by Kate Morton
‘I know he is.’
‘Honest, kind, reliable. There’s a lot to be said for that.’
I agreed, and as we fell to sipping our soup a picture of Percy Blythe came into my mind. She was a bit like Dad in that respect: the sort of person who might be overlooked amongst more vibrant company, but whose sturdiness, steeliness even, was the foundation upon which everybody else could shine. Thoughts of the castle and the Sisters Blythe reminded me of something.
‘I can’t believe I forgot!’ I said, reaching for my bag and pulling out the box that Juniper had given me in the night.
Mum laid down her spoon and wiped her fingers on the napkin in her lap. ‘A present? You didn’t even know that I was coming.’
‘It’s not from me.’
‘Then who?’
I was about to say, ‘Open it and find out,’ when I remembered that the last time I’d presented her with a box of memories and said the same thing it hadn’t worked out so well. ‘It’s from Juniper, Mum.’
Her lips parted and she made a tiny winded noise, fumbled with the box, trying to get it open. ‘Silly me,’ she said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, ‘I’m all thumbs.’ Finally, the lid came off and her hand went to her mouth in wonder. ‘Oh my.’ She took the delicate sheets of austerity paper from inside and held them, as if they were the most precious items in the world.
‘Juniper thought I was you,’ I said. ‘She’d been keeping this for you.’
Mum’s eyes darted to the castle on the hill and she shook her head with gentle disbelief. ‘All this time . . .’
She turned over the typewritten pages, scanning as she read bits here and there, her smile flickering. I watched her, enjoying the evident pleasure the manuscript was giving her. There was something else, too. A change had come over her, subtle but certain, as she realized that her friend had not forgotten her: the features of her face, the muscles in her neck, even the blades of her shoulders seemed to soften. A lifetime’s defensiveness fell away and I could glimpse the girl within as if she’d just been woken from a long, deep sleep.
I said gently, ‘What about your writing, Mum?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your writing. You didn’t continue?’
‘Oh, no. I gave up on all that.’ She wrinkled her nose a little and her expression cast a sort of apology. ‘I suppose that sounds very cowardly to you.’
‘Not cowardly, no.’ I continued carefully, ‘Only, if something gave you pleasure, I don’t understand why you would stop.’
The sun had broken through the clouds, skating off puddles to throw a layer of dappled shadow across Mum’s cheek. She readjusted her glasses, shuffled slightly in her chair, and pressed her hands delicately on the manuscript. ‘It was such a big part of my past, of who I’d been,’ she said. ‘The whole lot got all wrapped up together. My distress at having thought myself abandoned by Juniper and Tom, the feeling that I’d let myself down by missing the interview . . . I suppose I stopped finding pleasure in it. I settled down with your father and concentrated on the future instead.’
She glanced again at the manuscript, held a sheet of paper aloft and smiled fleetingly at whatever was written there. ‘It was such a pleasure,’ she said. ‘Taking something abstract, like a thought or a feeling or a smell, and capturing it on paper. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.’
‘It’s never too late to start again.’
‘Edie, love,’ she smiled with fond regret. ‘I’m sixty-five years old. I haven’t written more than a shopping list in decades. I think it’s safe to say that it’s too late.’
I was shaking my head. I met people of all ages, every day of my working life, who were writing just because they couldn’t stop themselves.
‘It’s never too late, Mum,’ I said again, but she was no longer listening. Her attention had drifted over my shoulder and back towards the castle. With one fine hand she drew her cardigan closed across her breasts. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing. I wasn’t sure quite how I’d feel, but now that I’m here, I don’t know that I can go back. I don’t know that I want to.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I have a picture in my mind. A very happy picture; I don’t want for that to change.’
Perhaps she thought I might try to convince her otherwise, but I didn’t. The castle was a sad place now, fading and falling to pieces, a little like its three inhabitants. ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘It’s all looking a bit tired.’
‘You’re looking a bit tired, Edie.’ She frowned at my face as if she’d only just noticed.
As she said it, I began to yawn. ‘Well, it was an eventful night. I didn’t get much sleep.’
‘Yes, Mrs Bird mentioned there was quite a storm – I’m very content to stroll around the garden. I’ve lots to keep me busy.’ Mum fingered the edge of her manuscript. ‘Why don’t you go and have yourself a little lie-down?’
I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when Mrs Bird caught my attention. Standing on the next landing, waving something over the rail and asking whether she could borrow me for a minute. She was so emphatically eager that, although I agreed, I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of trepidation.
