The Distant Hours

Dad was waiting when I got in from visiting Theo Cavill. The front door hadn’t even latched behind me when the bell tinkled from his room. I went straight up and found him propped against his pillows, holding the cup and saucer Mum had brought him after dinner and feigning surprise. ‘Oh, Edie,’ he said, glancing at the wall clock, ‘I wasn’t expecting you. Time quite got away from me.’

A very unlikely assertion. My copy of the Mud Man was lying face down on the blanket beside him and the spiral notepad he’d taken to calling his ‘casebook’ was propped against his knees. The whole scene smacked of an afternoon spent musing on the Mud Man’s mysteries, not least the way he was hungrily surveying the printouts peeping from the top of my tote. Although I can’t say why, the devil entered into me at that moment and I yawned widely, patting my mouth and making my way slowly to the armchair on the other side of his bed. I smiled when I was comfy and finally he could stand it no longer. ‘I don’t suppose you had any luck at the library? Old kidnappings at Milderhurst Castle?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Of course. I quite forgot.’ I took the file from my bag and sorted through the pages, presenting the kidnap articles for his keen perusal.

He skimmed them, one after the other, with an eagerness that made me feel cruel for having made him wait. The doctors had talked to us more about the risk of depression for cardiac patients, especially a man like my dad, who was accustomed to being busy and important and was already on shaky ground dealing with his recent retirement. If he saw a future for himself as a literary sleuth, I wasn’t going to be the one to stop him. Never mind that the Mud Man was the first book he’d read in roughly forty years. Besides, it seemed to me a far better purpose in life than the endless mending of household items that weren’t broken to begin with. I resolved to make more of an effort. ‘Anything pertinent, Dad?’

His fervid expression, I noticed, had begun to droop. ‘None of these is about Milderhurst.’

‘I’m afraid not. Not directly anyway.’

‘But I was sure there’d be something.’

‘Sorry, Dad. It was the best I could do.’

He grimaced bravely. ‘Never mind, not your fault, Edie, and we mustn’t let ourselves become discouraged. We just need to think laterally.’ He knocked his pen against his chin then pointed it at me. ‘I’ve been going over the book all afternoon, and I’m positive it’s something to do with the moat. It has to be. It says in your book about Milderhurst that Raymond Blythe had the moat filled in just before he wrote the Mud Man.’

I nodded with all the conviction I could muster and decided against reminding him of Muriel Blythe’s death and Raymond’s subsequent show of grief.

‘Well, there you are then,’ he said brightly. ‘It must mean something. And the child in the window, stolen while her parents slept? It’s all in there, I just need to make the right connection.’

He turned his attention back to the articles, reading them slowly and carefully jotting notes in a quick, stabbing hand. I tried to concentrate, but it was difficult when a real mystery was preying on my mind. Eventually I fell to staring through the window at the dusky evening light; the crescent moon was high in the purple sky and thin sheets of cloud drifted across its face. My thoughts were with Theo and the brother who’d disappeared into thin air fifty years ago when he failed to arrive at Milderhurst Castle. I’d gone searching for Thomas Cavill in the hope I might find something that would help me better understand Juniper’s madness, and although that hadn’t happened, my meeting with Theo had certainly changed the way I thought of Tom. Not a cheat at all, but a fellow, if his brother was correct, who had been much maligned. Certainly by me.

‘You’re not listening.’

I glanced back from the window, blinked: Dad was watching me reproachfully over the top of his reading glasses. ‘I’ve been outlining a very sensible theory, Edie, and you haven’t heard a word.’

‘Yes, I have. Moats, babies…’ I winced, took a crack. ‘Boats?’

He huffed indignantly. ‘You’re as bad as your mother. The two of you are downright distracted these days.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. Here.’ I leaned my elbows on my knees and waited. ‘Look, I’m all ears. Lay the theory on me.’

His chagrin was no match for his enthusiasm and he proceeded to do so at a skip. ‘It’s this report here that’s got me thinking. An unsolved kidnapping of a young lad from his bedroom in a manor house near Milderhurst. The window was left wide open, even though the nurse insisted she checked it when the children went to sleep, and there were marks on the ground that seemed to indicate a stepladder. It was 1872 so Raymond would’ve been six years old. Old enough for the whole event to have left quite an impression, don’t you think?’

It was possible, I supposed. It wasn’t impossible. ‘Definitely, Dad. That sounds very likely.’

‘The real clincher is that the boy’s body was found after an extensive search – ’ he grinned, proud of himself and stretching the suspense – ‘at the bottom of the muddy estate lake.’ His eyes scanned mine, his smile faltered. ‘What is it? Why do you look like that?’

‘I… because it’s rather awful. That poor little boy. His poor family.’

‘Well yes, of course, but it was a hundred years ago and they’re all long gone now, and that’s just what I’m saying. It must’ve been an awful thing for a little boy living in a nearby castle to hear his parents talking about.’

I remembered the locks on the nursery window, Percy Blythe telling me that Raymond was funny about security because of something in his childhood. Dad actually had a point. ‘That’s true.’

He frowned. ‘But I’m still not sure what it all has to do with the moat at Milderhurst. Or how the boy’s muddy body turned into a man who lives at the bottom of a mudded moat. Or why the description of the man emerging would be so vivid-’

A soft knock at the door and we both looked up to see Mum. ‘I don’t mean to interrupt. I’m just checking whether you’ve finished with your teacup.’

‘Thank you, dear.’ He held it out and she hesitated before coming to collect it.

‘You’re very busy in here,’ she said, pretending great interest in a tea drop on the cup’s outer curve. Blotting it with her finger and making every effort not to look in my direction.

‘We’re working on our theory.’ Dad winked at me, blissfully unaware that a cold front had cut his room in two.

‘I expect you’ll be a while then. I’ll say my goodnights and turn in. It’s been a rather tiring day.’ She kissed Dad on the cheek then nodded my way without actually making eye contact. ‘Good night, Edie.’

‘Night, Mum.’

Oh Lord, but it was so stiff between us! I didn’t watch her leave, pretending great interest instead in the printout on my lap. It happened to be the stapled set of pages Miss Yeats had sourced on the Pembroke Farm Institute. I glanced through the introduction which gave the group’s history: started in 1907 by a guy called Oliver Sykes – the name was familiar and I racked my brain before remembering it was the architect fellow who’d designed the circular pool at Milderhurst. It figured; if Raymond Blythe was going to leave money to a group of conservationists, they must’ve been people he had reason to admire. Ergo, he’d have employed the same people to work on his prized estate… Mum’s bedroom door closed and I breathed a sigh of something like relief. I laid down the papers and tried to act normally for Dad’s sake.

‘You know, Dad,’ I said, my throat gritty, ‘I think you might be on to something; that thing about the lake and the little boy.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about, Edie.’

‘I know. And I definitely think it could’ve been the inspiration for the novel.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Not that, Edie; forget about the book. I’m referring to your mother.’

‘To Mum?’

He pointed at the closed door. ‘She’s unhappy and I don’t like to see her that way.’

‘You’re imagining things.’

‘I’m not daft. She’s been moping about the house for weeks, then today she mentioned that she’d found the letting pages in your room and she started to cry.’

Mum had been in my room? ‘Mum cried?’

‘She feels things deeply, she always has. Wears her heart on her sleeve. You’re similar that way, the two of you.’

And I’m not sure whether the comment was calculated to knock me off guard, but the very notion of Mum wearing her heart on her sleeve was so confounding that I lost all ability to insist that he was totally and utterly incorrect about us being similar. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was one of the things I most liked about her. She was different from all the stiff upper lips I’d come across before. The first time I laid eyes on her she was having a good old cry.’

‘Really?’

‘We were at the pictures. By chance we were the only ones there. It wasn’t a particularly sad film, not that I could see, but your mum spent the whole time weeping in the dark. She tried to hide it, but when we got out into the foyer her eyes were as red as your T-shirt. I felt so sorry for her I took her out for cake.’

‘What was she crying about?’

‘I was never sure exactly. She cried rather easily in those days.’

‘No… really?’

‘Oh yes. She was very sensitive – funny, too; clever and unpredictable. She had a way of describing things that made you see them as if for the first time.’

I wanted to ask, ‘What happened?’ but the insinuation that she was no longer any of those things seemed cruel. I was glad when Dad continued anyway.

‘Things changed,’ he said, ‘after your brother. After Daniel. Things were different then.’

I couldn’t be certain I’d ever heard my dad say Daniel’s name and the effect was to freeze me. There were so many things I wanted to say, to ask, that they swamped one another and I managed only, ‘Oh.’

‘It was a terrible thing.’ His voice was slow and even, but his bottom lip betrayed him, a strange, involuntary mobility that made my heart constrict. ‘A terrible thing.’

I touched his arm lightly, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on a patch of carpet by the door; he smiled wistfully at something that wasn’t there, before saying, ‘He used to jump. He loved it. “I jump!” he’d say. “Look, Daddy, I jump!”’

I could picture him then, my little-big brother, beaming with pride while he took clumsy frog leaps around the house. ‘I would have liked to know him.’

Dad planted his hand on top of mine. ‘I’d have liked that, too.’

The night breeze toyed with the curtain by my shoulder and I shivered. ‘I used to think we had a ghost. When I was little. I sometimes heard you and Mum talking; I heard you say his name, but whenever I came into the room you stopped. I asked Mum about him once.’

He looked up and his eyes searched mine. ‘What did she say?’

‘She said I was imagining things.’

Dad lifted one of his hands and frowned at it, spidered his fingers into a loose fist, scrunching an invisible piece of paper as he gave a rumpled sigh. ‘We thought we were doing the right thing. We did the best we could.’

‘I know you did.’

‘Your mum…’ He tightened his lips against his sorrow and a part of me wanted to put him out of his misery. But I couldn’t. I’d waited such a long time to hear this story – it described my absence, after all – and I was greedy for any crumb he might share. He chose his next words with a care that was painful to watch. ‘Your mother took it especially badly. She blamed herself. She couldn’t accept that what happened – ’ he swallowed – ‘what happened to Daniel was an accident. She got it into her head that she’d brought it on herself somehow, that she deserved to lose a child.’

I was speechless, and not just because what he described was so horrid, so sad, but because he was telling me at all. ‘But why would she think such a thing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Daniel’s condition wasn’t hereditary.’

‘No.’

‘It was just…’ I struggled for words that weren’t, ‘one of those things’, but failed.

He folded over the cover of his spiral notebook, laid it evenly on top of the Mud Man and set them on the bedside table. Evidently, we wouldn’t be reading tonight. ‘Sometimes, Edie, a person’s feelings aren’t rational. At least, they don’t seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base.’

And I could only nod because the day had already been so bizarre and now my father was reminding me about the subtleties of the human condition and it was all just too topsy-turvy to compute.

‘I’ve always suspected it had something to do with her own mother; a fight they’d had years before, when your mum was still a teenager. They became estranged afterwards. I never knew the details, but whatever your gran said, Meredith remembered it when she lost Daniel.’

‘But Gran would never have hurt Mum, not if she could help it.’

He shook his head. ‘You never can tell, Edie. Not with people. I never liked the way your gran and Rita used to gang up on your mother. It used to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The two of them setting against her, using you to create a wedge.’

I was surprised to hear his reading of the situation; touched by the care in his voice as he told me. Rita had implied that Mum and Dad were snobs, that they’d looked down on the other side of the family, but to hear Dad tell it – well, I began to wonder whether things weren’t quite as clear as I’d supposed.

‘Life’s too short for rifts, Edie. One day you’re here, the next you’re not. I don’t know what’s happened between you and your mum, but she’s unhappy and that makes me unhappy, and I’m a not-quite-old-yet chap, recovering from a heart attack, whose feelings must be taken into account.’

I smiled, and he did too. ‘Patch it up with her, Edie love.’ I nodded.

