The Distant Hours (68 page)

The fire at Milderhurst Castle burned most of the night. By the time I called the fire brigade they were already on their way, but there was little they could do. The castle might have been built of stone but there was so much wood within, all that oak panelling, the struts, the doors, the millions of sheets of paper. As Percy Blythe had warned, one spark and the whole lot went up like a tinderbox.

The old ladies inside never stood a chance. So said one of the firemen next morning, at the breakfast Mrs Bird supplied. They’d all three been sitting together, he said, in a room on the first floor. ‘It looked as if they’d been caught unawares while dozing by the fire.’

‘Is that what started it?’ asked Mrs Bird. ‘A spark from the fire – just like what happened to the twins’ mother.’ She shook her head, tutting at the tragic parallel.

‘It’s hard to say,’ said the fireman, before proceeding to say much more. ‘It could’ve been anything, really. A stray ember from the fireplace, a dropped cigarette, an electrical fault – the wiring in those places is older than me, most times.’

The police or the fire brigade, I’m not sure which, had put barriers around the outside of the smouldering castle, but I knew the garden pretty well by now and was able to climb up the back way. It was grisly, perhaps, but I needed to have a closer look. I’d known the Sisters Blythe only briefly, but had come to feel such strong possession of their stories, their world, that to wake and find it all turned into ash provoked in me a feeling of deep bereavement. It was the loss of the sisters, of course, and their castle, but it was something more, as well. I was overcome by a sense that I’d been left behind. That a door so recently opened to me had closed again, swiftly and completely, and I would never step through it again.

I stood for a time, taking in the black and hollowed shell, remembering my first visit, all those months before, the sense of anticipation as I’d made my way past the circular pool and towards the castle. Everything I’d learned since.

Seledreorig
. . . The word came into my head like a whisper. Sadness for the lack of a hall.

A small castle stone lay loose on the ground by my feet, and it made me more melancholy still. It was just a bit of rock. The Blythes were no more and their distant hours were silent.

‘I can’t believe it’s gone.’

I turned to see a young man with dark hair standing beside me. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of years old and it was destroyed in hours.’

‘I heard on the radio this morning and I had to come and see it for myself. I was hoping to see you, too.’

Perhaps I looked surprised, for he held out a hand and said, ‘Adam Gilbert.’

That name should have meant something, and it did: an elderly chap in tweeds and an antique office chair. ‘Edie,’ I managed. ‘Edie Burchill.’

‘I thought as much. The very same Edie who stole my job.’

He was joking and I needed a witty rejoinder. I came up instead with muddle-headed gibberish: ‘Your knee . . . Your nurse . . . I thought – ?’

‘All better now. Or very nearly.’ He indicated the walking stick in his other hand. ‘Would you believe a rock-climbing incident?’ A crooked smile. ‘No? Oh, all right. I tripped over a pile of books in the library and shattered my knee. These are the dangers of the writing life.’ He dipped his head towards the farmhouse. ‘Heading back?’

A final glance at the castle and I nodded.

‘May I walk with you?’

‘Of course.’

We walked for a time, slowly due to Adam’s stick, talking over our memories of the castle and the Sisters Blythe; our mutual passion for the
Mud Man
when we were kids. When we reached the field that led to the farmhouse he stopped. I did the same.

‘God, I feel crass to ask this now,’ he said, gesturing at the distant smoking castle. ‘And yet . . .’ He seemed to listen to something I couldn’t hear. Nodded. ‘Yes, it appears I’m going to ask you anyway. Mrs Button gave me your message when I got in last night. Is it true? Did you find something out about the
Mud Man
’s origins?’

He had kind brown eyes, which made it hard for me to look at them and lie. So I didn’t. I looked at his forehead instead. ‘No,’ I said, ‘unfortunately not. It was a false alarm.’

He held aloft a palm and sighed. ‘Ah well. Then the truth dies with them, I suppose. There’s a certain poetry to that. We need our mysteries, don’t you think?’

