by Kate Morton
‘Oh.’ A trembly deflation rather than a word.
‘He’s due back in the next day or two. I could leave a message and have him telephone you when he returns at the end of the week, if you’d like?’
‘No,’ I said; it was too late, I needed help now – and yet, it was better than nothing. ‘Yes, all right. Thank you. If you could let him know that it’s rather important. That I think I might have stumbled on something related to the mystery we were discussing recently.’
I spent the rest of the evening staring at the letter, scribbling indecipherable patterns in my notebook, and dialling Herbert’s number; listening to the phantom voices trapped inside that empty phone line. At eleven o’clock I accepted finally that it was too late to continue stalking Herbert’s empty house; that, for now at any rate, I was alone with my problem.
As I headed for the castle next morning, exhausted and bleary-eyed, I felt as if I’d spent the night tumbling through the wash. I had the letter concealed within the inside pocket of my jacket and I kept slipping my hand in to check it was still there; I can’t explain why exactly, but as I left my room I’d been compelled to retrieve it, to tuck it away safely and carry it on my person. To leave the letter behind on the desk was unthinkable, somehow. It wasn’t a rational decision; it wasn’t through fear that someone else might happen upon it during the day. It was a strange and burning conviction that the letter belonged with me, that it had presented itself to me, that we were attached in some way now and I had been entrusted with unravelling its secrets.
When I arrived Percy Blythe was waiting for me, pretending to pull weeds from a plant pot by the entrance stairs. I saw her before she noticed me, which is how I know she was pretending. Right up until the moment that some creeping sixth sense made her aware of my presence, she’d been standing upright, leaning against the stone of the stairs, arms wrapped across her middle, attention fixed on something in the distance. She’d been so still, so pale, that she’d looked like a statue. Though not the sort of statue most people would choose to stand in front of their house.
‘Any sign of Bruno?’ I called, wondering at my ability to sound normal.
She made a small performance of surprise at my arrival and rubbed her fingers together so that tiny pieces of dirt sifted to the ground. ‘I don’t hold out high hopes. Not with the cold come in as it has.’ She waited for me to reach her, then extending her arm, invited me to follow: ‘Come.’
It was no warmer inside the castle than out. Indeed, the stones seemed somehow to trap the cold air, making the whole place greyer, darker, more bleak than before.
I expected that we would follow the usual corridor towards the yellow parlour but Percy led me instead to a small hidden doorway, tucked behind an alcove within the entrance hall.
‘The tower,’ she said.
‘Oh.’
‘For your article.’
I nodded, and then, because she’d started up the narrow, winding staircase, I began to follow.
With each step, my sense of unease grew. It was true what she had said – seeing the tower was important for my article – and yet there was something indefinably strange in Percy Blythe suggesting that she should show it to me. She’d been so reticent thus far, so reluctant that I should speak to her sisters or see her father’s notebooks. To find her waiting for me this morning, outside in the cold, for her to propose showing me the tower room without my having to ask first – well, it was unexpected, and I am not made comfortable by unexpected things.
I told myself I was reading too much into it: Percy Blythe had selected me for the task of writing about her father, and she was nothing if not proud of her castle. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Or perhaps she’d decided that the sooner I saw what I needed to, the sooner I’d be on my way and they would be left once more to their own devices. But no matter how much sense I made, the niggling had started. Was there any way, I wondered, that she knew what I had found?
We’d reached a small platform of uneven stone; a narrow archer’s window had been cut into the dusky wall and I was able to glimpse through it a thick sweep of Cardarker Wood; so glorious when seen in full, yet ominous somehow in section.
Percy Blythe pushed open the narrow round-topped door. ‘The tower room.’
Once again, she stepped aside so that I might go first. I went gingerly, stopping in the centre of the small, circular room on a faded rug of sooty shades. The first thing I noticed was that the fire had been freshly set, in preparedness for our visit, I supposed.