‘I need my mind clear if I’m to sort out this Mud Man business.’

I sat on top of my bed later that night with the letting pages spread out before me, doodling circles around flats I hadn’t a hope of affording and wondering about the sensitive, funny, laughing, crying young woman I’d never had the chance to know. An enigma in one of those dated photographs – the square ones with the rounded corners and the soft, sun-shadowed colours – wearing faded bell-bottoms and a floral blouse, holding the hand of a little boy with a bowl haircut and leather sandals. A little boy who liked to jump, and whose death would soon despoil her.

I thought, too, about Dad’s suggestion that Mum had blamed herself when Daniel died. Her conviction that she’d deserved to lose a child. Something in the way he’d said it, his use of the word ‘lost’ perhaps, his suspicion that it had something to do with a fight she’d had with Gran, made me think of Mum’s final letter home to her parents. Her pleas to be allowed to remain at Milderhurst, her insistence that she’d finally found the place where she belonged, her reassurances that her choice didn’t mean Gran had ‘lost’ her.

Links were being made, I could feel them, but my stomach didn’t care one whit. It issued an unceremonious interruption, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten a bite since Herbert’s lasagne.

The house was quiet and I went carefully along the dark corridor towards the stairs. I’d almost made it when I noticed the thin strip of light issuing from beneath Mum’s bedroom door. I hesitated, the promise I’d made to Dad ringing in my ears; the small matter of patching things up. I didn’t like my chances – there’s no one quite like Mum for skating airily along the surface of a frost – but it was important to Dad, so I drew a deep breath and knocked, ever so lightly, on the door. Nothing happened and for a moment I thought I might be spared, but then a soft voice came from the other side: ‘Edie? Is that you?’

I opened the door and saw Mum sitting up in bed beneath my favourite painting of the full moon turning a liquorice-black sea to mercury. Her reading glasses were balanced on the tip of her nose and a novel called The Last Days in Paris leaned against her knees. Her expression as she blinked at me was one of strained uncertainty.

‘I saw the light under the door.’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She tilted the book towards me. ‘Reading helps sometimes.’

I nodded agreement and neither of us spoke further; my stomach noticed the silence and took the opportunity to fill it. I was making movements to excuse myself and escape back towards the kitchen, when Mum said, ‘Close the door, Edie.’

I did as she said.

‘Please. Come and sit down.’ She took off her glasses and hung them by the chain over her bedpost. I sat carefully, leaning against the wooden end-rail in the same place I’d occupied as a kid on birthday mornings.

‘Mum,’ I started, ‘I-’

‘You were right, Edie.’ She slid the bookmark into her novel, closed its cover but didn’t relinquish it to the bedside table. ‘I did take you back to Milderhurst. Many years ago now.’

I was seized by a sudden urge to cry.

‘You were just a little girl. I didn’t think you’d remember. We weren’t there for long. As it happens, I lacked the courage to go any further than the front gates.’ She didn’t meet my eyes, hugging her novel firmly to her chest. ‘It was wrong what I did, pretending that you’d imagined the whole thing. It was just… such a shock when you asked. I was unprepared. I didn’t mean to lie about it. Can you forgive me?’

Is it possible not to wilt before a request like that? ‘Of course.’

‘I loved that place,’ she said, lips drawing. ‘I never wanted to leave it.’

‘Oh, Mum.’ I wanted to reach out and touch her.

‘I loved her, too: Juniper Blythe.’ And then she looked up and the expression on her face was so lost, so forlorn, that my breath caught in my throat.

‘Tell me about her, Mum.’

There was a pause, an enduring pause, and I could see by her eyes that she was far away and long ago. ‘She was… like no one else I’d ever met.’ Mum brushed a phantom strand of hair from her forehead. ‘She was enchanting. And I say that quite earnestly. She enchanted me.’

I thought of the silver-haired woman I’d met within the shadowy corridor of Milderhurst; the utter transformation of her face when she smiled; Theo’s account of his brother’s love-mad letters. The little girl in the photograph, caught unawares and staring at the camera with those wide-apart eyes.

‘You didn’t want to come home from Milderhurst.’

‘No.’

‘You wanted to stay with Juniper.’

She nodded.

‘And Gran was angry.’

‘Oh, yes. She’d wanted me home for months, but I’d… I’d managed to persuade her that I should stay. Then the Blitz happened and they were pleased, I think, that I was safe. She sent my father to get me in the end, though, and I never went back to the castle. But I always wondered.’

‘About Milderhurst?’

She shook her head. ‘About Juniper and Mr Cavill.’

My skin actually tingled and I held the bedrail very tightly.

‘That was my favourite teacher’s name,’ she continued. ‘Thomas Cavill. They became engaged, you see, and I never heard from either one of them again.’

‘Until the lost letter arrived from Juniper.’

At mention of the letter, Mum flinched. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And it made you cry.’

‘Yes.’ And for a long moment I thought she might do so again. ‘But not because it was sad, not the letter itself. Not really. All that time, you see, all the time that it was lost, I thought that she’d forgotten.’

‘Forgotten what?’

‘Why, me, of course.’ Mum’s lips were trembling. ‘I thought that they’d got married and forgotten all about me.’

‘But they hadn’t.’

‘No.’

‘They hadn’t even got married, for that matter.’

‘No, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t realize until you told me. All I knew was that I never heard from either one of them again. I’d sent something to Juniper, you see, something very important to me, and I was waiting to hear back from her. I waited and waited and checked the post twice every day, but nothing came.’

‘Did you write back to her? To find out why, to check that she’d received it?’

‘I almost did a number of times but it seemed so needy. Then I bumped into one of Mr Cavill’s sisters at the grocery shop and she told me that he’d run off to get married without telling any of them.’

‘Oh, Mum. I’m sorry.’

She set her book down on the quilt beside her and said, softly, ‘I hated them both after that. I was so hurt. Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.’ I shifted closer and took her hand in mine; she held on tightly. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘I hated her and I loved her and it hurt so very deeply.’ She reached into the pocket of her dressing gown and handed me an envelope. ‘And then this. Fifty years later.’

It was Juniper’s lost letter. I took it from Mum, unable to speak, uncertain whether she meant for me to read it. I met her eyes and she nodded slightly.

Fingers trembling, I opened it and began.

Dearest Merry,

My clever, clever chicken! Your story arrived safely and soundly and I wept when I read it. What a beautiful, beautiful piece! Joyous and terribly sad, and oh! so beautifully observed. What a clever young Miss you are! There is such honesty in your writing, Merry; a truthfulness to which many aspire, but which few attain. You must keep on; there is no reason why you shouldn’t do exactly what you wish with your life. There is nothing holding you back, my little friend.

I would love to have been able to tell you this in person, to hand your manuscript back to you beneath the tree in the park, the one with the little diamonds of sunlight caught within its leaves, but I’m sorry to say that I won’t be back in London as I thought. Not for a time, at any rate. Things here have not worked out as I’d imagined. I can’t say too much, only that something has happened and it’s best for me to stay at home for now. I miss you, Merry. You were my first and only friend, did I ever tell you that? I think often of our time here together, especially that afternoon on the roof – do you remember? You’d only been with us a few days and hadn’t yet told me you were frightened of heights. You asked me what I was frightened of and I told you. I’d never spoken of it to anyone else.

Goodbye, little chicken,

Much love always,

Juniper x

I read it again, I had to, tracing the scratchy, cursive handwriting with my eyes. There was so much within the letter that made me curious, but one thing in particular to which my focus returned. Mum had shown it to me so I’d understand about Juniper, about their friendship, but all I could think of was Mum and me. My whole adult life had been spent happily immersed in the world of writers and their manuscripts: I’d brought countless anecdotes home to the dinner table even though I knew they were falling on deaf ears and I’d presumed myself since childhood an aberration. Not once had Mum even hinted that she’d harboured literary aspirations of her own. Rita had said as much, of course, but until that moment, with Juniper’s letter in hand and my mother watching me nervously, I don’t think I’d fully believed her. I handed the letter back to Mum, swallowing the clot of aggrievement that had settled in my throat. ‘You sent her a manuscript? Something you’d written?’

‘It was a childish fancy, something I grew out of.’

But I could tell by the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes that it had been far more than that. I wanted to press harder, to ask if she ever wrote now, if she still had any of her work, if she’d ever show it to me. But I didn’t. She was gazing at the letter again, her expression so sad that I couldn’t. I said instead, ‘You were good friends.’

‘Yes.’

My first and only friend, I loved her, Mum had said, Juniper had written. And yet they’d parted in 1941 and never made contact again. I thought carefully before saying, ‘What does Juniper mean, Mum? What do you think she means when she says that something happened?’

Mum smoothed the letter. ‘I expect she means that Thomas ran off with another woman. You’re the one who told me that.’

Which was true, but only because that’s what I’d thought at the time. I didn’t think it any more, not after speaking with Theo Cavill. ‘What about that bit at the end,’ I said, ‘about being frightened? What does she mean there?’

‘That is a bit odd,’ Mum agreed. ‘I suppose she was remembering that conversation as an instance of our friendship. We spent so much time together, did so many things – I’m not sure why she’d mention that especially.’ She looked up at me and I could tell that her puzzlement was genuine. ‘Juniper was an intrepid sort of person; it didn’t occur to her to fear the things that other people do. The only thing that scared her was some notion she had that she’d turn out like her father.’

‘Like Raymond Blythe? In what way?’

‘She never told me, not exactly. He was a confused old gentleman, and a writer, as was she – but he used to believe that his characters had come to life and were going to come after him. I ran into him once, by mistake. I took a wrong turn and wound up near his tower – he was rather terrifying. Perhaps that’s what she meant.’

It was certainly possible; I cast my mind back to my visit to Milderhurst village and the stories I’d been told about Juniper. The lost time that she couldn’t account for later. Watching her father lose his mind in old age must have been particularly scary for a girl who suffered her own episodes. As it turned out, she’d been right to be afraid.

Mum sighed and ruffled her hair with one hand. ‘I’ve made a mess of everything. Juniper, Thomas – now you’re looking at the letting pages because of me.’

‘Now that’s not true,’ I smiled. ‘I’m looking at the letting pages because I’m thirty years old and I can’t stay at home forever, no matter how much better the tea tastes when you make it.’

She smiled too then, and I felt a tug of deep affection, a stirring sensation of something profound that had been sleeping for a very long time.

‘And I’m the one who made a mess. I shouldn’t have read your letters. Can you forgive me?’

‘You don’t need to ask.’

‘I just wanted to know you better, Mum.’

She brushed my hand with a feather-light touch and I knew she understood. ‘I can hear your stomach grumbling from here, Edie,’ was all she said. ‘Come down to the kitchen and I’ll make you something nice to eat.’

An Invitation and a New Edition

And right when I was puzzling over what had gone on between Thomas and Juniper and whether I’d ever have the chance to find out, something completely unexpected happened. It was Wednesday lunchtime and Herbert and I were returning with Jess from our constitutional around Kensington Gardens. Returning with a lot more fuss than that description suggests, mind you: Jess doesn’t like to walk and she has no difficulty making her feelings known, registering protest by stopping every fifty feet or so to snout about in the gutters, chasing one mysterious odour after another.

Herbert and I were cooling our heels during one such fossicking session, when he said, ‘And how’s life on the home front?’

‘Beginning to thaw, actually.’ I proceeded to give him the summary version of recent events. ‘I don’t want to speak too soon, but I believe we might’ve reached a new and brighter dawn.’

‘Are your plans to move on hold, then?’ He steered Jess away from a patch of suspiciously odorous mud.

‘Lord, no. My dad’s been making noises about buying me a personalized robe and putting a third hook in the bathroom once he’s able. I fear if I don’t make the break soon, I’ll be lost forever.’

‘Sounds dire. Anything in the letting pages?’

‘Loads. I’m just going to need to hit my boss for a significant pay rise to afford them.’