I did, but before I could say so, something caught my attention, back at the farmhouse. ‘Will you excuse me just a minute?’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’

I’m not sure what Chief Inspector Rawlins thought when he saw a wild-haired, washed-out woman hurrying across the field towards him, and even less when I began telling him my story. To his credit, he managed to keep an extraordinarily straight expression when I suggested over the breakfast table that he might want to extend his investigation, that I had it on good authority that the remains of two bodies lay buried beneath the earth around the castle. He merely slowed his stirring spoon a fraction and said, ‘Two men, you say? I don’t s’pose you’d be knowing their names.’

‘I do, actually. One was called Oliver Sykes, the other Thomas Cavill. Sykes died in the 1910 fire that killed Muriel Blythe, and Thomas died by accident during a storm in October 1941.’

‘I see.’ He swatted a fly by his ear, without taking his eyes from mine.

‘Sykes is buried on the western side, where the old moat used to be.’

‘And the other one?’

I remembered the night of the storm, Juniper’s terrible flight down the corridors and into the garden; Percy knowing just where to find her. ‘Thomas Cavill is in the pets’ graveyard,’ I said. ‘Right in the centre, near the headstone marked Emerson.’

A slow appraisal as he sipped from his tea then added another half spoonful of sugar. Regarded me with slightly narrowed eyes as he stirred again.

‘If you check the records,’ I continued, ‘you’ll see that Thomas Cavill was reported as missing and that neither man’s death was ever recorded.’ And a person needed their set of dates, just as Percy Blythe had told me. It wasn’t enough to retain only the first. A person without a closed bracket could never rest.

I decided not to write the introduction for the Pippin Books edition of the
Mud Man
. I explained to Judith Waterman that I had a scheduling clash, that I’d barely had a chance to meet with the Sisters Blythe anyway before the fire. She told me that she understood; that she was sure Adam Gilbert would be happy enough to pick up where he’d left off. I had to agree that it made sense: he was the one who’d compiled all the research.

And I couldn’t have written it. I knew the answer to a riddle that had plagued literary critics for seventy-five years, but I couldn’t share it with the world. To do so would have felt like a tremendous betrayal of Percy Blythe. ‘This is a family story,’ she’d said, before asking whether she could trust me. It would also have made me responsible for unveiling a sad and sordid story that would overshadow the novel for ever. The book that had made me a reader.

To write anything else, though, to rehash the same old accounts of the book’s mysterious origins, would have been utterly disingenuous. Besides, Percy Blythe had hired me under false pretences. She hadn’t wanted me to write the introduction, she’d wanted me to set the official records straight. And I’d done that. Rawlins and his men broadened the investigation into the fire and two bodies were found in the castle grounds, right where I’d said they’d be. Theo Cavill finally learned what had become of his brother, Tom: that he’d died on a stormy night at Milderhurst Castle in the middle of the war.

Chief Inspector Rawlins pressed me for any further details I might have, but I told him nothing more. And it was true, I didn’t
know
more. Percy had told me one thing, Juniper another. I believed that Percy was covering for her sister, but I couldn’t prove it. And I wasn’t going to tell, either way. The truth had died with the three sisters, and if the foundation stones of the castle whispered still about what had happened that night in October 1941, I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t want to hear them. Not any more. It was time for me to go back to my own life.

Milderhurst Castle, October 29th, 1941

The storm that had pushed its way in from the North Sea on the afternoon of October 29th, 1941, had rolled and groaned, thickened and furrowed, before settling finally over the tower of Milderhurst Castle. The first reluctant rain drops broke through the clouds at dusk and many more would follow before the night was done. It was a stealthy storm, the sort of rain that eschews clatter in favour of constancy; hour by steady hour fat drops pounded, poured down the roof tiles and sheeted over the castle eaves. Roving Brook began to rise, the dark pool in Cardarker Wood grew darker, and the skirt of soft ground around the castle, a little lower than that beyond, became sodden, collecting water so that a shadow of the long-ago moat appeared in the darkness. But the twins inside knew none of that; they knew only that after hours of anxious waiting a knock had finally come at the castle door.

