud Man
was a great literary mystery was a little like putting a box of chocolates on the floor beside a toddler and expecting him not to touch it. He’s rather results-based, my dad, and he liked the idea that he might be able to solve a mystery that had plagued academics for decades. He had his theory: the real-life kidnapping of a long-ago child lay at the novel’s gothic heart; all he needed to do was prove it and the fame, the glory, the personal satisfaction, would be his. Confinement to bed, however, is no friend to the sleuth, so an agent was necessarily enlisted and dispatched in his place. Which was where I figured. I humoured him for three reasons: partly because he was recuperating from a heart attack, partly because his theory wasn’t completely ridiculous, but most of all because reading my mother’s letters had stretched my fascination with Milderhurst to pathological proportions.

I started my enquiries, as I usually do, by asking Herbert whether he knew anything about unsolved kidnapping cases from the early part of the century. One of my hands-down favourite things about Herbert – and the list is long – is his ability to find precisely the information he’s after in the face of apparent chaos. His house is tall and skinny to start with, four one-time flats patched back together: our office and printing press takes up the first two levels, the attic’s been sacrificed to storage, and the basement flat is where he lives with Jess. Every wall of every room is lined with books: old books, new books, first editions, signed editions, twenty-third editions, stacked together on mismatched, improvised sets of shelves, in a glorious, healthy disregard for display. And yet the entire collection is catalogued in his brain, his very own reference library, so that he has every reading experience of his life at his fingertips. To see him home in on a target is a thing of beauty: first, his impressive brow furrows as he takes in the query, then a single finger, delicate and smooth as a candlestick, raises and he hobbles, wordlessly, to a distant wall of books where the finger is given free reign to hover, as if magnetized, above the spines, leading him, finally, to slide the perfect book from its place.

Asking Herbert about the kidnapping was a lazy long shot, so I wasn’t really surprised when it yielded little of use. I told him not to feel bad and headed to the library, where I befriended a delightful old lady in the basement who’d apparently been waiting there all her life on the off-chance I’d show up. ‘Just sign in over here, my dear,’ she said eagerly, pointing to a clipboard and biro, and shadowing me closely as I filled in the requisite columns. ‘Oh, Billing & Brown, how lovely. My dear old friend, may he rest in peace, published his memoirs with B&B some thirty years ago.’

There weren’t many other folk spending that gorgeous summer’s day in the bowels of the library, so I was easily able to co-opt Miss Yeats to my purpose. We passed a lovely time together, trawling through the archives, turning up three unsolved kidnapping cases in and around Kent during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, then plenty of newspaper reports concerning the Blythe family of Milderhurst Castle. There was a charming, semi-regular column of housekeeping advice written by Saffy Blythe throughout the fifties and sixties; numerous articles about Raymond Blythe’s literary success; and some headlining reports of the family’s near loss of Milderhurst in 1952. At the time Percy Blythe had given an interview in which she made an emphatic case: ‘A place is more than the sum of its physical parts; it’s a repository for memories, a record and retainer of all that has happened within its boundaries. This castle belongs to my family. It belonged to my ancestors for centuries before I was born, and I won’t see it passed into the hands of people who wish to plant conifers in its ancient woods.’

A rather pernickety representative of the National Trust had also been interviewed for the article, lamenting the lost opportunity for their new Garden Scheme to restore the property to its former glory: ‘It’s a tragedy,’ he began, ‘to think that the great properties of our nation will be lost to us over the coming decades, through the sheer bloody-mindedness of those who cannot see that in these lean and austere times, individual residence in such national treasures is tantamount to sacrilege.’ When asked about the Trust’s plans for Milderhurst Castle, he outlined a programme of works including, ‘the structural repair of the castle itself, and a complete garden restoration’. An aim, I’d have thought, that was very much in line with Percy Blythe’s wishes for her family estate.