‘Fancy your chances?’

I shifted my hand like a puppeteer.

‘Well,’ said Herbert, passing me Jess’s lead while he dug out his cigarettes. ‘Your boss may not be able to stretch to a pay rise, but he might have had an idea.’

I raised a brow. ‘What sort of an idea?’

‘Rather a good one, I should think.’

‘Oh?’

‘All in good time, Edie, my love.’ He winked over the top of his cigarette. ‘All in good time.’

We turned the corner into Herbert’s street to find the postman poised to feed some letters through the door. Herbert tipped his hat and took the clutch of envelopes beneath his arm, unlocking the door to let us in. Jess, as per habit, went straight for the cushioned throne beneath Herbert’s desk, arranging herself artfully before fixing us with a look of wounded indignation.

Herbert and I have our own post-walk habit, so when he closed the door behind him and said, ‘Potlatch or post, Edie?’, I was already halfway to the kitchen.

‘I’ll make the tea,’ I said. ‘You read the mail.’

The tray had been set up earlier in the kitchen – Herbert is very fastidious about such things – and a fresh batch of scones was cooling beneath a checked tea towel. While I scooped cream and homemade jam into small ramekins, Herbert read out snippets of import from the day’s correspondence. I was juggling the tray into the office when he said, ‘Well, well.’

‘What is it?’

He folded the letter in question towards him and peered over its top. ‘An offer of work, I believe.’

‘From whom?’

‘A rather large publisher.’

‘How cheeky!’ I handed him a cup. ‘I trust you’ll remind them that you already have a perfectly good job.’

‘I would, of course,’ he said, ‘only the offer isn’t for me. It’s you they want, Edie. You and no one else.’

The letter, as it turned out, was from the publisher of Raymond Blythe’s Mud Man. Over a steaming cup of Darjeeling and a jam-laden scone, Herbert read it aloud to me; then he read it again. Then he explained its contents in rather basic terms because, despite a decade in the publishing industry, the surprise had rendered me temporarily incapable of understanding such things myself: to wit, there was a new edition of the Mud Man being printed the following year to coincide with its seventy-fifth anniversary. Raymond Blythe’s publishers wanted me to write a new introduction to celebrate the occasion.

‘You’re having a joke…’ He shook his head. ‘But that’s just… far too unbelievable,’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He turned over the letter, saw that the other side was blank. Gazed up at me, eyes enormous behind his glasses. ‘It doesn’t say.’

‘But how peculiar.’ A ripple beneath my skin as the threads that had tied themselves to Milderhurst began to tremble. ‘What shall I do?’

Herbert handed me the letter. ‘I should think you might start by giving this number a ring.’

My conversation with Judith Waterman, publisher at Pippin Books, was short and not unsweet. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she said, when I told her who I was and why I was calling: ‘we’d employed another writer to do it and we were very happy with him. The daughters though, Raymond Blythe’s daughters, were not. The whole thing’s become rather a grand headache; we’re publishing early next year, so time is of the essence. The edition’s been in development for months: our writer had already conducted preliminary interviews and got some way into his draft, then out of the blue we received a phone call from the Misses Blythe letting us know they were pulling the plug.’

That I could imagine. It was not difficult to envisage Percy Blythe taking great pleasure in such contrary behaviour.

‘We’re committed to the edition, though,’ Judith continued. ‘We’ve a new imprint starting, a series of classics with memoir-esque opening essays, and The True History of the Mud Man, as one of our most popular titles, is the ideal choice for summer publication.’

I realized I was nodding as if she were with me in the room. ‘I can understand that,’ I said, ‘I’m just not sure how I can-’

‘The problem,’ Judith pressed on, ‘would appear to be with one of the daughters in particular.’

‘Oh?’

‘Persephone Blythe. Which is an unexpected nuisance seeing as the proposal came to us in the first instance from her twin sister. Whatever the case, they weren’t happy, we can’t do anything without permission due to a complicated copyright arrangement, and the whole thing is teetering. I went down there myself a fortnight ago and mercifully they agreed to allow the project to go ahead with a different writer, someone of whom they approved – ’ She broke off and I heard her gulping a drink at the other end of the line. ‘We sent them a long list of writers, including samples of their work. They sent them all back to us unopened. Persephone Blythe asked for you instead.’

A hook of niggling doubt snagged my stomach lining. ‘She asked for me?’

‘By name. Quite assuredly.’

‘You know I’m not a writer.’

‘Yes,’ said Judith. ‘And I explained that to them, but they didn’t mind at all. Evidently they already know who you are and what you do. More to the point, it would appear you’re the only person they’ll tolerate, which reduces our options rather dramatically. Either you write it, or the entire project collapses.’

‘I see.’

‘Look – ’ the busy sound of papers being moved across a desk – ‘I’m convinced you’ll do a good job. You work in publishing, you know your way around sentences. I’ve contacted some of your former clients and they all spoke very highly of you.’

‘Really?’ Oh, frightful vanity, fishing for a compliment! She was right to ignore me.

‘And all of us at Pippin are looking at this as a positive. We’re wondering whether perhaps the sisters have been so specific because they’re ready, finally, to talk about the inspiration behind the book. I don’t need to tell you what a terrific coup that would be, to discover the true history behind the book’s creation!’

She did not. My dad was doing a brilliant job of that already.

‘Well then. What do you say?’

What did I say? Percy Blythe had requested me personally. I was being asked to write about the Mud Man, to speak again with the Sisters Blythe, to visit them in their castle. What else was there to say? ‘I’ll do it.’

‘I was at the opening night of the play, you know,’ said Herbert when I’d finished relaying the conversation.

‘The Mud Man play?’

He nodded as Jess took up her position on his feet. ‘Have I never mentioned it?’

‘No.’ That he hadn’t was not as strange as it might seem. Herbert’s parents were theatre people and much of his childhood had been spent knocking about behind the proscenium arch.

‘I was twelve, or thereabouts,’ he said, ‘and I remember it because it was one of the most astonishing things I’d ever seen. Marvellous in many ways. The castle had been constructed in the centre of the stage, but they’d built it on a disc, raised and inclined, so that the tower pointed towards the audience and we could look right through the attic window into the room where Jane and her brother slept. The moat was on the very rim of the disc and the lights came from behind, so that when the Mud Man finally emerged, when he began his climb up the stones of the castle, long shadows fell into the audience, as if the mud of the story, the damp and the dark and the monster himself, were reaching out to touch one.’

I shivered theatrically and earned a suspicious look from Jess. ‘Sounds the stuff of nightmares. No wonder you remember it so well.’

‘Quite, although there was more to it than that. I remember that night specially because of the kerfuffle in the audience.’

‘Which kerfuffle?’

‘I was watching from the wings, so I was well placed to see it when it happened. A commotion, up in the writer’s box, people standing, a small child crying, someone ailing. A doctor was called and some of the family retired backstage.’

‘The Blythe family?’

‘I suppose it must have been, although I confess to having lost interest once the disturbance was over. The show went on, as it must – I don’t think the incident rated as much as a mention in the papers the following day. But for a young lad like myself it was all a bit of excitement.’

‘Did you ever find out what it was that happened?’ I was thinking of Juniper, the episodes I’d heard so much about.

He shook his head and drained the last of his tea. ‘Just another colourful theatre moment.’ He fumbled a cigarette into his mouth, grinned around it as he drew. ‘But enough about me. How about this summons to the castle for young Edie Burchill? What a lark, eh?’

I beamed, I couldn’t help it, but the expression staled a little as I reflected on the circumstances of my appointment. ‘I don’t feel great about the other writer, the fellow they engaged first.’

Herbert waved his hand and ash sifted to the carpet. ‘Not your fault, Edie love. Percy Blythe wanted you – she’s only human.’

‘Having met her, I’m not so sure of that.’

He laughed and smoked and said, ‘The other fellow will get over it: all’s fair in love, war and publishing.’

I was quite certain the displaced writer bore me no love, but I hoped it wasn’t a case of war either. ‘Judith Waterman says he’s offered to hand over his notes. She’s sending them this afternoon.’

‘Well, then. That’s very decent of him.’

It most definitely was, but something else had occurred to me. ‘I won’t be leaving you in the lurch when I go, will I? You’ll be all right here by yourself?’

‘It will be difficult,’ he said, furrowing his brow with mock perseverance. Still, I suppose I must bear it bravely.’

I pulled a face at him.

He stood up and patted his pockets, feeling for his car keys. ‘I’m only sorry we’ve got the vet’s appointment and I won’t be here when the notes arrive. Mark the best bits, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

He called Jess to heel then leaned over to hold my face in his two hands, so firmly I could feel the tremors that lived inside them as he planted a whiskery kiss on each cheek. ‘Be brilliant, my love.’

The package from Pippin Books arrived by courier that afternoon, just as I was closing up shop. I debated taking the whole lot home, opening it in a steady, professional manner, then thought better of it. Jiggled the key in the lock, fired up the lights again and hurried back to my desk, tearing the parcel open as I went.

Two cassette tapes fell free as I fumbled an enormous stack of papers from inside. There were over a hundred pages, fastened neatly with a pair of bulldog clips. On top was a cover letter from Judith Waterman including a project brief, the crux of which read as follows:

NEW PIPPIN CLASSICS is an exciting new imprint of PIPPIN BOOKS that will bring a selection of our favourite classic texts to new readers and old. Re-jacketed with beautiful matching bindings, assorted decorative endpapers and all-new biographical introductions, the NPC titles promise to be a dynamic publishing presence in coming years. Beginning with Raymond Blythe’s The True History of the Mud Man, NPC titles will be numbered so that readers can enjoy collecting them all.

There was an asterisked handwritten note from Judith at the bottom of the letter:

Edie, what you write is, of course, up to you; however, in our initial briefing discussions we wondered whether, seeing as so much is already known about Raymond Blythe and because he was so reticent about his inspiration, it might be interesting to write the piece with a particular eye to the three daughters, posing and answering the question of what it was like to grow up in the place from which the Mud Man came.

You’ll see in the interview transcripts that our original writer, Adam Gilbert, has included detailed descriptions and impressions of his visits to the castle. You are most welcome to work from these, but you’ll no doubt wish to conduct your own research. In fact, Persephone Blythe was surprisingly amenable on that count, suggesting that you pay them a visit. (And it goes without saying that if she should choose to let slip the origins of the story we’d love for you to write that up for us!)

The budget isn’t huge but there’s sufficient remaining to fund a short stay in the village of Milderhurst.

We have made an arrangement with Mrs Marilyn Bird at the nearby Home Farm Bed and Breakfast. Adam was pleased with the standard and cleanliness of the room, and the tariff includes meals. Mrs Bird has advised of a four-night vacancy beginning October 31st, so when next we speak please let me know whether you’d like us to make a reservation.

I flipped over the letter, ran my hand across Adam Gilbert’s cover sheet, and sank into this most thrilling moment. I believe I may actually have smiled as I turned the page; I certainly bit my lip. Rather too hard, which is how I remember it so well.

Four hours later I’d read it all and I was no longer sitting in a quiet office in London. I was of course, but also I was not. I was many miles away inside a dark and knotty castle in Kent, with three sisters, their larger-than-life Daddy, and a manuscript that was yet to become a book that was yet to become a classic.

I laid down the transcripts, pushed back from my desk and stretched. Then I stood and stretched some more. A kink had tied itself at the base of my spine – I’m told reading with one’s feet crossed atop the desk can do that – and I struggled to dislodge it. Time and a little space allowed certain thoughts to rise from the ocean floor of my mind, and two things in particular floated to the surface. First up, I was awestruck by Adam Gilbert’s workmanship. The notes had clearly been transcribed verbatim from taped interviews and prepared on an old-fashioned typewriter, with impeccable handwritten annotations where necessary, and a level of detail so that they read more like play scripts than interviews (complete with bracketed stage directions if any of his subjects so much as scratched); which is probably why the other thought struck me so strongly: there had been a notable omission. I knelt on my chair and leafed again through the stack to con- firm, checking both sides of the paper. There was nothing from Juniper Blythe.