Saffy got there first, laid a hand on the jamb and drove the brass key into the lock. The fit was tight, it had always been tight, and she struggled for a moment; noticed that her hands were shaking, that her nail polish was chipped, that her skin was looking old; then the mechanism gave way, the door opened, and such thoughts flew away into the dark, wet night, for there was Juniper.

‘Darling girl.’ Saffy could have wept to see her little sister, safe and well and home at last. ‘Thank God! We’ve missed you so!’

‘I lost my key,’ said Juniper. ‘I’m sorry.’

Despite the grown-up raincoat, the grown-up haircut revealed beneath her hat, Juniper looked such a child in the half-light of the doorway that Saffy couldn’t help but take her sister’s face between her hands and plant a kiss upon her forehead as she’d used to do when June was small. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, gesturing at Percy, whose dark mood had retreated into the stones. ‘We’re just so glad to have you home, to see you in one piece. Let me look at you . . .’ She held her sister at arm’s length and her chest swelled with a wave of gladness and relief she knew would be impossible to express with words; she drew Juniper into an embrace instead. ‘When you were so late we began to worry – ’

‘The bus. We were stopped, there was some kind of . . . incident.’

‘An incident?’ Saffy stepped back.

‘Something with the bus. A roadblock, I suppose; I’m not exactly sure . . .’ She smiled and shrugged, let her sentence trail off, but a thread of perplexity tugged briefly at her features. Only a moment’s shift, but it was enough; the unspoken words echoed in the room as clearly as if she’d said them.
I can’t remember
. Three simple words, innocent when uttered by anyone but Juniper. Unease dropped clean as a sinker through Saffy’s stomach. She glanced at Percy, noticed that same familiar anxiety settling on her too.

‘Well, come on inside,’ said Percy, reviving her smile. ‘There’s no need for us to stand out in the weather.’

‘Yes!’ Saffy matched her twin’s cheer. ‘You poor dear; you’ll catch a chill if we’re not careful – Percy, go downstairs, will you, and fetch a hot water bottle?’

As Percy disappeared along the darkened hall towards the kitchen, Juniper turned to Saffy, took her wrist and said, ‘Tom?’

‘Not yet.’

Her face fell. ‘But it’s late.
I’m
late.’

‘I know, darling.’

‘What could be keeping him?’

‘The war, darling; the war’s to blame. Come and sit by the fire. I’ll fix you a lovely drink and he’ll be right along, you’ll see.’

They reached the good parlour and Saffy allowed herself a moment’s pleasure at the pretty scene before leading Juniper to the rug by the hearth. She gave the largest log a prod as her sister produced a case of cigarettes from her coat pocket.

The fire sparked and Saffy flinched. She straightened, leaned the poker back where it belonged and dusted her hands, even though there was nothing on them to clean. Juniper struck a match, drew hard. ‘Your hair,’ said Saffy softly.

‘I had it cut.’ Anyone else’s hand might have gone to their neck, but not Juniper’s.

‘Well, I like it.’

They smiled at one another, Juniper a little skittishly, it seemed to Saffy. Though, of course, that made no sense; Juniper did not get nervous. Saffy pretended not to watch as her sister wrapped an arm across her middle and continued to smoke.

London
, Saffy wanted to say.
You’ve been to London! Tell me about it; paint me pictures with words so that I might see and know everything that you do. Did you dance? Did you sit by the Serpentine? Did you fall in love?
The questions lined up, one behind the other, begging to be spoken, and yet she said nothing. She stood instead like a ninny, as the fire warmed her face and the minutes ticked by. It was ridiculous, she knew; Percy would be back at any moment and the opportunity to speak alone with Juniper would be gone. She ought just to leap in, to demand outright:
Tell me about him, darling; tell me about Tom, about your plans
. This was Juniper, after all, her own, her dearest little sister. There was nothing they couldn’t talk about. And yet. Saffy thought of the journal entry and her cheeks warmed. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘How remiss of me! Let me take your coat.’