The Distant Hours (66 page)

‘Juniper,’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you, Merry. I knew you’d come. I have it for you. I’ve been keeping it safe.’

I had no idea what she meant, but she handed me something rather bulky. Firm edge, sharp angles, not too heavy. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

In the half-light, her smile faltered. ‘Oh, Meredith,’ she said, ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing.’

Which was precisely what she’d said to Saffy in the corridor at the end of my tour. My pulse began to beat a little faster. It was wrong to question her, but I couldn’t help saying, ‘What is it? What did you do?’

‘Tom is coming soon. He’s coming for dinner.’

I felt so sad for her then; she’d been waiting for him fifty years, convinced she’d been abandoned. ‘Of course he is,’ I said. ‘Tom loves you. He wants to marry you.’

‘Tom loves me.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I love him.’

‘I know you do.’

And just as I was enjoying the warm, pleased feeling of having swept her mind back to a happy place, her hands leaped to her mouth in horror and she said, ‘But there was blood, Meredith . . .’

‘What?’

‘ . . . so much blood; all over my arms, all over my dress.’ She looked down at her dress then up at me and her face was a picture of misery. ‘Blood, blood, blood. And Tom didn’t come. But I don’t remember. I can’t remember.’

Then, with a swooping certainty, I understood.

Everything shifted into place and I saw what they were hiding. What had really happened to Thomas Cavill. Who had been responsible for his death.

Juniper’s habit of blacking out after traumatic events; the episodes after which she couldn’t recall what she’d done; the hushed-up incident in which the gardener’s son had been beaten. With dawning horror, I remembered too the letter she’d sent to Mum in which she’d mentioned her one fear: that she might turn out like her father. And she had.

‘I can’t remember,’ she was saying still. ‘I can’t remember.’ Her face was pathetically confused and although what she was telling me was ghastly, in that moment I wanted only to embrace her, to release her in some small way from the terrible burden she’d been carrying for fifty years. She whispered again, ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing,’ and before I could say anything to calm her, she darted past me towards the door.

‘Juniper,’ I called after her. ‘Wait.’

‘Tom loves me,’ she said, as if the happy thought had just occurred to her. ‘I’m going to go and look for Tom. He must be coming soon.’

And then she disappeared into the dark corridor.

I threw the boxy object towards the bed and followed her. Round a corner, along another short corridor until she reached a small landing from which a staircase fell away. A biting gust of damp wind blew up from below and I knew she must have opened a door, that she was planning to vanish into the cold, wet night.

A split second’s indecision and I started down after her. I couldn’t just leave her to the elements. For all I knew, she was intending to follow the drive all the way to the road, looking for Thomas Cavill. I reached the bottom of the stairs and saw there was a door leading the way through a small antechamber that connected the castle to the outside world.

It was still raining heavily, but I could see it was a garden of sorts. Not much seemed to be growing there, a few odd statues were dotted about, the whole was enclosed by massive hedges – I drew breath. It was the garden I’d seen from the attic on my first visit, the square enclosure Percy Blythe had been at great pains to tell me was not a garden at all. And she was right. I’d read about it in Mum’s journal. This was the pets’ graveyard, the place that was special to Juniper.

Juniper had stopped at the centre of the garden, a frail old lady in a ghostly pale dress, drenched and wild looking. And suddenly it made sense to me what Percy had said earlier, about stormy weather adding to Juniper’s agitation. It had been stormy that night in 1941, just as it was now . . .

It was odd, but the storm appeared to calm around her as she stood there. I was transfixed for a short time, before realizing that of course I had to go outside and bring her in; that she couldn’t stay out in the weather. At that moment, I heard a voice and saw Juniper look to her right. Percy Blythe appeared from a gate in the hedge, dressed in a mackintosh and wellington boots, approaching her little sister, calling her back inside. She held out her arms and Juniper stumbled into her embrace.

I suddenly felt like an intruder; a stranger observing a personal moment. I turned to leave.

Someone was behind me. It was Saffy, her hair brushed over her shoulders. She was wrapped in a dressing gown and her face was all apology. ‘Oh, Edith,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry for the disturbance.’

‘Juniper – ’ I started, gesturing over my shoulder, trying to explain.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, a kind smile on her face. ‘She wanders sometimes. There’s nothing to worry about. Percy’s bringing her inside. You can go back to bed now.’

I hurried back up the stairs, along the corridor, and into my room, closing the door carefully behind me. I leaned against it, catching breaths that continued to run away from me. I flicked the electric switch, in the hope that power had been restored, but alas: a dull plastic clunk and no reassuring spill of light.

I tiptoed back to bed, shifted the mysterious box onto the floor and wrapped myself in the blanket. I lay with my head on the pillow, listening to my pulse race in my ear. I couldn’t stop replaying the details of Juniper’s confession, her confusion as she struggled to put the pieces of her fragmented mind together, the embrace she’d shared with Percy in the pets’ graveyard. And I knew then, why Percy Blythe had lied to me. I had no doubt that Thomas Cavill had indeed died on a stormy October night in 1941, but it wasn’t Percy who’d done it. She’d merely been protecting her little sister to the last.

I must finally have slept because the next I knew, a weak misty light was stealing through the gaps in the shutters. The storm had passed, leaving only weary morning in its place. I lay for a time, blinking at the ceiling, sifting through the previous night’s events. By the welcome light of day I was more certain than ever that it was Juniper who’d been responsible for Thomas’s death. It was the only thing that made sense. I knew, too, that Percy and Saffy were anxious no one should ever learn the truth.

I hopped out of bed and almost tripped over a box on the floor. Juniper’s gift. With everything else that had happened, I’d completely forgotten. It was the same shape and size as those in Saffy’s collection in the muniment room, and when I opened it, a manuscript lay within, but it wasn’t one of Saffy’s. The cover page read:
Destiny: A Love Story, by Meredith Baker, October 1941.