‘There was a lot of ambivalence about the Trust at the time,’ said Miss Yeats, when I ventured as much. ‘The fifties were a difficult period: the cherry trees were taken out at Hidcote, the avenue at Wimpole was cut down, all in the service of a sort of all-purpose historical prettiness.’

The two examples meant little to me, but all-purpose historical prettiness certainly didn’t sound like much of a match for the Percy Blythe I’d met. As I read further, matters became clearer still. ‘It says here that the Trust planned to restore the moat.’ I looked up at Miss Yeats, who inclined her head, awaiting explanation. ‘Raymond Blythe had the moat filled in after the twins’ mother’s death: a sort of symbolic memorial. They wouldn’t have been happy with the Trust’s plans to dig it out again.’ I leaned back in my chair, stretching my lower back. ‘What I don’t understand is how they could’ve hit such hard times in the first place. The
Mud Man
is a classic, a bestseller, even today. Surely the royalties would have been enough to keep them out of trouble?’

‘One would think so,’ Miss Yeats agreed. Then she frowned and turned her attention to the rather large stack of printouts on the table before us. ‘You know, I’m sure I . . .’ She shuffled the pages back and forth until one was chosen and held right by her nose. ‘Yes! Here it is.’ She handed me the newspaper article dated May 13th, 1941, and peered over the top of her half-moon glasses. ‘Apparently Raymond Blythe left a couple of large bequests when he died.’

The article was entitled: ‘Generous Gift from Literary Patron Saves Institute’, and was accompanied by a picture of a grinning, dungaree-clad woman clutching a copy of the
Mud Man
. I scanned the text and saw that Miss Yeats was right: the majority of the royalties were divided after Raymond Blythe’s death between the Catholic Church and another group. ‘The Pembroke Farm Institute,’ I read slowly. ‘It says here that they’re a conservation group based in Sussex. Committed to the promotion of sound ecological practice.’

‘Rather ahead of their time,’ said Miss Yeats.

I nodded.

‘Shall we check the reference files upstairs? See what else we can find?’

Miss Yeats was so buoyed by the prospect of a new research tangent that her cheeks had taken on a rosy sheen and I felt really rather cruel when I said, ‘Not today, no. I’m afraid I haven’t the time.’ She looked crestfallen, so I added, ‘I’m so sorry. But my dad’s expecting a report on my research.’

Which was true, and yet I didn’t go straight home. When I said there were three reasons I was happy to give up my weekend to my dad’s library task, I’m afraid I was a little disingenuous. I wasn’t lying, they were all true, however there was also the small matter of a fourth and more pressing reason. I was avoiding my mother. It was all the fault of those letters, more accurately, of my inability to leave the damned shoebox closed once Rita had given it to me.

I read them all, you see. The night of Sam’s hen party, I took them home and devoured them, one by one, beginning with Mum’s arrival at the castle. I endured with her the freezing early months of 1940, witnessed the Battle of Britain raging above my head, the nights spent shivering in the Anderson shelter. Over the course of eighteen months, the handwriting grew neater, the expression more mature, until finally, in the wee hours, I reached the last letter, the one sent home just before her father came to fetch her back to London. It was dated February 17th, 1941, and read as follows.

I dreamed of Milderhurst that night. I was a girl again, dressed in a school uniform I didn’t recognize, and standing at the tall iron gates at the bottom of the driveway. They were locked and far too high to scale; so high that when I looked up at where their tops should be they seemed to disappear into the swirling clouds above. I tried to climb them but my feet kept slipping, they’d gone all jelly-like, the way they often do in dreams: the iron was icy beneath my hands, yet I was filled with a deep longing, a fierce desire to know what lay beyond.

I looked down and saw that a large key, rusting around the edges, lay across my palm. Next thing I knew, I was beyond the gates and sitting in a carriage on the other side. In a scene borrowed directly from the
Mud Man
, I was being drawn up the long and winding drive, past the dark and shivering woods, across the bridges, until finally the castle loomed above me at the top of the hill.