I drummed my fingers slowly on the stack of notes: there were perfectly good reasons why Adam Gilbert might have passed her over. There was more than enough material without additional comment, she hadn’t even been alive when the Mud Man was first published, she was Juniper… Nonetheless, it niggled. And when things niggle, the perfectionist in me starts to fret. And I don’t much like to fret. There were three Sisters Blythe. Their story, therefore, should not – could not – be written without Juniper’s voice.

Adam Gilbert’s contact details were typed at the bottom of his cover sheet and I deliberated for around ten seconds – just long enough to wonder whether nine thirty was too late to ring somebody whose home address was Old Mill Cottage, Tenterden – before reaching for the phone and dialling his number.

A woman picked up and said: ‘Hello. Mrs Button speaking.’

Something about the slow, melodic tone of her voice reminded me of those wartime movies with the rows of phone operators working the switchboard. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Edie Burchill, but I’m afraid I might have called the wrong number. I was looking for Adam Gilbert.’

‘This is Mr Gilbert’s residence. This is his nurse speaking, Mrs Button.’

Nurse. Oh dear. He was an invalid. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you this late. Perhaps I ought to call back another time.’

‘Not at all. Mr Gilbert is still in his study; I see the light beneath the door. Quite against doctor’s orders, but so long as he keeps off his bad leg there’s not much I can do. He’s rather stubborn. Just a minute and I’ll transfer your call.’

There was a heavy plastic clunk as she laid down the receiver, and the steady sound of footsteps retreating. A knock on a distant door, a murmured exchange, then a few seconds later, Adam Gilbert picked up.

There was a pause after I introduced myself and my purpose, in which I apologized some more for the awkward way in which we’d entered each other’s orbit. ‘I didn’t even know about the Pippin Books edition until today. I’ve no idea at all why Percy Blythe would put her foot down like that.’

Still he didn’t speak.

‘I’m really very, very sorry. I can’t explain it; I’ve only met her once before and then only briefly. I certainly never meant for this to happen.’ I was jabbering, I could hear it, so with great force of will I stopped.

Finally he spoke, in a world-weary sort of voice. ‘All right then, Edie Burchill. I forgive you for stealing my job. One condition, though. If you find out anything to do with the Mud Man’s origins you tell me first.’

My dad would not be pleased. ‘Of course.’

‘Right then. What can I do for you?’

I explained that I’d just read through his transcript, I complimented him on the thoroughness of his notes, and then I said, ‘There’s one little thing I’m wondering, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The third sister, Juniper. There’s nothing here from her.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, there’s not.’

I waited, and when nothing followed I said, ‘You didn’t speak with her?’

‘No.’

Again I waited. Again nothing followed. Apparently this was not going to be easy. At the other end of the line he cleared his throat and said, ‘I proposed to interview Juniper Blythe but she wasn’t available.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, she was available in a bodily sense – I don’t think she leaves the castle much – but the older sisters wouldn’t permit me to speak with her.’

Comprehension dawned. ‘Oh.’

‘She’s not well, so I expect that’s all it was, but…’

‘But what?’

A break in conversation during which I could almost see him grabbing for the words to explain himself. Finally, a brambly sigh. ‘I got the feeling they were trying to protect her in some way.’

‘Protect her from what? From whom? From you?’

‘No, not from me!’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know. It was just a feeling. As if they were worried about what she might say. How it might reflect.’

‘On them? On their father?’

‘Maybe. Or else on her.’

I remembered then the strange feeling I’d got when I was at Milderhurst, the glance that had passed between Saffy and Percy when Juniper shouted at me in the yellow parlour; Saffy’s concern when she discovered that Juniper had wandered off, that she’d been talking to me in the passage. That she might have said something she shouldn’t. ‘But why?’ I said, more to myself than to him, thinking about Mum’s lost letter, the trouble hinted at between its lines. ‘What could Juniper possibly have to hide?’

‘Well,’ said Adam, lowering his voice a little, ‘I must admit to having done a bit of digging. The more adamant they were about keeping her out of it, the more interested I got.’

‘And? What did you find?’ I was glad he couldn’t see me. There was no dignity in the way I was practically swallowing the telephone receiver in my eagerness.

‘An incident in 1935; I guess you could call it a scandal.’ He let the final word hang between us with a sort of mysterious satisfaction, and I could just picture him: leaning back against his bentwood desk chair, smoking jacket drawn taut against his belly, warm pipe clamped between his teeth.

I matched his hushed tone. ‘What sort of scandal?’

‘Some “bad business” is what I was told, involving the son of an employee. One of the gardeners. The details were all rather imprecise and I couldn’t find anything of an official nature to verify it, but the story goes that the two of them were involved in some sort of a scrap and he came out of it beaten black and blue.’

‘By Juniper?’ An image came to mind of the wisp of old woman I’d met at Milderhurst; the slender girl in the old photos. I tried not to laugh. ‘When she was thirteen years old?’

‘That was the implication, though saying it out loud like that makes it seem rather far-fetched.’

‘But that’s what he told people? That Juniper did it?’

‘Well, he didn’t say any such thing. I can’t imagine there are too many young fellows who’d admit freely to being bested by a slim young girl like her. It was his mother who went up to the castle making claims. From what I hear, Raymond Blythe paid them off. Dressed up as a bonus for his father, apparently, who’d worked his whole life on the estate. The rumour didn’t go away, though, not completely; there was still talk in the village.’

I got the feeling Juniper was the sort of girl people liked to talk about: her family were important, she was beautiful and talented – in Mum’s words, enchanting – but still: Juniper the Teenage Man-Beater? It seemed unlikely, to say the very least.

‘Look, it’s probably just groundless old talk.’ Adam’s tone was breezy again as he echoed my thoughts. ‘Nothing at all to do with why her sisters vetoed our interview.’

I nodded slowly.

‘More likely, they just wanted to spare her the stress. She’s not well, she’s certainly not good with strangers, she wasn’t even born when the Mud Man was written.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure that’s all it was.’

But I wasn’t. I didn’t really imagine that the twins were fretting over a long-forgotten incident with the gardener’s son, but I couldn’t rid myself of the certainty that there was something else behind it. I put down the phone and I was back in that ghostly passage, looking between Juniper and Saffy and Percy, feeling like a child who is old enough to recognize nuance at play, but hopelessly ill-equipped to read it.

The day that I was due to leave for Milderhurst, Mum came early to my bedroom. The sun was still hiding behind the wall of Singer & Sons, but I’d been awake for an hour or so already, as excited as a kid on her first day of school.

‘There’s something I wanted to give you,’ she said. ‘To lend you, at any rate. It’s rather precious to me.’

I waited, wondering what it might be. She reached inside her dressing-gown pocket and took an object out. Her eyes searched mine for a moment, then she handed it over. A little book with a brown leather cover.

‘You said you wanted to know me better.’ She was trying hard to be brave, to keep her voice from shaking. ‘It’s all in there. She’s in there. The person that I used to be.’

I took the journal, as nervy as a novice mother with a brand-new baby. Awed by its preciousness, terrified of doing it damage, amazed and touched and gratified that Mum would trust me with such a treasure. I couldn’t think what to say; that is, I could think of lots of things I wanted to say, but there was a lump in my throat, years in the making, and it wasn’t about to budge. ‘Thank you,’ I managed, before I began to cry.

Mum’s eyes misted in instant response and at the very same moment each of us reached for the other and held on tight.

THREE

Milderhurst, April 20th, 1940

It was typical. After a terribly cold winter, spring had arrived with a great big smile and the day itself was perfect; a fact Percy couldn’t help but take as a direct slight from God. Then and there she became a non-believer, standing in the village church, at the far end of the family pew her grandmother had designed and William Morris had carved, watching as Mr Gordon, the vicar, pronounced Harry Rogers and Lucy Middleton man and wife. The entire experience had the vaguely spongy feeling of a nightmare, though it was possible the quantity of bolstering whisky she’d consumed beforehand was playing its part.

Harry smiled at his new bride and Percy was struck again by how handsome he was. Not in the conventional sense, neither devilish nor suave nor clean-cut, rather he was handsome because he was good. She had always thought so, even when she was a little girl and he a young fellow who came to the house to attend the clocks for Daddy. There was something about the way he carried himself, the unassuming set of his shoulders, that marked him as a man whose self-opinion was not unduly inflated. Moreover he was possessed of a slow, steady nature, which might not have been dynamic, but spoke of care and tenderness. She used to watch him from between the banisters, coaxing life back into the oldest and crossest of the castle’s clocks, but if he’d noticed he’d never let on. He didn’t see her now, either. He only had eyes for Lucy.

For her part, Lucy was smiling, giving an excellent performance of one who was pleased to be marrying the man she loved above all others. Percy had known Lucy for a long time, but had never thought her such a very good actress. An ill feeling shifted in the pit of her stomach and she longed again for the whole ordeal to be ended.

She could have stayed away, of course – feigned illness or pleaded essential war work – but there’d have been talk. They’d employed Lucy at the castle for over twenty years: it was unthinkable that she might be married without a Blythe standing witness in the congregation. Daddy, for obvious reasons, made a poor choice, Saffy was preparing the castle for Meredith’s mother and father, and Juniper – never an ideal candidate – had retreated to the attic with her pen in a frenzy of inspiration; thus the duty had fallen to Percy. To shirk the responsibility wasn’t an option, not least because Percy would’ve had to explain her absence to her twin. Crushed to be missing the wedding herself, Saffy had demanded a report of every last detail.

‘The dress, the flowers, the way they look at one another,’ she’d said, listing them on her fingers as Percy tried to leave the castle. ‘I want to hear it all.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Percy had said, wondering whether her whisky flask would fit inside the fancy little handbag Saffy had insisted she carry. ‘Don’t forget Daddy’s medicine, will you? I’ve left it out on the table in the entrance hall.’

‘The hall table. Right.’

‘It’s important he has it on the hour. We don’t want a repeat of last time.’

‘No,’ Saffy agreed, ‘we certainly do not. Poor Meredith thought she was seeing a ghost, poor lamb. A very rambunctious ghost.’

Percy had almost been at the bottom of the front stairs when she’d turned back. ‘And Saffy?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Let me know if anyone comes to call.’

Ghastly death merchants preying on an old man’s confusion. Whispering in his ear, playing up to his fears, his ancient guilt. Rattling their Catholic crucifixes and muttering their Latin into the castle corners; convincing Daddy that the spectres of his imagination were bona fide demons. All, she was sure, so they could get their hands on the castle when he died.

Percy picked at the skin around her fingernails, wondered how much longer it would be before she could get outside for a cigarette; whether it was possible for her to slip out unnoticed if she affected the perfect attitude of authority. The vicar said something then and everybody stood; Harry took Lucy’s hand in his to walk her back down the aisle, holding it with such tenderness that Percy realized she couldn’t hate him, even now.

Joy animated the married couple’s features and Percy did her best to match it. She even managed to join in the applause as they made their way along the narrow aisle and out into the sunshine. She was aware of her limbs, the unnatural claw she’d made with her hand on the back of the pew, the lines of her face sitting in forced merriment that made her feel like a clockwork puppet. Someone hidden high above in the raked church ceiling jerked an invisible wire and she seized her handbag from beside her. Laughed a little and pretended to be a living, feeling thing.

The magnolias were out, just as Saffy had hoped and prayed and crossed her fingers for, and it was one of those rare but precious days in April when summer begins to advertise itself. Saffy smiled just because she couldn’t help it.

