by Kate Morton
Percy refilled her water and drank shakily. ‘Do you remember when you first visited, Miss Burchill, and you mentioned the past singing in the walls?’
‘Yes.’ The tour that seemed a lifetime ago.
‘I told you it was nonsense, the distant hours. That the stones were old but that they didn’t tell their secrets.’
‘I remember.’
‘I was lying.’ She lifted her chin and set her eyes on mine, a challenge. ‘I do hear them. The older I get, the louder they become. This has not been an easy story to tell, but it’s been necessary. As I said, there is another type of immortality, a far more lonely one.’
I waited.
‘A life, Miss Burchill, a human life, is bracketed by a pair of events: one’s birth and one’s death. The dates of those events belong to a person as much as their name, as much as the experiences that happen in between. I am not telling you this story so that I might feel absolved. I am telling you because a death should be recorded. Do you understand?’
I nodded, thinking of Theo Cavill and his obsessive checking of his brother’s records, the ghastly limbo of not knowing.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘There must be no confusion on that count.’
Her talk of absolution reminded me of Raymond’s guilt, for that was why he’d converted to Catholicism, of course. Why he’d left a great deal of his wealth to the Church. The other recipient had been Sykes’s Farm Institute. Not because Raymond Blythe admired the group’s work, but because he was guilty. I thought of something. ‘You said before that your father didn’t know that he’d inspired the dream at first: did he realize later?’
She smiled. ‘He received a letter from a doctoral student in Norway writing a thesis on physical injury in literature. He was interested in the Mud Man’s blackened body because at times, the student felt, the descriptions painted him in a way that mirrored other representations of burn victims. Daddy never wrote back, but he knew then.’
‘When was that?’
‘The mid-thirties. That’s when he began to see the Mud Man in the castle.’
And when he added a second dedication to his book: MB and OS. Not the initials of his wives, but an attempt to atone in some way for the deaths he’d caused. Something struck me: ‘You didn’t see it happen. How do you know about the fight in the library? Oliver Sykes being there that night?’
‘Juniper.’
‘What?’
‘Daddy told her. She suffered a traumatic event of her own when she was thirteen. He was always on about how similar they were: I expect he thought it would comfort her to know that we are all capable of behaving in ways we might regret. He could be grand and foolish like that.’
She fell silent then, reaching for her glass of water, and the room itself seemed to exhale. Relief, perhaps, that the truth had finally been disclosed. Was Percy Blythe relieved? I wasn’t so sure. Glad that her duty had been discharged, no doubt, but there was nothing in her bearing that seemed lightened by the telling. I had a feeling I knew why: any comfort she might have drawn was far exceeded by her grief. Grand and foolish. They were the first words I’d heard her speak ill about her father and on her lips, she who was so fiercely protective of his legacy, they’d weighed especially heavily.
And why shouldn’t they? What Raymond Blythe had done was wicked, no one could argue with that, and it was little wonder he’d been driven mad by guilt. I remembered that photograph of the elderly Raymond in the book I’d bought from the village shop: the fearful eyes, the contracted features, the sense that his body was burdened by black thoughts. A similar appearance, it occurred to me, to the one his eldest daughter presented now. She had shrunk into the chair and her clothing seemed oversized, draping from one bone to the next. Her story had left her spent, her eyelids sagging and the fragile skin shot through with blue; it struck me as wretched that a daughter should have to suffer the sins of her father in such a way.
Rain was falling hard outside, beating against the already sodden ground, and inside the room had darkened with the passing afternoon. Even the fire, which had flickered alongside Percy’s story, was dying now, taking the last of the study’s warmth with it.
I closed my notebook. ‘Why don’t we finish up for the afternoon?’ I said, with what I hoped was kindness. ‘We can pick up again tomorrow, if you like.’
‘Almost, Miss Burchill, I’m almost done.’
She rattled her cigarette box and tipped a final stick onto the desk. Fiddled with it a bit before her match took and the cigarette end glowed. ‘You know now about Sykes,’ she said, ‘but not about the other one.’
The other one. My breath caught.
‘I see by your face, you know of whom I speak.’
I nodded, stiltedly. There was an enormous crack of thunder and I shivered where I sat. Let my notebook fall open again.
She drew hard on her cigarette, coughed as she exhaled. ‘Juniper’s friend.’
‘Thomas Cavill,’ I whispered.
‘He did arrive that night. October 29th, 1941. Write that down. He came as he’d promised her. Only she never knew it.’
‘Why? What happened?’ Perched on the fringes of enlightenment, I almost didn’t want to know.
‘There was a storm, rather like this one. It was dark. There was an accident.’ She spoke so softly I had to lean very close to hear. ‘I thought he was an intruder.’
There was nothing I could think to say.
Her face was ashen and in its lines I read decades of guilt. ‘I never told anyone. Certainly not the police. I was concerned they might not believe me. That they might think I was covering for someone else.’
Juniper. Juniper with the violent incident in her past. The scandal with the gardener’s son.
‘I took care of it. I did my best. But nobody knows and that, finally, must be set to rights.’ I was shocked then to see that she was weeping, tears rolling freely down her old, old face. Shocked, because it was Percy Blythe, but not surprised. Not after what she’d just confessed.
Two men’s deaths, two concealments: there was much to process – so much that I could neither see nor feel distinctly. My emotions had run together like the colours in a set of waterpaints so that I didn’t feel angry or frightened or morally superior, and I certainly wasn’t feverish with glee at having learned the answers to my questions. I just felt sad. Upset and concerned for the old woman sitting across from me, who was weeping for her life’s spiny secrets. I wasn’t able to alleviate her pain, but I couldn’t just sit there staring either. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘let me help you downstairs.’
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.’
A Night at the Castle
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.