The Distant Hours

by Kate Morton

  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.

  Journey Through a Garden’s Bones

  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.

  I should say that siblings interest me generally. I’m intrigued and repelled by their closeness. The sharing of genetic ingredients, the random and at times unfair distribution of inheritance, the inescapability of the tie. I understand a little of that tie myself. I had a brother once, but not for long. He was buried before I knew him and by the time I’d pieced enough together to miss him, the traces he’d left behind had been neatly p
ut away. A pair of certificates, one birth, one death, in a slim file in the cabinet; a small photograph in my father’s wallet, another in my mum’s jewellery drawer: all that remained to say, ‘I was here!’ Along with the memories and sorrows that live inside my parents’ heads, of course, but they don’t share those with me.

  My point is not to make you feel uncomfortable or sorry for me, only to express that despite having almost nothing material or memorable left with which to conjure Daniel, I’ve felt the tie between us all my life. An invisible thread connects us just as certainly as day is bound to night. It’s always been that way, even when I was small. If I was a presence in my parents’ house, he was an absence. An unspoken sentence every time we were happy: If only he were here; every time I disappointed them: He wouldn’t have done so; every time I started a new school year: Those would be his classmates, those big kids over there. The distant look I caught in their gazes sometimes when they thought they were alone.

  Now I’m not saying my curiosity about the Sisters Blythe had much, if anything, to do with Daniel. Not directly. But theirs was such a beautiful story: two older sisters giving up their own lives to devote themselves to the care of the younger: a broken heart, a lost mind, an unrequited love; it made me wonder what things might have been like, whether Daniel might have been the sort of person I’d have given my life to protect. I couldn’t stop thinking of those sisters, you see, the three of them tied together like that. Growing old, fading, spinning out their days in their ancestral home, the last living members of a grand, romantic family.

  I climbed carefully, up and up, past a weathered sundial, past a row of patient urns on silent plinths, past a pair of stone deer facing off across neglected hedges, until finally I reached the last step and the ground flattened. A pleached alley of gnarled fruit trees racked before me, drawing me onwards. It was as if the garden had a plan, I remember thinking that first morning; as if there were an order, as if it had been waiting for me, refusing to leave me lost, conspiring instead to deliver me to the castle.

  Sentimental silliness, of course. I can only suppose that the steep incline had left me light-headed and subject to wildly grandiose thoughts. Whatever the case, I felt infused. I was intrepid (if rather sweaty). An adventurer who’d slipped from my own time and place and was going forth now to conquer . . . well, to conquer something. Never mind that this particular mission was destined to end with three old ladies and a country house tour, perhaps an offer of tea if I was lucky.

  Like the pool, this part of the garden had long been left untended, and as I passed through the tunnel of arches I felt myself to be walking within the ancient skeleton of some enormous monster, long dead. Giant ribs stretched above, encasing me, while long linear shadows created the illusion that they also curved beneath. I skipped quickly to the end but when I reached it I stopped short.

  There before me, cloaked in shade though the day was warm, stood Milderhurst Castle. The back of Milderhurst Castle, I realized with a frown, taking in the outhouses, the exposed plumbing, the distinct lack of pillars, entrance lawn or driveway.

  And then it dawned on me, the precise nature of my lostness. Somehow I must’ve missed an early turn and I had ended up winding right around the wooded hillside instead, approaching the castle from the north rather than the south.

  All’s well that end’s well, though: I’d made it relatively unscathed and I was quite sure I wasn’t yet offensively late. Even better, I’d spied a flat strip of wild grass wrapping its way around the walled castle gardens. I followed it, and finally – a triumphant trumpet flourish – stumbled upon Mrs Bird’s pillars. Across the south lawn, just where it ought to be, the front face of Milderhurst Castle rose tall and taller to meet the sun.

  The quiet, steady accumulation of years I’d felt on the garden climb was more concentrated here, spun out like a web around the castle. The building had a dramatic grace and was decidedly oblivious to my intrusion. The bored sash windows gazed beyond me, looking towards the English Channel with a weary permanence of expression that emphasized my sense that I was trivial, temporary, that the grand old building had seen too much else in its time to be bothered much by me.

  A clutter of starlings took flight from the chimney tops, wheeling through the sky and into the valley where Mrs Bird’s farmhouse nestled. The noise, the motion, was oddly disconcerting.