We’d all overslept and it was mid-morning. The breakfast table was laid in the yellow parlour when I came downstairs and all three sisters were seated, the twins chatting away as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the night. And perhaps it hadn’t; perhaps I’d witnessed only one upset of many. Saffy smiled and offered me a cup of tea. I thanked her and glanced at Juniper, sitting blankly in the armchair, none of the night’s excitement evident in her demeanour. Percy, I thought, watched me a little more closely than usual as I drank my tea, but that might have been the result of her confession, false or otherwise, the day before.

After I’d said my goodbyes, she walked me to the entrance hall and we spoke pleasantly enough of trivial matters until we reached the door. ‘With regard to what I told you yesterday, Miss Burchill,’ she said, planting her cane firmly. ‘I wanted to reiterate that it was an accident.’

She was testing me, I realized; this was her way of ascertaining whether I still believed her story. Whether Juniper had told me anything in the night. This was my chance to reveal what I had learned, to ask her outright who had really killed Thomas Cavill. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand completely.’ To what end would I have told her? To satisfy my own curiosity at the expense of the sisters’ peace of mind? I couldn’t do it.

She was visibly relieved. ‘I’ve suffered endlessly. I never intended for it to happen.’

‘I know. I know you didn’t.’ I was touched by her sisterly sense of duty, a love so strong that she would confess to a crime she didn’t commit. ‘You must put it out of your mind,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen before, one which I am hard pressed to describe. Part anguish, part relief, but with hints of something else mixed in as well. She was Percy Blythe, though, and she didn’t go in for sentiment. She coolly composed herself and nodded sharply. ‘Don’t forget your promise, now, Miss Burchill. I’m relying on you. I am not the sort who likes to trust to chance.’

The ground was wet, the sky was white, and the entire landscape had the blanched look of a face in the aftermath of a hysterical rage. A little the way I imagined my own face might be looking. I went carefully, keen to avoid being swept away like a log downstream, and by the time I reached the farmhouse Mrs Bird had already moved on to lunch preparation. The strong, dense smell of soup hung thickly in the air, a simple but tremendous pleasure for someone who’d spent a night in company with the castle’s ghosts.

Mrs Bird herself was setting tables in the main room and her plump, apron-wrapped figure was such an ordinary, comforting sight, that I felt possessed by a strong urge to hug her. I might have, too, had I not then noticed that we weren’t alone.

There was someone else, another guest, leaning forward to pay close attention to the black-and-white photographs on the wall.

A very familiar person.

‘Mum?’

She looked up and offered me a tentative smile. ‘Hello, Edie.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘You said I should come. I wanted to surprise you.’

I don’t think I’d ever been so pleased or relieved to see another person in my life. I gave
her
my hug instead. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

Perhaps my vehemence showed, perhaps I held on just a mite too long, for she blinked at me and said, ‘Is everything all right, Edie?’

I hesitated as the secrets I’d learned, the grim truths I’d witnessed, shuffled like cards in my mind. Then I folded them away and smiled. ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. There was quite a storm last night.’

‘Mrs Bird was telling me, she said you’d been rained in at the castle.’ The buckle in her voice was only slight. ‘I’m glad I didn’t set off in the afternoon as I’d planned.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Only twenty minutes or so. I’ve been looking at these.’ She pointed to a nearby photograph, one of the
Country Life
pictures from 1910. It was the circular pool, when it was still under construction. ‘I learned to swim in that pool,’ she said, ‘when I was living at the castle.’

I bent closer to read the annotation beneath the photo:
Oliver Sykes, overseeing the construction, shows Mr and Mrs Raymond Blythe the work on their new pool.
There he was, the handsome young architect, the Mud Man who would end his days buried beneath the moat he was restoring. The brush of prescience swept across my skin and I felt heavily the burden of having learned the secret of that young man’s fate. Percy Blythe’s entreaty came drifting back to me:
Don’t forget your promise. I’m relying on you
.

‘Can I get you ladies some lunch?’ Mrs Bird said.

I turned away from Sykes’s smiling face. ‘What do you say, Mum? You must be hungry after the drive.’

‘Soup would be lovely. Is it all right if we sit outside?’

We sat at a table in the garden from which we could glimpse the castle; Mrs Bird had made the suggestion and, before I could demur, Mum had declared it perfect. As the farmhouse geese kept busy in the nearby puddles, ever hopeful that a crumb might fall their way, Mum began to talk about her past. The time she’d spent at Milderhurst, the way she’d felt about Juniper, the crush she’d had on her teacher, Mr Cavill; finally, she told me of her dreams of being a journalist.

‘What happened, Mum?’ I said, spreading butter on my bread. ‘Why did you change your mind?’

‘I didn’t change my mind. I just – ’ She shifted a little in the white iron seat that Mrs Bird had towel-dried – ‘I suppose I just . . . In the end I couldn’t . . .’ She frowned at her inability to find the words she needed, then continued with new determination. ‘Meeting Juniper opened a door for me and I desperately wanted to belong on the other side. Without her, though, I couldn’t seem to keep it open. I tried, Edie, I really did. I dreamed of going to university, but so many schools were closed in London during the war and in the end I applied for work as a typist. I always believed that it was temporary, that one day I would go on and do what I’d intended. But when the war ended I was eighteen and too old for school. I couldn’t go to university without my Higher.’

‘So you stopped writing?’

‘Oh no.’ She drew a figure eight in her soup with the tip of the spoon, round and round again. ‘No, I didn’t. I was rather stubborn back then. I set my mind to it and decided I wasn’t going to let a small matter like that stop me.’ She smiled a little without looking up. ‘I was going to write for myself, become a famous journalist.’