The Distant Hours (65 page)

And this time, she wordlessly agreed.

I kept a gentle hold of her as we went. Slowly, carefully, winding down the stairs. She insisted on carrying the walking cane herself and it dragged behind, marking our progress, step by step, with a drear tattoo. Neither of us spoke; we were both too tired.

When finally we reached the closed door behind which was the yellow parlour, Percy Blythe stopped. By sheer force of will she composed herself, drawing her frame erect and finding an extra inch of height. ‘Not a word to my sisters,’ she said. Her voice was not unkind, but its sinew caused me to startle. ‘Not a word, do you hear?’

‘Stay for dinner, won’t you, Edith?’ said Saffy, brightly, as we came through the door. ‘I prepared extra when it got so late and you were with us still.’ She glanced at Percy, a pleasant expression on her face, yet I could tell she was perplexed, wondering what it was her sister had been saying that had taken the whole day.

I demurred, but she was already laying a place and it was pouring with rain outside.

‘Of course she’ll stay,’ said Percy, letting go of my arm and making her way slowly but certainly to the far side of the table. She turned to regard me when she reached it and beneath the room’s electric light I could see how thoroughly, how astonishingly, she’d managed to resurrect her spirits for the benefit of her sisters. ‘I kept you working over lunch. The least we can do is feed you dinner.’

We ate together, all four of us, a meal of smoked haddock – bright yellow in colour, slimy in consistency, lukewarm in preparation – and the dog, who’d been found, finally, holed up in the butler’s pantry, spent most of the time lying across Juniper’s feet as she fed him pieces of fish from her plate. The storm did not let up, in fact it gained in strength. We ate a dessert of toast and jam; we drank tea, and then more tea, until finally we ran out of amiable chat. At irregular intervals the lights flickered, signalling the like li hood of power outage, and each time they revived we exchanged smiles of reassurance. All the while, rain sluiced over the eaves, and swept across the windows in great sheets.

‘Well,’ said Saffy eventually, ‘I don’t see that there’s any choice about it. We’ll make you up a bed and you can stay here the night. I’ll telephone the farmhouse and let them know.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, with more alacrity than was perhaps polite. ‘I don’t want to impose.’ I
didn’t
want to impose – neither did I fancy the idea of staying in the castle overnight.

‘Nonsense,’ said Percy, turning from the window. ‘It’s as black as pitch. You’re as likely to fall into the brook and be swept away like a piece of driftwood.’ She straightened. ‘No. We don’t want any accidents. Not when we have room to spare here.’

It was Saffy who showed me to my bedroom. We walked quite a distance from the wing in which the Sisters Blythe now lived, and although our passage was long and dark, I was grateful that I wasn’t being led downstairs. It was enough that I was staying in the castle overnight; I didn’t fancy sleeping anywhere near the muniment room. We each carried a paraffin lamp up a set of stairs to the second floor and along a wide, shadowy corridor. Even when the electric bulbs weren’t flickering, the glow was a peculiar sort of half-light. Finally, Saffy stopped.

‘Here we are,’ she said, opening the door. ‘The guest chamber.’

She – or perhaps it had been Percy – had put sheets on the bed and arranged a small pile of books by the pillow. ‘It’s rather cheerless, I’m afraid,’ she said, glancing about the room with an apologetic smile. ‘We don’t entertain often; we’re rather out of the habit. It’s been such a long time since anybody came to stay.’

‘I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble.’

She was shaking her head. ‘Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all. I always loved having guests. Entertaining was one of the things I found the most fulfilling in life.’ She started towards the bed and set her lamp down on the side table. ‘Now, I’ve laid out a nightgown and found some books, too. I can’t imagine facing the end of the day without a story to drop into on my way towards sleep.’ She fingered the book on the top of the pile. ‘
Jane Eyre
was always a favourite of mine.’

‘Of mine, too. I always carry a copy, though my edition’s not nearly as beautiful as yours.’