‘I have something to show you,’ she said, darting a glance over her shoulder. ‘It’s a bit of a secret.’
After the twenty-four hours I’d had, this did not thrill me.
She pressed a greyish envelope into my hands when I reached her and said, in a stage whisper, ‘It’s one of the letters.’
‘Which letters?’ I’d seen a few over the past few months.
She looked at me as if I’d forgotten which day of the week it was. Which, come to think of it, I had. ‘The letters I was telling you about, of course, the love letters sent to Mum by Raymond Blythe.’
‘Oh! – Those letters.’
She nodded eagerly, and the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall behind her chose that moment to spit out its pair of dancing mice. We waited out the jig then I said, ‘You want me to look at it?’
‘You needn’t read it,’ said Mrs Bird, ‘not if you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that something you said the other evening got me thinking.’
‘It did?’
‘You said that you were going to be seeing Raymond Blythe’s notebooks and it occurred to me that you’d probably have a very good idea by now of what his handwriting looks like.’ She drew breath and then said, all in a rush, ‘I wondered, that is, I hoped . . .’
‘That I could take a look and let you know.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Sure, I guess—’
‘Wonderful!’ She clapped her hands together lightly beneath her chin as I slid the sheet of paper from within its envelope.
I knew at once that I was going to disappoint her, that the letter hadn’t been written by Raymond Blythe at all. Reading his notebook so closely, I’d become very familiar with his sloping handwriting, the long looping tails when he wrote G or J, the particular type of R he used to sign his name. No, this letter had been written by someone else.
Lucy, my love, my one, my only.
Have I ever told you how I fell in love? That it happened in the first instant that I saw you? Something in the way you stood, in the set of your shoulders, in the wisps of hair that had come loose to brush against your neck; I was yours.
I’ve thought of what you said when last we met. I’ve thought of little else. I wonder whether perhaps you might be right; that it is not a mere fancy. That we might just forget everything and everybody else and go far away together.
I didn’t read the rest. I skipped over the next few paragraphs and arrived at the single initial, just as Mrs Bird had said. But as I looked at it, variables shifted by degrees and a number of things slipped into alignment. I had seen this person’s handwriting before.
I knew who had written the letter and I knew who it was that Lucy Middleton had loved above all others. Mrs Bird had been right – it was a love that flew in the face of their society’s
conventions – but it hadn’t been between Raymond and Lucy. It wasn’t an R at the end of those letters, it was a P, written in an old-fashioned hand so that a small tail emerged from the curve of the letter. Easy to confuse with an R, especially if that’s what one was looking for.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, tripping over my words because I felt forlorn, suddenly, thinking of those two young women and the long lives they’d spent apart.
‘So sad, don’t you think?’ She sighed, tucking the letter back inside her pocket, then she looked at me hopefully: ‘Such a beautifully written letter.’
When I’d finally extricated myself from Mrs Bird, having been as non-committal as I could, I made a beeline for my room and collapsed sideways across the bed. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my mind, but it was no use. My thoughts remained tethered to the castle. I couldn’t stop thinking of Percy Blythe, who had loved so well and so long ago; who people thought of as stiff and cold; who had spent most of her life keeping a terrible secret to protect her little sister.
Percy had told me about Oliver Sykes and Thomas Cavill on condition that I did ‘the right thing’. She’d spoken a lot about people’s closing dates, but what I couldn’t work out was why she’d needed to tell me at all; what she wanted me to do with the information that she couldn’t do herself. I was too tired that afternoon. I needed a sleep and then I was looking forward to spending the evening with Mum. So I resolved to visit the castle the following morning, to see Percy Blythe one final time.
And in the End
Only I never got the chance. After dinner with Mum I fell asleep quickly and soundly but, just past midnight, I woke with a start. I lay for a moment in my bed at the farmhouse, wondering why I’d emerged from sleep, whether it was something I’d heard, some nocturnal sound that had since subsided, or whether I’d somehow dreamed myself awake. One thing I did know: the sudden wakefulness didn’t feel anywhere near as frightening as it had the previous night. I had no sense this time that there was anyone with me in the room, and I could hear nothing untoward. Yet that pull I’ve spoken of, the connection I felt towards the castle was tugging at me. I slid out of bed and went to the window, drew aside the curtains. And that’s when I saw it. Shock buckled my knees, and I was hot and cold at once. Where the dark castle should have sat, all was bright: orange flames licking at the low and heavy sky.
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 fi
nd 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.