‘Come on, slow coach,’ she called, turning to hurry Meredith along. ‘It’s Saturday, the sun is shining, your mother and father are on their way to visit; there’s no excuse for dragging your feet.’ Really, the child was in a most cheerless mood. One would’ve thought she’d be delighted at the prospect of seeing her parents, yet she’d been moping all morning. Saffy could guess why, of course.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, as Meredith reached her side. ‘Juniper won’t be much longer. It never lasts more than a day or so.’

‘But she’s been up there since dinnertime. The door’s locked, she won’t answer. I don’t understand…’ Meredith squinted in an unflattering way, a habit that Saffy found frightfully endearing. ‘What’s she doing?’

‘Writing,’ said Saffy simply. ‘That’s how it is with Juniper. That’s how it’s always been. It won’t last long and then she’ll be back to normal. Here – ’ she handed Meredith the small stack of cake plates – ‘why don’t you help by laying these out? Shall we sit your mother and father with their backs to the hedge so they can see the garden?’

‘All right,’ said Meredith, cheering up.

Saffy smiled to herself. Meredith Baker was delightfully compliant – an unexpected joy after raising Juniper – and her residency at Milderhurst Castle had been a resounding success. There was nothing like a child for forcing life back into tired, old stones, and the infusion of light and laughter had been just what the doctor ordered. Even Percy had taken a shine to the girl, relieved, no doubt, at having found the curlicues intact.

The greatest surprise, though, had been Juniper’s reaction. The evident affection she felt for the young evacuee was the closest Saffy had ever seen her come to caring for another person. Safty heard them sometimes, talking and giggling in the garden, and was confounded, but pleasantly so, by the genuine geniality in Juniper’s voice. Genial was not a word Saffy had ever thought to use when describing her little sister.

‘Let’s lay a place here for June,’ she said, indicating the table, ‘just in case, and you beside, I think… and Percy over there…’

Meredith had been following, laying down the plates, but she stopped then. ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Where will you sit?’ And perhaps she read the apology forming in Saffy’s face for she went on quickly, ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’

‘Now, my dear.’ Saffy let the clutch of cake forks fall limp against her skirt, ‘I’d love to, you know I would. But Percy’s very traditional about such matters. She’s the eldest, and in the absence of Daddy that makes her the host. I know it must all sound terribly silly and formal to you, very old-fashioned indeed, but that’s the way things are done here. It’s the way Daddy likes to entertain at Milderhurst.’

‘But I still don’t see why you can’t both come.’

‘Well, one of us has to stay inside should Daddy need help.’

‘But Percy-’

‘Is so looking forward to it. She’s very keen to meet your parents.’

Saffy could see that Meredith was unconvinced; more than that, the poor child looked so bitterly disappointed that Saffy would have done just about anything to cheer her up. She prevaricated, but only briefly and not with any real strength, and when Meredith let out a long, dispirited sigh, Saffy’s remaining resolve collapsed. ‘Oh, Merry,’ she said, sneaking a glance over her shoulder, ‘I shouldn’t say anything, I really shouldn’t, but there is another reason I have to stay indoors.’

She slid to one end of the rickety garden seat and indicated Meredith should join her. Took a deep, cool breath and released it decidedly. Then she told Meredith all about the telephone call she was expecting that afternoon. ‘He’s a very important private collector in London,’ she said. ‘I wrote to him after a small advertisement appeared in the newspaper seeking an assistant to catalogue his collection. And he wrote back recently to tell me that mine was the successful application; that he would telephone me this afternoon so we might work out the details together.’

‘What does he collect?’

Saffy couldn’t help clasping her hands together beneath her chin. ‘Antiquities, art, books, beautiful things – what heaven!’

Excitement brightened the tiny freckles across Meredith’s nose and Saffy thought again what a lovely child she was, and how far she’d come in six short months. When one considered the poor skinny waif she’d been when Juniper first brought her home! Beneath the pale London skin and ragged dress, though, there lurked a quick mind and a delightful hunger for knowledge.

‘Can I visit the collection?’ said Meredith. ‘I’ve always wanted to see a real, live Egyptian artefact.’

Saffy laughed. ‘Of course you shall. I’m certain Mr Wicks would be delighted to show his precious things to a clever young lady like you.’

Meredith really did appear to glow then and the first barb of regret poked holes in Saffy’s pleasure. Was it not just a little unkind to fill the girl’s head with such grand imaginings only then to expect her to keep quiet about them? ‘Now, Merry,’ she said, sobering, ‘it’s very exciting news, but you must remember that it’s a secret. Percy doesn’t know yet, and nor shall she.’

‘Why not?’ Meredith’s eyes widened further. ‘What will she do?’

‘She won’t be happy, that’s for certain. She won’t want me to go. She’s rather resistant to change, you see, and she likes things the way they are, all three of us here together. She’s very protective like that. She always has been.’

Meredith was nodding, absorbing this detail of the family dynamic with so much interest that Saffy half expected her to pull out that little journal of hers and take down notes. Her interest was understandable, though: Saffy had heard sufficient of the child’s own older sister to know that notions of sibling protectiveness would be unfamiliar to her.

‘Percy is my twin and I love her dearly, but sometimes, Merry dear, one has to put one’s own desires first. Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.’ She smiled and resisted adding that there had been other opportunities, other chances, all lost. It was one thing to feed a child a confidence, quite another to burden her with adult regrets.

‘But what will happen when it’s time for you to go?’ said Meredith. ‘She’ll find out then.’

‘Oh, but I’ll tell her before that!’ Saffy said with a laugh. ‘Of course I will. I’m not planning to abscond in the black of night, you know! Certainly not. I just need to find the perfect words, a way of ensuring that Percy’s feelings aren’t hurt. Until such time, I think it best that she not hear a thing about it. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Meredith, somewhat breathlessly.

Saffy bit down on her bottom lip; she had the uneasy sense that she’d made an unfortunate error of judgement, that it had been unfair to put a child in such an awkward position. She’d only meant to take Meredith’s mind off her own miserable mood.

Meredith misunderstood Saffy’s silence, taking it for a lack of faith in her ability to keep a confidence. ‘I won’t say anything, I promise. Not a word. I’m very good at secrets.’

‘Oh Meredith,’ Saffy smiled ruefully. ‘I don’t doubt it. That’s not it at all – Oh, dear, I’m afraid I must apologize. It was wrong of me, asking you to keep a secret from Percy – will you forgive me?’

Meredith nodded solemnly and Saffy detected a glimmer in the girl’s face; pride at having been treated in such an adult manner, she supposed. Saffy remembered her own childish eagerness to grow up, how she’d waited impatiently on the cliff edge, pleading with adulthood to claim her, and she wondered whether it was possible ever to slow another’s journey. Was it even fair to try? Surely there could be nothing wrong in wanting to save Meredith, just as she’d tried to save Juniper, from reaching adulthood and its disappointments too fast?

‘There now, lovely one,’ she said, taking the last plate from Meredith’s hands, ‘why don’t you leave me to finish here? Go and have some fun while you wait for your parents to arrive. The morning’s far too brilliant to be spent doing chores. Just try not to get your dress too dirty.’

It was one of the pinafores Saffy had sewn when Merry first arrived; made from a lovely piece of Liberty fabric ordered years ago, not because Saffy had a project in mind, but because it was simply too beautiful not to possess. It had languished ever since in the sewing cupboard, waiting patiently for Saffy to find it a purpose. And now she had. As Meredith dissolved into the horizon, Saffy returned her attention to the table, making sure everything was just so.

Meredith wandered aimlessly through the long grass, swishing a stick from side to side, wondering how it was that one person’s absence could rob the day so wholly of its shape and meaning. She rounded the hill and met the stream, then followed it as far as the bridge carrying the driveway.

She considered going further. Across the verge and into the woods. Deep enough that the light sifted, the spotted trout disappeared, and the water ran thick as molasses. All the way until she crossed into the wild woods and reached the forgotten pool at the base of the oldest tree in Cardarker Wood. The place of insistent blackness that she’d hated when she’d first come to the castle. Mum and Dad weren’t due for an hour or so yet, there was still time, and she knew the way, it was only a matter of sticking by the burbling brook, after all…

But without Juniper, Meredith knew, it wouldn’t be so much fun. Just dark and damp and rather smelly. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Juniper had said, the first time they’d explored together. Meredith had been uncertain. The log they were sitting on was cool and damp and her plimsolls wet from where she’d slid off a rock. There was another pool on the estate, teeming with butterflies and birds, and a rope swing that lazed back and forth in the dappled sunlight, and she’d wished, wished, wished, they’d decided to spend the day there instead. She didn’t say as much though; the force of Juniper’s conviction was such that Meredith knew the fault was her own, that her tastes were too juvenile, that she just wasn’t trying hard enough. Screwing her determination to the sticking place, she’d smiled and said, ‘Yes.’ And again, with feeling, ‘Yes. It is. Wonderful.’

In a single, fluid motion, Juniper had stood, arms extended to the sides, and tiptoed across a fallen log. ‘It’s the shadows,’ she’d said, ‘the way the reeds slip down the banks, almost slyly; the smell of mud and moisture and rot.’ She smiled sideways at Meredith. ‘Why, it’s almost prehistoric. If I told you we’d crossed an invisible threshold into the past, you’d believe me, wouldn’t you?’

Meredith had shivered then, just as she did now, and a small, smooth magnet within her child’s body had thrummed with inexplicable urgency, and she’d felt the pull of longing, though for what she did not know.

‘Close your eyes and listen,’ Juniper had whispered, finger to her lips. ‘You can hear the spiders spinning…’

Meredith closed her eyes now. Listened to the chorus of crickets, the occasional splashing of trout, the distant drone of a tractor somewhere… There was another sound, too. One that seemed distinctly out of place. It was an engine, she realized, close by and coming nearer.

She opened her eyes and saw it. A black motorcar, winding down the gravelled driveway from the castle. Meredith couldn’t help but stare. Visitors were rare at Milderhurst, motorcars even rarer. Few people had the petrol for making social calls and, from what Meredith could tell, those who did were hoarding it so they could flee north when the Germans invaded. Even the priest who called on the old man in the tower arrived on foot these days. This visitor must be someone official, Meredith decided; someone on special war business.

The motorcar passed and the driver, a man she did not recognize, touched his black hat, nodding sternly at Meredith. She squinted after him, watching the car as it continued warily along the gravel. It disappeared behind a wooded bend only to reappear some time later at the foot of the driveway, a black speck turning onto the Tenterden Road.

Meredith yawned and promptly forgot all about it. There was a patch of violets growing wild near the bridge and she couldn’t resist picking some. When her posy was lovely and thick, she climbed up to sit on the railing of the bridge and divided her time between daydreaming and dropping the flowers, one by one, into the stream, watching as they turned purple somersaults in the gentle current.

‘Morning.’

She looked up to see Percy Blythe pushing her bicycle up the driveway, an unflattering hat on her head, requisite cigarette in hand. The stern twin, as Meredith usually thought of her, though today there was something else in her face, something beyond stern and a little more like sad. It might just have been the hat. Meredith said, ‘Hello,’ and clutched the railing to save herself from falling.

‘Or is it afternoon already?’ Percy slowed to a stop and flicked her wrist, reading the small watch-face that sat against the inside. ‘Just gone half past. You won’t forget we have a tea engagement, will you?’ She glanced over the end of her cigarette as she drew long and hard, then exhaled slowly. ‘Your parents would be rather disappointed, I imagine: to travel all this way only to miss you.’

It was a joke, Meredith suspected, but there was nothing jovial about Percy’s expression or her manner so she couldn’t be sure. She hedged her bets, smiling politely; at the very least, she figured, Percy might assume she hadn’t heard.

Percy gave no indication that she’d noticed Meredith’s response, let alone given it further thought. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘things to do.’ And she nodded bluntly, continuing on towards the castle.