‘There,’ she said, closing the door behind us. ‘Now we are alone.’
Which set my heart to racing, though why precisely I could not say. My fear made little sense. She was an old lady, a frail old lady who’d just employed what scant energy she had in climbing the stairs. If the two of us were to engage in a physical tussle, I was pretty sure I’d hold my own. And yet. There was something in the way her eyes still shone, a spirit that was stronger than her body. And all I could think was that it was an awfully long drop from here to the ground and that a lot of people already had died plummeting from that window right there . . .
Happily, Percy Blythe was unable to read my mind and see written there the sorts of horrors that belong only in melodramatic fiction. She rolled a wrist slightly and said, ‘This is it. This is where he worked.’
And hearing her say it, I was able finally to creep out from beneath my own clouded thoughts and appreciate that I was standing in the middle of Raymond Blythe’s tower. These bookshelves, built to mould against the curving walls, were where he’d kept his favourites, the fireplace had been that by which he’d sat, day and evening, working on his books. My fingers ran along the very desk at which he’d written the Mud Man.
The letter whispered against my skin. If indeed he wrote the book himself.
‘There’s a room,’ said Percy Blythe, as she struck a match and set the fire burning, ‘behind the tiny door in the entrance hall. Four storeys below, but right beneath the tower. We used to sit there sometimes, Saffy and I. When we were young. When Daddy was working.’ It was a rare moment of expansiveness, and I couldn’t help but watch her as she spoke. She was tiny, thin and wan, and yet there was something deep inside Percy Blythe, a strength – of character perhaps? – that drew one like a moth. As if sensing my interest, she withdrew her light, that twist of a smile breezed across her face, and she straightened. Nodded at me as she tossed the spent matchstick into the flames. ‘Please yourself,’ was all she said. ‘Have a look around.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t go too near the window, though. It’s a long way to fall.’
Giving her what little smile I could manage, I began to take in the details of the room. The shelves were quite empty now; most of their former contents, I supposed, were lining the walls of the muniment room; but there were still framed pictures on the wall. One in particular caught my eye. It was an image with which I was familiar: Goya’s Sleep of Reason. I paused before it, taking in the foreground human figure, slumped – in despair it seemed – over his writing desk, while a host of bat-like monsters flurried above, arising from and feeding on, his sleeping mind.
‘That was my father’s,’ said Percy. Her voice made me jump, but I didn’t turn, and when I looked again at the picture my perception had changed so that I saw my own shadowy reflection, and hers behind me, in the glass. ‘It used to frighten us terribly.’
‘I can understand why.’
‘Daddy said to fear was foolish. That we’d do better to draw a lesson.’
‘Which lesson was that?’ I turned now to face her.
She touched the chair by the window.
‘Oh no, I – ’ another weak smile – ‘I’m happy to stand.’
Percy blinked slowly and I thought for a moment that she might insist. She didn’t though, saying only, ‘The lesson, Miss Burchill, was that when reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.’
My hands were clammy and a spreading heat was climbing up my arms.
But surely she had not read my mind. She couldn’t possibly know the monstrous things I’d been imagining since I found the letter, my morbid fantasies of being pushed from the window.
‘Goya anticipated Freud by some time, in that respect.’
I smiled somewhat sickly, and then the fever hit my cheeks and I knew that I could stand the suspense, the subterfuge, no longer. I was not formed for games like these. If Percy Blythe knew what I had found in the muniment room, if she knew that I had taken it with me and that I was bound to investigate further; if this was all an elaborate ploy to have me admit to my deception, and for her to try, by whatever means she could, to prevent me from exposing her father’s lie, then I was ready. What was more, I was going to strike the first blow. ‘Miss Blythe,’ I said, ‘I found something yesterday. In the muniment room.’
A dreadful look came over her, a leaching of colour that was instant and absolute. As quickly as it had appeared she managed to conceal it again. She blinked. ‘Well? I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to guess, Miss Burchill. You’re going to have to tell me what it was.’