She smiled, pleased. ‘You remind me a little of myself, you know, Edith. The person I might have become if things had been different. If times had been different. Living in London, working with books. When I was young, I dreamed of becoming a governess. Travelling and meeting people, working in a museum. Meeting my own Mr Rochester perhaps.’

She became shy then, and wistful, and I remembered the floral boxes I’d found in the muniment room, in particular the one marked
Marriage to Matthew de Courcy
. I knew Juniper’s tragic love story well enough, but very little of Saffy’s and Percy’s romantic pasts. Surely they, too, had once been young and filled with lust; yet both had been sacrificed to Juniper’s care. ‘You mentioned that you were engaged once?’

‘To a man called Matthew. We fell in love when we were very young. Sixteen.’ She smiled softly, remembering. ‘We planned to marry when we were twenty-one.’

‘Do you mind me asking what happened?’

‘Not at all.’ She began folding down the bed, smoothing back the blanket and sheet at a neat angle. ‘It didn’t work out; he married someone else.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. So much time has passed. Both of them have been dead for years.’ Perhaps she was uncomfortable that the conversation had taken a self-pitying turn for she made a joke then: ‘I was fortunate, I suppose, that my sister was kind enough to let me live on at the castle for such a bargain rate.’

‘I can’t imagine Percy would have minded that at all,’ I said lightly.

‘Perhaps not, though it was Juniper I meant.’

‘I’m afraid I . . . ?’

Saffy blinked at me, surprised. ‘Why, the castle is hers. Didn’t you know? We’d always supposed that it would pass to Percy, of course – she was the eldest and the only one who loved it as he did – but Daddy changed his will at the last.’

‘Why?’ I was thinking aloud; I hadn’t really expected her to answer, but she appeared to be wrapped up in the telling of her story.

‘Daddy was obsessed with the impossibility of creative women being able to continue with their art once saddled with the burden of marriage and children. When Juniper showed such promise, he became fixated on the idea that she might marry and waste her talent. He kept her here, never let her go out to school or to meet other people, and then had his will changed so that the castle was hers. That way, he reasoned, she would never have to concern herself with the business of making a living, nor with marrying a man who’d keep her. It was terribly unfair of him, though. The castle was always meant to be Percy’s. She loves this place as other people love their sweethearts.’ She gave the pillows a final plump before collecting her lamp from the table. ‘I suppose in that respect it’s fortunate that Juniper
didn’t
marry and move away.’

I failed to make the connection. ‘But wouldn’t Juniper have been happy in that case to have a sister who cared so much for the old place living here and looking after it?’

Saffy smiled. ‘It wasn’t so simple. Daddy could be cruel when it came to getting his own way. He put a condition on the will. If Juniper were to marry, the castle would no longer be hers, passing instead to the Catholic Church.’

‘The Church?’

‘He suffered with guilt, did Daddy.’

And after my meeting with Percy, I knew exactly why that would be. ‘So if Juniper and Thomas had married, the castle would have been lost?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s right. Poor Percy would never have borne it.’ She shivered then. ‘I am sorry. It’s so cold in here. One never realizes. We have no need to use the room ourselves. I’m afraid there’s no heating along this wing, but there are extra blankets in the bottom of the wardrobe.’

A spectacular bolt of lightning struck then, followed by a crack of thunder. The feeble electric light wavered, flickered, then the bulb went dark. Saffy and I both raised our lamps, as if puppets drawn by the same string. We gazed together at the cooling bulb.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘there goes our power. Thank goodness we thought to bring the lamps.’ She hesitated. ‘Will you be all right, alone up here?’

‘I’m sure I will.’

‘Well then,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

Night-time is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. Particularly when one is sleeping in a strange, old castle with a storm outside. Even more particularly when one has spent the afternoon listening to an elderly lady’s confession. Which is why, when Saffy left, closing the door behind her, I didn’t even consider snuffing my lamp’s flame.