FOUR

When Meredith finally caught sight of her parents, walking together up the driveway, her stomach flip-flopped. For a split second she felt as if she was watching the approach of two dream people, familiar yet entirely out of place here, in the real world. The sensation lasted only a moment before something inside her, some disc of perception, turned over and she saw properly it was Mum and Dad and they were here at last and she had so much to tell them. She ran forwards, arms wide, and Dad knelt, mirroring her posture, so she could leap into his big, wide, warm embrace. Mum planted a kiss on her cheek, which was unusual but not unpleasant, and although she knew herself to be far too old for it neither Rita nor Ed were there to tease her, so Meredith let her dad hold hands with her all the rest of the way, as she talked without pause about the castle and its library and the fields and the brook and the woods.

Percy was already waiting by the table, smoking another cigarette, which she extinguished when she saw them. She smoothed the sides of her skirt, held out a hand, and with a bit of fussing the greeting was effected. ‘And how was your train trip? Not too unpleasant I hope?’ The question was perfectly ordinary, polite even, but Meredith heard the toffy clip of Percy’s voice through her parent’s ears and wished it were Saffy’s soft welcome instead.

Sure enough, Mum’s voice was thin and guarded: ‘It was long. Stopping and starting all the way, letting the troop trains pass. We spent more time in the sidings than we did on the track.’

‘Still,’ said Dad, ‘our boys have gotta get themselves to war somehow. Show Hitler Britain can take it.’

‘Just so, Mr Baker. Sit down, won’t you, please?’ said Percy, indicating the prettily laid table. ‘You must be famished.’

Percy poured tea and offered slices of Saffy’s cake, and they spoke, somewhat stiltedly, about the crowding on the trains, the state of the war (Denmark had toppled, would Norway be next?), predictions for its progress. Meredith nibbled a piece of cake and watched. She’d been convinced that Mum and Dad would take one look at the castle, then another at Percy Blythe, with her plummy accent and broomstick spine, and adopt defensive manoeuvres, but so far things were going smoothly enough.

Meredith’s mum was very quiet, it was true. She kept one hand holding tightly onto the handbag on her lap in a nervous, stiff sort of way, which was a little disquieting given that Meredith couldn’t think that she’d ever seen her mother nervous before: not of rats, or spiders, or even Mr Lane from across the road when he’d spent too long in the pub. Dad seemed to be a bit more at ease, nodding as Percy described the Spitfire drive and the care packages for soldiers in France, and sipping tea from a hand-painted porcelain teacup as if he did so every day. Well, almost. He did manage to make it look rather like a doll’s-house tea set. Meredith didn’t think she’d ever realized quite how enormous his fingers were and an unexpected wave of affection washed over her. She reached out beneath the table to lay her palm on his other hand. They weren’t a family who expressed themselves physically and he glanced up, surprised, before squeezing hers in return.

‘How’s your schoolwork going, my girl?’ He leaned his shoulder a little closer and looked up to wink at Percy: ‘Our Rita might have got the looks, but young Merry here took all the brains.’

Meredith warmed with pride. ‘I’m doing lessons here, Dad, at the castle, with Saffy. You should see the library, there are more books even than at the circulating library. Every wall covered with shelves. And I’m learning Latin…’ Oh, how she loved Latin. Sounds from the past, imbued with meaning. Ancient voices on the wind. Meredith pushed her spectacles higher up the bridge of her nose; they often slipped with excitement. ‘And I’m learning the piano, too.’

‘My sister Seraphina is very pleased with your daughter’s progress,’ said Percy. ‘She’s come along rather well, considering she’d never seen a piano before.’

‘Is that right?’ said Dad, hands jiggling in his pockets so that his elbows moved most peculiarly above the table top. ‘My girl can play tunes?’

Meredith smiled proudly and wondered if her ears were glowing. ‘Some.’

Percy topped up everybody’s tea. ‘Perhaps you’ll take your parents inside later, Meredith; into the music room, where you might play one of your pieces for them?’

‘You hear that, Mum?’ Dad nodded his chin. ‘Our Meredith is playing real music.’

‘I heard.’ Something seemed to set then in Mum’s face, though Meredith wasn’t sure exactly what it was. It was the same look she got when she and Dad were fighting over something, and he made a small but fatal error ensuring that victory would be hers. Her voice tight, she spoke to Meredith as if Percy wasn’t there. ‘We missed you at Christmas.’

‘I missed you too, Mum. I did really want to come and visit. Only there were no trains. They needed them all for the soldiers.’

‘Rita’s coming home with us today.’ Mum set her teacup on its saucer, straightened the teaspoon decisively and pushed it away. ‘Found her a position with a hairdressing salon, we have, down on the Old Kent Road. Starts on Monday. Cleaning at first, but they’ll teach her how to do sets and cuts, too.’ Gratification brought a glimmer to Mum’s eyes. ‘There’s opportunities at the moment, Merry, what with so many of the older girls joining the Wrens or going to the factories. Good opportunities for a young girl without other prospects.’

It made sense. Rita was always fussing with her hair and her prized collection of beauty aids. ‘Sounds good, Mum. Nice to have someone in the family who can set your hair for you.’ That didn’t seem to please her mum.

Percy Blythe took a cigarette from the silver case Saffy insisted she use in company and felt about in her pocket for matches.

Dad cleared his throat. ‘The thing is, Merry,’ he said, and his awkwardness was no consolation to Meredith for the terrible thing he said next ‘your Mum and me – we thought it might be time for you, too.’

And then Meredith understood. They wanted her to go home, to become a hairdresser, to leave Milderhurst. Deep inside her stomach panic formed a ball and started rolling back and forth. She blinked a couple of times, straightened her specs, then stammered, ‘But, but, I don’t want to be a hairdresser. Saffy says it’s important I finish my education. That I might even get a place at grammar school when the war is over.’

‘Your mum was just thinking of your future with the hairdressing; we can talk about something else if you like. An office girl maybe. One of the ministries?’

‘But it’s not safe in London,’ said Meredith suddenly. It was a stroke of genius: she wasn’t really remotely frightened of Hitler or his bombs, but perhaps this was a way to convince them.

Dad smiled and patted her shoulder. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, my girl. We’re all doing our bit to ruin Hitler’s party: Mum’s just started in a munitions factory and I’m working nights. There’s no bombs been dropped, no poison gas, the old neighbourhood looks just the same as always.’

Just the same as always. Meredith pictured the grimy old streets and her grim place in them, and with a bolt of sickening clarity admitted then how desperate she was to stay on at Milderhurst. She turned towards the castle, knotting her fingers, wishing she could summon Juniper with nothing more than the intensity of her need; wishing that Saffy might appear and say the perfect thing, make Mum and Dad see that taking her home was the wrong thing to do, that they must let her stay.

Perhaps by some strange twin communication, Percy chose that moment to wade in. ‘Mr and Mrs Baker,’ she said, tapping the end of her cigarette on the silver case and looking like she’d rather be anywhere else, ‘I can understand that you’d very much like to have Meredith home with you, but if the invasion should-’

‘You’re coming with us this afternoon, young miss, and that’s final.’ Mum’s hackles had risen like a set of quills. She didn’t so much as glance at Percy, fixing Meredith with a look that promised fierce punishment later.

Meredith’s eyes watered behind her spectacles. ‘I’m not.’

Dad growled, ‘Don’t you talk back to your mother-’

‘Well,’ said Percy abruptly. She’d lifted the lid on the teapot and was scrutinizing its contents. ‘The pot’s empty; excuse me while I refill it, won’t you? We’re rather short on help at the moment. Wartime economies.’

They all three watched her retreat, then Mum hissed at Dad, ‘Rather short on help. You hear that?’

‘Come on, Annie.’ Confrontation was not something Dad enjoyed. He was the sort of man whose impressive bulk was enough of a deterrent that he rarely needed to come to blows. Mum, on the other hand…

‘That woman’s been looking down her nose at us since we arrived. Wartime economies indeed – in a place like this.’ She tossed her hand in the direction of the castle. ‘Probably thinks we ought to be in there fetching after her.’

‘She does not!’ said Meredith. ‘They’re not like that.’

‘Meredith.’ Dad was still staring at a fixed point on the ground, but his voice rose, almost pleading, and he shot a glance at her from beneath his knotted brow. Ordinarily, she knew, he relied on her to stand silently beside him when Mum and Rita started screaming. But not today, she couldn’t just stand by today.

‘But, Dad, look at the lovely tea they put on specially-’

‘That’s enough lip from you, Miss.’ Mum was on her feet now and she jerked Meredith up by the sleeve of her new dress, harder than she might otherwise have. ‘You get on inside and fetch your things. Your real clothes. The train’s leaving soon and we’re all going to be on it.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ said Meredith, turning urgently to her father. ‘Let me stay, Dad. Please don’t make me go. I’m learning-’

‘Pah!’ Mum swiped her hand dismissively. ‘I can see well enough what you’ve been learning here with your Lady Muck; learning to cheek your parents. I can see what you’re forgetting too: who you are and where you come from.’ She shook her finger at Dad. ‘I told you we were wrong to send them away. If we’d only kept them home like I wanted-’

‘Enough!’ Dad’s top had finally blown. ‘That’s enough, Annie. Sit down. There’s no need for all this; she’s coming home now.’

‘I’m not!’

‘Oh yes you are,’ said Mum, pulling back her flattened hand. ‘And there’s a good clip round the ear waiting for you when you get there.’

‘That’s enough!’ Dad was on his feet now, too; he grabbed hold of Mum’s wrist. ‘For Christ’s sake, that’s enough, Annie.’ His eyes searched hers and something passed between them; Meredith saw her mother’s wrist go limp. Dad nodded at her. ‘We’ve all become a bit hot and bothered, that’s all.’

‘Talk to your daughter… I can’t stand to look at her. I only hope she never knows what it is to lose a child.’ And she walked away, arms folded stubbornly across her body.

Dad looked tired suddenly, old. He ran a hand over his hair. It was thinning on top so that Meredith could see the marks that the comb had made that morning. ‘You mustn’t mind her. She’s fiery, you know how she gets. She’s been worried about you, we both have.’ He glanced again at the castle, looming above them. ‘Only we’ve heard stories. From Rita’s letters and from some of the kids who’ve come home, terrible stories about how they were treated.’

Was that all? Meredith felt the bubbling delirium of relief; she knew there had been evacuees less fortunate than her, but if that was all they were worried about, then surely all she had to do was reassure her dad. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about, Dad. I told you in my letters: I’m happy here. Didn’t you read my letters?’

‘Course I did. We both did. Brightest spot in our day, your mum and me, getting a letter from you.’

The way he said it, Meredith knew that it was true and something inside her panged, imagining them at the table, poring over the things she’d written. ‘Well then,’ she said, unable to meet his eyes, ‘you know that everything’s all right. Better than all right.’

‘I know that’s what you said.’ He looked towards Mum, checking she was still a fair distance away. ‘That was part of the problem. Your letters were so… cheerful. And your mother heard from one of her friends that there were foster families changing the letters that the boys and girls were writing home. Stopping them from saying anything that might reflect badly. Making things seem better than they really were.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘That’s not how it is, though, is it, Merry? Not for you.’

‘No, Dad.’

‘You’re happy here; as happy your letters make out?’

‘Yes.’ Meredith could see that he was wavering. Possibility shot like fireworks through her limbs, and she spoke quickly. ‘Percy’s a bit stiff, but Saffy’s wonderful. You could meet her if you come inside; I could play you a song on the piano.’

He looked up at the tower, sunlight sweeping across his cheeks. Meredith watched as his pupils shrank; she waited, trying to read his wide, blank face. His lips moved as if he were taking measurements, memorizing figures, but it was impossible for her to see which way the sums might lead him. He glanced, then, at his wife, fuming by the fountain, and Meredith knew that it was now or never. ‘Please, Dad.’ She grabbed the fabric of his shirtsleeve. ‘Please don’t make me go back. I’m learning so much here, far more than I could learn in London. Please make Mum see that I’m better off here.’