I reached into my jacket and retrieved the letter, tried to steady my fingers as I handed it to her. I watched as she dug reading glasses from her pocket, held them before her eyes and scanned the page. Time slowed interminably. She shifted her fingertips lightly over its surface. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see.’ She seemed almost relieved, as if my discovery was not what she’d feared.
I waited for her to continue and when it was clear she had no intention of doing so, I said, ‘I’m rather worried – ’ it was, without doubt, the most difficult conversation I’d ever had to initiate. ‘If there’s any question, you see, that the Mud Man was – ’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘stolen’. ‘If there’s any chance at all that your father might have read it elsewhere first,’ I swallowed, the room was swimming a little before my eyes, ‘as this letter seems to suggest, the publishers will need to know.’
She was folding the letter very carefully and crisply, and only when she’d finished did she say, ‘Let me set your mind at ease, Miss Burchill. My father wrote every word of that book.’
‘But the letter – are you sure?’ I had made a huge mistake in telling her. What had I expected her to do? Speak honestly with me? Give me her blessing while I made enquiries that stood to strip her father of his literary credibility? It was natural, of course, for his daughter to support him, especially a daughter like Percy.
‘I am very sure, Miss Burchill,’ she said, meeting my gaze. ‘It was I who wrote that letter.’
‘You wrote it?’
A curt nod.
‘But why? Why did you write such a thing?’ Especially if it was true that every word was his.
There was fresh colour in her cheeks and her eyes were bright, her energy much improved, almost as if she were feeding in some way on my confusion. Enjoying it. She looked at me slyly, a look to which I was becoming accustomed, a look that suggested she had something more to tell me than what I’d thought to ask. ‘There comes a time in the lives of all children, I expect, when the shutters are lifted and they become aware that their parents are not immune to the worst of human frailties. That they are not invincible. That sometimes they will do things to suit themselves, to feed their own monsters. We are a selfish species by nature, Miss Burchill.’
My thoughts were swimming in a deep and clouded soup. I wasn’t quite sure how one thing related to the other, but assumed it must have something to do with the distressing consequences that her letter had prophesied. ‘But the letter—’
‘That letter is nothing,’ she snapped, with a wave of her hand. ‘Not any more. It’s an irrelevance.’ She glanced at it briefly and her face seemed to flicker like a projection screen, a film running backwards across seventy-five years. In a single sudden motion she tossed it onto the fire, where it sizzled and burned and made her flinch. ‘As it happens, I was wrong. It was his story to tell.’ She smiled then, wryly, a little biliously. ‘Even if he didn’t know it at the time.’
I was utterly confused. How could he not know that it was his story, and how could she have thought it otherwise? It made no sense.
‘I knew a girl once, in the war.’ Percy Blythe had gone to sit on the chair behind her father’s desk and she leaned back into the chair’s arms as she continued: ‘She worked in the cabinet rooms; met Churchill a number of times in the corridors. There was a sign they had hanging, one that he’d put there. It said, “Please understand there is no depression in this house, and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.” ’ She sat for a moment, her chin lifted and her eyes slightly narrowed, her own words hanging still around her. Through the wash of smoke, with her neat haircut, her fine features, the silk blouse, she almost looked like she were back in the Second World War. ‘What do you think of that?’
I do not do well with these sorts of games; I never have, particularly riddles without even the most tenuous link to the rest of the conversation. I shifted my shoulders miserably.
‘Miss Burchill?’
A statistic came to me then, something I’d read or heard once about the way suicide rates plummet during times of war; people are too busy trying to survive to give much thought to how miserable they are. ‘I think wartime is different,’ I said, unable to avoid the rising tone that betrayed my discomfort. ‘I think the rules are different. I imagine depression is probably akin to defeat during war. Maybe that’s what Churchill meant.’