  I followed their progress as they skimmed the treetops, skirling towards the tiny red-tiled roofs. The farmhouse looked so far away, I was overcome by the strangest sense that at some point during my walk up the wooded hill I’d crossed an invisible line of sorts. I’d been there, but now I was here, and something more complicated was at work than a simple shift in location.

  Turning back towards the castle, I saw that a large black door in the lower arch of the tower stood wide open. Strange that I hadn’t noticed it before.

  I started across the grass, but when I reached the stone front stairs I faltered. Sitting by a weathered marble greyhound was his flesh and blood descendant, a black dog of the type I would come to know as a lurcher. He’d been watching me, it seemed, the whole time I’d been standing on the lawn.

  Now he stood, blocking my way, assessing me with his dark eyes. I felt unwilling, unable to continue. My breathing was shallow and I was suddenly cold. I wasn’t afraid, though. It’s difficult to explain, but it was as if he were the ferryman, or an old-fashioned butler, someone whose permission I needed before I could proceed.

  He padded towards me, gaze fixed, footfalls noiseless. Brushed lightly beneath my fingertips before he turned and loped away. Disappeared without a second glance through the open door.

  Beckoning me, or so it seemed, to follow.

  Three Fading Sisters

  Have you ever wondered what the stretch of time smells like? I can’t say I had, not before I set foot inside Milderhurst Castle, but I certainly know now. Mould and ammonia, a pinch of lavender and a fair whack of dust, the mass disintegration of very old sheets of paper. And there’s something else, too, something underlying it all, something verging on rotten or stewed but not. It took me a while to work out what that smell was, but I think I know now. It’s the past. Thoughts and dreams, hopes and hurts, all brewed together, fermenting slowly in the fusty air, unable ever to dissipate completely.

  ‘Hello?’ I called, waiting at the top of the wide stone staircase for a return greeting. Time passed and none came, so I said it again, louder this time. ‘Hello? Is anyone home?’

  Mrs Bird had told me to go on in, that the Sisters Blythe were expecting us, that she’d meet me inside. In fact, she’d been at great pains to impress upon me that I was not to knock or ring the bell or otherwise announce my arrival. I’d been dubious – where I came from, entrance without announcement came pretty close to trespassing – but I did as she’d bid me: took myself straight through the stone portico, beneath the arched walkway, and into the circular room beyond. There were no windows and it was dim despite a ceiling that swept up to form a high dome. A noise drew my attention to the rounded top, where a white bird had flown through the rafters and hovered now in a shaft of dusted light.

  ‘Well then.’ The voice came from my left and I turned quickly to see a very old woman standing in a doorframe some ten feet away, the lurcher by her side. She was thin but tall, dressed in tweeds and a button-up collared shirt, almost gentlemanly in style. Her gender had been brittled by the years, any curves she’d had sunken long ago. Her hair had receded from her forehead and sat short and white around her ears with a wiry stubbornness; the egg-shaped face was alert and intelligent. Her eyebrows, I noted as I moved closer, had been plucked to the point of complete removal then drawn in again, scores the colour of old blood. The effect was dramatic, if a little grim. She leaned forward slightly on an elegant ivory-handled cane. ‘You must be Miss Burchill.’

  ‘Yes.’ I held out my hand, breathless suddenly. ‘Edith Burchill. Hello there.’

  Chill fingers pressed lightly against mine and the leat
her strap of her watch fell noiselessly around her wrist bone. ‘Marilyn Bird from the farmhouse said you’d be coming. My name is Persephone Blythe.’

  ‘Thank you so much for agreeing to meet me. Ever since I learned of Milderhurst Castle, I’ve been dying to see inside.’

  ‘Really?’ A sharp twist of her lips, a smile as crooked as a hairpin. ‘I wonder why.’

  That was the time, of course, to tell her about Mum, about the letter, her evacuation here as a girl. To see Percy Blythe’s face light up with recognition, for us to exchange news and old stories as we walked. Nothing could have been more natural, which is why it came as something of a surprise to hear myself say: ‘I read about it in a book.’

  She made a noise, a less interested version of ‘ah’.

  ‘I read a lot,’ I added quickly, as if the truthful qualifier might somehow lessen the lie. ‘I love books. I work with books. Books are my life.’