A light sigh and he frowned at Mum’s back. As Meredith watched his face changed, fell along lines of tenderness so that Meredith’s heart turned a somersault. But he didn’t look down at her and he didn’t speak. Finally, she followed his sightline and noticed that Mum had twisted a bit, was standing now with one hand on her hip, the other fidgeting lightly by her side. The sun had crept up behind her and found glints of red in her brown hair, and she looked pretty and lost and unusually young. Her eyes were locked with Dad’s, and in a dull thudding moment, Meredith saw that the tenderness in his face was for Mum, and not for her at all.

‘I’m sorry, Merry,’ he said, covering her fingers, still clutching at his shirt, with his. ‘It’s for the best. Go and fetch your things. We’re going home.’

And that’s when Meredith did the very wicked thing, the betrayal for which her mother would never forgive her. Her only excuse that she was robbed entirely of choice; that she was a child and would be for years to come, and nobody cared what she wanted. She was tired of being treated like a parcel or a suitcase, shunted off here or there depending on what the adults thought was best. All she wanted was to belong somewhere.

She took her dad’s hand and said, ‘I’m sorry, too, Dad.’ And as bewilderment was still settling on his lovely face, she smiled apologetically, avoided her mum’s furious glare, and ran as fast as she could down the grassy lawn. Leaped across the verge and into the cool, dark safety of Cardarker Wood.

Percy found out about Saffy’s plans for London quite by chance. If she hadn’t absented herself from tea with Meredith’s parents, she might never have known. Not until it was too late. It was fortunate, she supposed, that the public airing of dirty laundry was something she found both embarrassing and drear, and that she’d made her excuses and gone inside, intending only to allow the requisite time to pass before returning to stilled waters. She’d expected to find Saffy crouched by the window, spying on proceedings from afar and demanding a report – What were the parents like? How did Meredith seem? Had they enjoyed the cakes? – so it had been somewhat surprising to find the kitchen empty.

Percy remembered she was still carrying the teapot and, following her rather feeble ruse, returned the kettle to the stove. Time passed slowly and her attention drifted away from the flames, and she started wondering instead what dreadful thing she’d done to deserve both a wedding and a tea engagement on the same day. And that’s when it came, a shrill clattering from the butler’s pantry. Telephone calls had become rare after the Post Office warned that social chatter over the networks could delay important war talks, so it took a moment for Percy to realize the cause of the indignant racket.

As a consequence, when she did finally lift the receiver, she succeeded in sounding both fearful and suspicious: ‘Milderhurst Castle. Hello?’

The caller identified himself at once as Archibald Wicks of Chelsea, and asked to speak to Miss Seraphina Blythe. Taken aback, Percy offered to jot down a message, and that’s when the gentleman told her he was Saffy’s employer, calling with revised advice regarding her accommodation in London as of the following week.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Wicks,’ said Percy, blood vessels dilating beneath her skin, ‘I’m afraid there must have been a misunderstanding.’

An airy hesitation. ‘A misunderstanding, did you say? The line – it’s rather difficult to hear.’

‘Seraphina – my sister – will be unable to take up a position in London.’

‘Oh.’ There was another pause, during which the line crackled across the distance and Percy couldn’t help picturing the telephone wires, strung from post to post, swaying in the wuthering breeze. ‘Oh, I see,’ he continued. ‘But that is odd, only I have her letter accepting the position right here in my hand. We’d corresponded quite reliably on the topic.’

That explained the frequency of post Percy had been carrying to and from the castle of late; Saffy’s determination to stay within reach of the telephone ‘in case an important call should come through regarding the war’. Percy cursed herself for having been distracted by her WVS duties, for not having paid closer attention. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘And I’m certain that Seraphina had every intention of honouring her agreement. But the war, you see, and now our father has been taken ill. I’m afraid she’ll be needed at home for the duration.’

Though disappointed and understandably confused, Mr Wicks was mollified somewhat by Percy’s promise to send him a signed first edition of the Mud Man for his collection of rare books, and rang off in relatively good spirits. There would be no question, at least, of his suing them for breach of contract.

Saffy’s disappointment, Percy suspected, would not be so easily managed. A toilet flushed somewhere in the distance, then the pipes gurgled in the kitchen wall. Percy sat on the stool and waited. Within minutes, Saffy hurried in from upstairs.

‘Percy!’ She stopped still, glanced towards the open back door. ‘What are you doing here? Where’s Meredith? Her parents haven’t left already, surely? Is everything all right?’

‘I came to fetch more tea.’

‘Oh.’ Saffy’s face relaxed into a faltering smile. ‘Then let me help. You don’t want to be away from your guests too long.’ She fetched the jar of tea leaves and lifted the pot’s lid.

Percy considered obfuscation but the conversation with Mr Wicks had so surprised her that she drew a blank. In the end, she said simply, ‘There was a telephone call. While I was waiting for the kettle.’

Only the faintest tremor, a fine drift of tea leaves from the sides of the spoon. ‘A telephone call? When?’

‘Just now.’

‘Oh.’ Saffy brushed the loose leaves into the palm of one hand; they lay together like a pile of dead ants. ‘Something to do with the war, was it?’

‘No.’

Saffy leaned against the bench top and clenched a nearby tea towel in her hand as if trying to avoid being pulled out to sea.

The kettle chose that moment to spit, hissing through its spout before winding itself up to a menacing whistle. Saffy took it off the heat, remained at the stove with her back to Percy, her breath stilled.

‘It was a fellow by the name of Mr Archibald Wicks,’ Percy said then. ‘Calling from London. A collector, he said.’

‘I see.’ Saffy didn’t turn. ‘And what did you tell him?’

A shout from outside and Percy moved swiftly to the open door.

‘What did you tell him, Percy?’

A breeze, and on it the yellowing scent of cut grass.

‘Percy?’ Barely a whisper.

‘I told him that we needed you here.’

Saffy gave a sound that might have been a sob.

Percy spoke carefully then, slowly. ‘You know you can’t go, Saffy. That you mustn’t mislead people like that. He was expecting you in London next week.’

‘Expecting me in London because that’s where I’m going to be. I applied for a position, Percy, and he chose me.’ She did turn then. Lifted her clenched hand, elbow bent, a strangely theatrical gesture made more so by the scrunched tea towel still in her grasp. ‘He chose me,’ she said, shaking her fist for emphasis. ‘He collects all sorts of things, beautiful things, and he’s hired me – me – to assist him with his work.’

Percy dug a cigarette from her case, had to fight the match, but eventually she struck it.

‘I’m going, Percy, and you can’t stop me.’

Damn Saffy; she wasn’t going to make things easy. Percy’s head was already throbbing; the wedding had left her spent, then playing hostess to Meredith’s parents. This was the last thing she needed; Saffy was being purposely obtuse, goading her into spelling things out. Well, if that was how she wanted to play it, Percy wasn’t afraid to lay down the law. ‘No,’ she exhaled smokily, ‘you’re not. You’re not going anywhere, Saff. You know it, I know it, and now Mr Wicks knows it, too.’

Saffy’s arms slackened beside her, the tea towel fell to the flagstones. ‘You told him I wasn’t coming. Just like that.’

‘Someone had to. He was about to wire you the fare.’

Saffy’s eyes were brimming now, and although Percy was angry with her she was pleased too, to see that her sister was fighting the rush of tears. Perhaps a scene would be avoided this time, after all.

‘Come along now,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’ll see eventually that it’s for the best-’

‘You’re really not going to let me go.’

‘No,’ said Percy, firmly but kindly, ‘I’m not.’

Saffy’s bottom lip trembled and her voice when finally she managed to speak was little more than a whisper. ‘You can’t control us forever, Percy.’ Her fingers were scrabbling together against her skirt, gathering invisible sticky threads into a tiny ball.

The gesture was one from childhood and Percy was overwhelmed by déjà vu and a fierce urge to hold her twin close and never let her go, to tell her she was loved, that Percy didn’t mean to be cruel, that she was doing it for Saffy’s own good. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if she had, because nobody wants to be told that sort of thing, even when they know, in their heart of hearts, that it’s true.

She settled instead for softening her own voice and saying, ‘I’m not trying to control you, Saffy. Maybe some other day, in the future, you’ll be able to leave.’ Percy gestured at the castle walls. ‘But not now. We need you here now, what with the war and Daddy as he is. Not to mention the severe shortage of staff: have you considered what would happen to the rest of us if you left? Can you see Juniper or Daddy or – Lord help us – me, staying on top of the laundry?’

‘There’s nothing you can’t do, Percy.’ Saffy’s voice was bitter. ‘There’s never been anything you couldn’t do.’

Percy knew then that she’d won; more importantly, that Saffy knew it too. But she felt no joy, only the familiar burden of responsibility. Her whole being ached for her sister, for the young girl she’d once been with the world at her feet.

‘Miss Blythe?’ Percy looked up to see Meredith’s father at the door, his thin little wife by his side, and an air of complete perturbation surrounding them both.

She’d forgotten them completely. ‘Mr Baker,’ she said, ruffling the back of her hair. ‘I apologize. I’ve taken an age with the tea-’

‘That’s all right, Miss Blythe. We’re about done with tea. It’s Meredith, you see.’ His shoulders seemed to sink a little. ‘My wife and I planned to take her home with us but she’s that set on staying – I’m afraid the little devil’s given us the slip.’

‘Oh.’ It was the last thing Percy needed. She glanced behind her, but Saffy had performed her own escape act. ‘Well. I expect we’d better take a look then, hadn’t we?’

‘That’s just it,’ Mr Baker said unhappily. ‘My wife and I have to be back on the three twenty-four to London. It’s the only service today.’

‘I see,’ said Percy. ‘Then of course you must go. The trains are terrible these days. If you miss today’s, you’re as likely still to be waiting this time Wednesday.’

‘But my girl…’ Mrs Baker looked as if she might be about to cry and the prospect didn’t sit comfortably on her tough, pointy face. Percy knew the feeling.

‘You’re not to worry,’ she said with a short nod. ‘I’ll find her. Is there a number in London where I can reach you? She won’t have gone far.’

From a branch in the oldest oak of Cardarker Wood, Meredith could just make out the castle. The pointed turret of the tower and its needle-like spire piercing the sky. The tiles glowed crimson with the afternoon light, and the silver tip shone. On the lawn at the top of the driveway Percy Blythe was waving her parents goodbye.

Meredith’s ears burned with the thrilling wickedness of what she’d done. There’d be repercussions, she knew, but she’d had no other option. She’d run and she’d run until she could run no further, and when her breath was finally caught, she’d scaled the tree, alive with the strange, humming energy of having acted impetuously for the very first time in her life.

At the top of the driveway, Mum’s shoulders sagged and Meredith thought for a moment she was crying; then her arms flew out to the side, hands like startled starfish. Dad flinched backwards and Meredith knew that Mum was shouting. She didn’t need to hear what Mum was saying to know that she was in big trouble.

Meanwhile, still standing in the castle yard, Percy Blythe was smoking, one hand on her hip as she watched the woods, and Meredith felt a whisper of doubt grow wings within her stomach. She had presumed she’d be welcome to stay on at the castle, but what if she weren’t? What if the twins were so shocked by her disobedience that they refused to look after her any longer? What if following her own desires had led her into terrible trouble? As Percy Blythe finished her cigarette and turned back towards the castle, Meredith felt suddenly very alone.

Movement drew her gaze to the castle roof and Meredith’s heart turned like a catherine wheel. Someone in a white summer dress was climbing there. Juniper. Finished at last! Back in the outside world. As Meredith watched, she reached the flattened edge and sat, long legs dangling over the side. She’d be lighting a cigarette now, Meredith knew, leaning back, looking up at the sky.