I changed into the nightdress and sat white and ghost-like on the bed. Listened as the rain continued to pour and the wind rattled the shutters, just as if someone were on the other side, struggling to get in. No – I pushed the thought aside, even managed to smile at myself. I was thinking of the
Mud Man
, of course. Understandable when I was spending the night in the very place in which the novel was set, on a night that might have materialized from its pages.

I tucked myself under the covers and turned my thoughts to Percy. I’d brought my notebook with me and now I opened it, jotting down ideas as they came to me. Percy Blythe had given me the story of the
Mud Man
’s genesis, which was a great coup. She’d also answered the mystery of Thomas Cavill’s disappearance. I should have felt relieved, and yet I was unsettled. The sensation was recent, something to do with what Saffy had told me. As she’d spoken of her father’s will, unpleasant connections were being made in my mind, little lights turning on that made me feel increasingly uncomfortable: Percy’s love for the castle, a will that specified its loss if Juniper should marry, Thomas Cavill’s unfortunate death . . .

But no. Percy had said it was an accident and I believed her.

I did. What reason did she have to lie? She might just as well have kept the whole thing to herself.

And yet . . .

Round and round the snippets went: Percy’s voice, then Saffy’s, and my own doubts thrown in for good measure. Not Juniper’s voice, though. I only ever seemed to hear
about
the youngest Blythe, never from her. Finally, I closed my notebook with a frustrated slap.

That was enough for one day. I heaved a sigh and glanced through the books that Saffy had provided, seeking something that might still my mind:
Jane Eyre
,
The Mysteries of Udulpho
,
Wuthering Heights
. I grimaced – good friends, all, but not the sort with whom I felt like keeping company on this cold and stormy night.

I was tired, very tired, but I warded off the moment of sleep, loath to blow out the lamp and submit myself finally to the dark. Eventually, though, my eyelids began to droop, and after I’d jerked myself awake a few times, I figured I was tired enough for sleep to claim me quickly. I blew out the flame, closed my eyes as the smell of dying smoke thinned in the cold air around me. The last thing I remember was a rush of rain slipping down the glass.

I woke with a jolt; suddenly and unnaturally at an unknown hour. I lay very still, listening. Waiting, wondering what it was that had woken me. The hairs on my arms were standing on end and I had the strongest, eeriest sense that I was not alone, that there was someone in the room with me. I scanned the shadows, my heart hammering, dreading what I might see.

I saw nothing, but I knew. Someone was there.

I held my breath and listened, but it was still raining outside and with the howling wind rattling the shutters, its wraiths gliding along the stone corridor, there was little chance of hearing anything else. I had no matches and no means of relighting my lamp, so I talked myself back to a state of comparative calm. I told myself it was my pre-sleep thoughts, my obsession with the
Mud Man
. I’d dreamed a noise. I was imagining things.

And just when I had myself almost convinced, there was a huge lightning flash and I saw that my bedroom door was open. Saffy had closed it behind her. I’d been right. Someone
had
been in the room with me; was still there, perhaps, waiting in the shadows—

‘
Meredith
. . .’

Every vertebra in my body straightened. My heart pounded, my pulse ran electric in my veins. That wasn’t the wind or the walls; someone had whispered Mum’s name. I was petrified and yet a strange energy gripped me. I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t sit the entire night out, wrapped in my blanket, wide eyes scanning the dark room.

The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed, but I did. I slid across the sheet and made my way on tiptoe to the door. The handle was cool, smooth beneath my hand and I pulled it lightly, noiselessly towards me, stepping out to scan the corridor.

‘
Meredith
. . .’

I almost screamed. It was right behind me.

I turned, slowly, and there was Juniper. She was wearing the same dress she’d put on during my first visit to Milderhurst, the dress – I knew now – that Saffy had made for her to wear when Thomas Cavill came to dinner.