She nodded, a slow smile playing at her lips. She was making things difficult for me on purpose, and I didn’t understand why. I’d come to Kent at her behest, but she wouldn’t let me interview her sisters, she wouldn’t answer any of my questions directly, she preferred to play cat-and-mouse games in which I was cast always as the quarry. She might just as easily have let Adam Gilbert continue with the project. He’d done his interviews, he needn’t have bothered them again. You may take it as an indication of my profound discomfort and frustration that I said then, ‘Why did you ask me to come, Miss Blythe?’
A single scar-like brow shot up like an arrow. ‘What’s that?’
‘Judith Waterman from Pippin Books told me you rang. That you asked specifically for me.’
A twitch at the corner of her mouth and she looked straight at me; you don’t realize how rare that is until someone actually does it. Stares, unflinchingly, right down deep into your soul. ‘Sit,’ she said, just as you might instruct a dog or a disobedient child, and the word was so brittle in her mouth that this time I did not argue; I spotted the nearest chair and did precisely as I was told.
She tapped a cigarette on the desk, then lit it. She drew hard, eyeing me as she exhaled. ‘There’s something different about you,’ she said, resting her other wrist across her body, leaning back into the chair. All the better to appraise me.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
She squinted then, dissecting, watery eyes looking me up and down with an intensity that made me shiver. ‘Yes. You’re less chirpy than you were before. The last time you came.’
I couldn’t argue with that so I didn’t. ‘Yes,’ I said. My arms were threatening to flail around so I crossed them. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Don’t be,’ said Percy, lifting her cigarette and her chin. ‘I like you better this way.’
Of course she did. And, happily, before I was faced with the impossibility of formulating a reply, she returned to my initial question: ‘I asked for you, in the first instance, because my sister wouldn’t tolerate an unknown man in the house.’
‘But Mr Gilbert had already finished his interviews. There was no need for him to come back to Milderhurst if Juniper didn’t like it.’
That sly smile reappeared. ‘You’re astute. Good. I had hoped you might be. I wasn’t entirely sure after our first meeting and I didn’t fancy dealing with an imbecile.’
I was torn between ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sod off’ and elected to compromise with a cool smile.
‘We don’t know many people,’ she continued on an exhalation, ‘not any more. And then when you came to visit, and that Bird woman told me that you worked in publishing. Well, I began to wonder. Then you told me that you hadn’t any siblings.’
I nodded, trying to follow the logic in her explanation.
‘And that’s when I decided.’ She drew again on her cigarette, performed a piece of fussy stage business in retrieving an ashtray. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be biased.’
I was feeling less and less astute by the second. ‘Biased about what?’
‘About us.’
‘Miss Blythe, I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of this has to do with the article I’ve been commissioned to write; with your father’s book and your memories of its publication.’
She waved her hand impatiently and ash fell to the floor. ‘Nothing. Nothing. It has nothing at all to do with any of that. It has to do with what I’m going to tell you.’
Was that when I felt it, the ominous creeping beneath my skin? Perhaps it was only that a gust of autumn chill came then, blustering beneath the door, angering the lock so that the key fell to the floor. Percy ignored it and I tried to do the same. ‘With what you’re going to tell me?’
‘Something that needs to be set right, before it’s too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘I’m dying.’ She blinked with customary cold frankness.
‘I’m so sorry—’
‘I’m old. It happens. Please don’t patronize me with unnecessary sympathy.’ A change came over her face, like clouds scudding across the wintry sky, covering the last of the sun’s feeble light. She looked old, tired. And I saw that what she said was true – she was dying. ‘I was dishonest when I telephoned that woman, that publisher, and asked for you. I regret any inconvenience caused to the other fellow. I’ve little doubt he’d have done an excellent job. He was nothing if not professional. Nonetheless, it was all I could think to do. I wanted you to come and I didn’t know how else to make that happen.’
‘But why?’ There was something new in her manner, an urgency that made my breathing grow shallow. The back of my neck prickled, with cold but with something else, too.