But she didn’t. She stopped abruptly instead, and looked towards the woods. Meredith held tightly to the branch; excitement had brought on a funny sort of laugh which caught in her throat. It was almost as if Juniper had heard her, as if the older girl had somehow sensed her presence. If anyone could do such a thing, Meredith knew, it was Juniper.

She couldn’t go back to London. She wouldn’t. Not now, not yet.

Meredith watched her mum and dad walk down the drive away from the castle, Mum’s arms folded over her middle, Dad’s limp by his sides. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered under her breath, ‘I didn’t have a choice.’

FIVE

The water was tepid and shallow, but Saffy didn’t mind. A long soak in a hot bath was a pleasure of the past, and it was enough just to be alone with Percy’s ghastly betrayal. She eased her bottom forward so she could lie flat on her back, knees bent towards the ceiling, head submerged, and ears underwater. Her hair floated like seaweed around the island of her face and she listened to the eddies and gurgles of the water, the clanking of the plug chain against the enamel, and other strange languages of the watery world.

For their entire adult life, Saffy had known herself to be the weaker twin. Percy liked to pooh-pooh such talk, insisting there was no such thing, not with them: that there was only a sunlight and a shadow position, between which they alternated so that things were always in perfect balance. Which was kind of her, but no more accurate for being well intentioned. Quite simply, Saffy knew that the things for which she had a superior talent were those that did not matter. She wrote well, she was a fine dressmaker, she could cook (passably) and lately even clean; but what use were such skills when she remained enslaved? Worse, a willing slave. Because for the most part, it shamed her to admit, Saffy didn’t mind the role. There was an ease, after all, that came with being subordinate, a release of burden. And yet, there were times, like today, when she resented the expectation that she ought to fall into line without argument, no matter her own preference.

Saffy lifted her body and leaned against the tub’s smooth end, swiped the wet flannel against her anger-warmed face. The enamel was cool on her back and she arranged the flannel like a shrunken blanket across her breasts and stomach, watched it tighten and release with her breaths, a second skin; then she closed her eyes. How dare Percy presume to speak for her? To make decisions on Saffy’s behalf, to determine her future without consultation?

But Percy did, just as she always had, and today, as ever, there’d been no arguing with her.

Saffy exhaled, long and slow, in an attempt to control her anger. The sigh caught on a sob. She supposed she should be pleased, flattered even, that Percy needed her so fiercely. And she was. But she was tired, too, of being powerless; more than that, she was sick at heart. For as long as she could remember, Saffy had been stuck in a life that ran parallel to the one of which she’d dreamed, the one she’d had every reasonable expectation to believe would be hers.

This time, however, there was one little thing she could do – Saffy brushed each cheek, enlivened by the creep of determination – a small way in which she might exercise her own feeble power against Percy. It would be a strike of omission rather than commission; Percy would never even know the blow had been struck. The only spoil of war would be a slight return of Saffy’s self-respect. But that was enough.

Saffy was going to keep something to herself, something that Percy would prefer to know: all about the unexpected visitor who’d arrived at the castle that day. While Percy was at Lucy’s wedding, Juniper was in the attic and Meredith was stalking the estate, Daddy’s solicitor, Mr Banks, had arrived in his black motorcar, accompanied by two dour little women in plain suits. Saffy, who’d been making adjustments to the tea table outside, had first considered hiding, pretending there was no one at home – she didn’t particularly like Mr Banks, and she certainly didn’t like answering the door to unexpected callers – but the old man had been known to her since she was a small girl, he was a friend to Daddy, and therefore she’d been bound in some way she couldn’t easily explain.

She’d run through the kitchen entrance, straightened herself in the oval mirror by the larder, then hurried upstairs, just in time to greet him at the front door. He’d been surprised, almost displeased, when he saw her, wondering aloud what times were coming to when somewhere as grand as Milderhurst was without a proper housekeeper, then instructing her to take him to her father. For all that Saffy longed to embrace society’s changing mores, she harboured an old-fashioned reverence for the law and its officers, so she’d done precisely as he said. He was a man of few words (that is, he was a man not disposed to making idle chitchat with the daughters of his clients); their climb was silent, and for that she’d been glad; men like Mr Banks always made her tongue-tied. When they finally reached the top of the winding staircase, he’d given her a curt nod before showing himself and his two officious companions through the doorway and into Daddy’s tower room.

Saffy’s intention hadn’t been to snoop; indeed, she’d resented the intrusion on her time almost as much as she resented any task which took her up to the ghastly tower with its smell of impending death, the monstrous framed print on the wall. If the tortured struggle of a butterfly trapped in a web between the banisters hadn’t caught her eye, she’d no doubt have been halfway down the stairs and well out of earshot. But she had and she wasn’t and so, while she carefully unthreaded the insect, she heard Daddy say: ‘That’s why I called you, Banks. Damned nuisance, death. Have you made the amendments?’

‘I have. I’ve brought them to be signed and witnessed, along with a copy for your records, of course.’

The details thereafter Saffy hadn’t heard, nor had she wanted to. She was the second daughter of an old-fashioned man, a spinster in her middle years: the masculine world of property and finance neither interested nor concerned her. She wanted only to free the weakened butterfly and get away from the tower, to leave the stale air and stifling memories behind her. She hadn’t been inside the little room for over twenty years, she intended never to set foot inside again, ever. And as she hurried down and away, she’d tried to elude the cloud of memories that pressed upon her as she went.

For they’d been close once, she and Daddy, a long time ago, but the love had spoiled. Juniper was the better writer and Percy the better daughter, which left very little room for Saffy in their father’s affections. There had only been the one brief, glorious moment in which Saffy’s usefulness had outshone that of her sisters. After the Great War when Daddy had returned to them, all bruised and broken, it was she who had been able to bring him back, to give him the very thing he needed most. And it had been seductive, the force of his fondness, the evenings spent in hiding, where no one else could find them…

Suddenly there was bedlam and Saffy’s eyes snapped open. Someone was shouting. She was in the tub but the water was icy, the light had disappeared through the open window leaving dusk in its place. Saffy realized that she’d slipped into a doze. She was fortunate that was all the slipping she’d done. But who was shouting? She sat up, straining to hear. Nothing, and she wondered whether she’d imagined the noise.

Then it came again. And the din of a bell. The old man in the tower, off on one of his rants. Well, let Percy see to him. They deserved each other.

With a shiver, Saffy peeled back the cold flannel and stood, sending the water buckling back and forth. She stepped, dripping, onto the mat. There were voices downstairs now, she could hear them. Meredith, Juniper – and Percy, too; they were all there, all of them in the yellow parlour together. Waiting for their dinner, she supposed, and she would fetch it for them as she always did.

Saffy tugged her dressing gown from the hook on the door, fought with the sleeves and fastened it over her cool, wet skin, then she started down the hallway, her wet footsteps echoing along the flagstones. Nursing her little secret close.

‘You wanted something, Daddy?’ Percy pushed open the heavy door to the tower room. It took her a moment to spot him, tucked in the alcove by the fireplace, beneath the Goya print; and, when she did, he looked frightened to see her and she knew immediately that he’d suffered another of his delusions. Which meant that when she went downstairs she’d more than likely find his daily medicine sitting on the hall table where she’d left it that morning. It was her own fault for having expected too much, and she cursed herself for not having thought to check on him as soon as she’d arrived home from the church.

She softened her voice, spoke to him the way she imagined she might to a child, had she ever had the chance to know one well enough to love them: ‘There now. Everything’s all right. Would you like to sit down? Come along, I’ll help you get settled here by the window. It’s a lovely evening.’

He nodded jerkily, started towards her outstretched arm, and she knew that the delusion had ended. She knew, too, that it hadn’t been a bad one because he’d managed to recover himself sufficiently to say, ‘I thought I told you to wear a hairpiece.’

He had, many times now, and Percy had dutifully purchased one (not an easy thing to do in a time of war), only to leave the wretched thing lying like a severed fox’s tail on her bedside table. There was a crocheted blanket draped over the arm of the chair, a small, brightly coloured thing that Lucy had made for him some years ago, and Percy straightened it over his knees when he sat down, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I forgot. I heard the bell and I didn’t want to leave you waiting.’

‘You look like a man. Is that what you want? People to treat you like a man?’

‘No, Daddy.’ Percy’s fingertips went to the nape of her neck, centred on the little velvety coil that dipped lower than the rest of her hairline. He’d meant nothing by it and she wasn’t offended, only a little startled by the suggestion. She sneaked a sideways glance at the glass-fronted bookcase, caught her image rippling in the dimpled surface; a rather severe-looking woman, sharp angles, a very straight spine, but a pair of not ungenerous breasts, a definite curve at the hips, a face that wasn’t primped with lipstick and powder but which she didn’t think was manly. Which she hoped was not.

Daddy, meanwhile, had turned his head to look out across the night-draped fields, blissfully unaware of the line of thinking he had sparked. ‘All of this,’ he said without shifting his gaze. ‘All of this.’

She leaned against the side of the chair, rested an elbow on its top. He didn’t need to say more. She understood as no one else the way he felt as he looked out across the fields of his ancestors.

‘Did you read Juniper’s story, Daddy?’ It was one of the few topics that could be relied upon to brighten his spirits, and Percy deployed it carefully, hoping she might thereby pull him back from the edges of the black mood she knew was still hovering.

He waved his hand in the direction of his pipe kit and Percy handed it to him. Rolled herself a cigarette as he was feeding tobacco into the bowl. ‘She’s a talent. There’s no doubt about it.’

Percy smiled. ‘She gets it from you.’

‘We must be careful with her. The creative mind needs freedom. It must wander at its own pace and in its own patterns. It’s a difficult thing to explain, Persephone, to someone whose mind works along more stolid lines, but it is imperative that she be freed from practicalities, from distractions, from anything that might steal her talent away.’ He grabbed at Percy’s skirt. ‘She hasn’t got a fellow chasing her, has she?’

‘No, Daddy.’

‘A girl like Juniper needs protection,’ he continued, setting his chin. ‘To be kept somewhere safe. Here at Milderhurst, within the castle.’

‘Of course she will stay here.’

‘It’s up to you to make sure. To take care of both your sisters.’ And he launched into his familiar spiel about legacy and responsibility and inheritance.

Percy waited a time, finished smoking her cigarette, and only when he was reaching the end, said, ‘I’ll take you to the lavatory before I go, shall I, Daddy?’

‘Go?’

‘I’ve a meeting this evening, in the village-’

‘Always rushing off.’ Displeasure pulled at his bottom lip and Percy had a very clear picture of what he might have looked like as a boy. A spoiled child accustomed to having things as he wished.

‘Come along now, Daddy.’ She walked the old man to the lavatory and reached for her tobacco tin as she waited in the cooling corridor. Patting her pocket and remembered she’d left it in the tower room. Daddy would be a time, so she hurried back to fetch it.

She found the tin on his desk. And that’s where she also found the parcel. A package from Mr Banks but with no stamp affixed. Meaning it had been delivered personally.

Percy’s heart beat faster. Saffy had not mentioned a visitor. Was it possible Mr Banks had come from Folkestone, sneaked into the castle and made his way up to the tower, without announcing himself to Saffy? Anything was possible, she supposed, but it was surely unlikely. What reason would he have for doing such a thing?

Percy stood for a moment, undecided, fingering the envelope as heat collected along the back of her neck and beneath her arms so that her blouse stuck.

With a glance over her shoulder, even though she knew herself to be alone, she unsealed it and shimmied the folded papers from inside. A will. The date was today’s; she straightened the letter and skimmed it for meaning. Experienced the strange, oppressive gravity of having her worst suspicions confirmed.

She pressed the fingers of one hand against her forehead. That such a thing should have been allowed to happen. Yet here it was; in black and white, and blue where Daddy had slashed his agreement. She read the document again, more closely, checking it for loopholes, for a missing page, for anything that might suggest she’d misunderstood, read too quickly.

She hadn’t.

Oh Christ, she hadn’t.