The Distant Hours (6 page)
Authors: Kate Morton
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.
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.