The Distant Hours

Mrs Bird’s Suspicions
1992

Darkness had fallen by the time I reached the farmhouse, and with it a fine drizzle was settling, net-like, across the landscape. There was still a couple of hours until dinner would be served and I was glad. After an unexpected afternoon in the company of the sisters, I was in need of a hot bath and time alone to shake off the cloying atmosphere which had trailed me home. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, only that there seemed to be so much unfulfilled longing within those castle walls, frustrated desires that had soaked inside the stones only to seep back out with time so that the air was stale, almost stagnant.

And yet the castle and its three gossamer inhabitants held an inexplicable fascination for me. No matter the moments of discomfort I experienced when I was there, as soon as I was away from them, from their castle, I felt compelled to return, and found myself counting the hours until I could go back. It makes little sense; perhaps madness never does. For I was mad about the Sisters Blythe, I see that now.

As soft rain began to fall on the farmhouse eaves, I lay curled up on my bedspread, a blanket draped across my feet, reading and dozing and thinking, and by dinnertime I felt much restored. It was natural that Percy should wish to spare Juniper pain, that she should leap to stop me when I threatened to open old wounds; it had been insensitive of me to mention Thomas Cavill, particularly with Juniper sleeping nearby. And yet the fire of Percy’s reaction had piqued my interest… Perhaps if I was lucky enough to find myself alone with Saffy, I might probe a little further. She had seemed agreeable, eager even, to help me with my research.

Research that now included rare and special access to Raymond Blythe’s notebooks. Even saying the words beneath my breath was enough to send a shiver of delight rippling down my spine. I rolled onto my back, thrilled to the tips of my toes, and gazed up at the joist-crossed ceiling, envisaging the very moment when I would glimpse inside the writer’s mind: see precisely the things he’d thought and the way he’d thought them.

I ate dinner at a table by myself in the cosy dining room of Mrs Bird’s farmhouse. The whole place smelled warmly of the vegetable stew that had been served, and a fire crackled in the grate. Outside, the wind continued to build, buffeting the glass panes, gently for the most part, but with occasional sharper bursts and I thought – not for the first time – what a true and simple pleasure it was, to be inside and sated when the cold and the starless dark spread out across the world.

I’d brought my notes to begin work on the Raymond Blythe article, but my thoughts would not behave themselves, drifting back, time and again, to his daughters. It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I’d been missing.

‘Big day?’ I looked up to see Mrs Bird standing above me. ‘And another tomorrow, I don’t doubt?’

‘I’m going to see Raymond Blythe’s work notebooks in the morning.’ I couldn’t help myself; the excitement just bubbled up and out of its own volition.

Mrs Bird was nonplussed, but in a kind sort of way. ‘Well, that’s nice, dear. You don’t mind if I…?’ She patted the chair across from me.

‘Of course not.’

She sat with a heavy lady’s huff, flattening a hand across her stomach as she righted herself against the table edge. ‘Well now, that feels a bit better. I’ve been run off my feet all day.’ She nodded at my notes. ‘But I see you’re working late, too.’

‘Trying. I’m a bit distracted though.’

‘Oh.’ Her eyebrows arrowed. ‘Handsome fellow, is it?’

‘Something like that. Mrs Bird, I don’t suppose there were any phone calls for me today?’

‘Phone calls? Nothing I can think of. Were you expecting one? The young fellow you’re mooning over?’ Her eyes brightened as she said, ‘Your publisher, perhaps?’

She looked so hopeful that it felt rather cruel to disappoint her. Nonetheless, for clarity’s sake: ‘My mum, actually. I had hoped she might make it down for a visit.’

A particularly large gust of wind rattled along the window locks and I shivered, from pleasure more than chill. There was something about the atmosphere that night, something enlivening. Mrs Bird and I were the only two remaining in the dining room, and the log in the fire had been honeycombed so that it glowed red, popping occasionally and spitting bits of gold against the bricks. I’m not sure whether it was the warm, smoky room itself, its contrast with the wet and the wind outside; or a reaction to the pervasive atmosphere of knots and secrets I’d encountered at the castle; or even just a sudden desire to have a normal conversation with another human being. Whatever the case, I felt expansive. I closed my notebook and pushed it aside. ‘My mother came here as an evacuee,’ I said. ‘During the war.’

‘To the village?’

‘To the castle.’

‘No! Really? Stayed there with the sisters?’

I nodded, pleased out of all proportion by her reaction. Wary, too, as a little voice inside my head whispered that my pleasure stemmed from the sense of possession Mum’s link with Milderhurst conferred onto me. A sense of possession that was most misplaced, and one that I’d thus far failed to mention to the Misses Blythe themselves.

‘Goodness!’ Mrs Bird was saying, clapping her fingertips together. ‘What a lot of stories she must have! The mind boggles.’

‘Actually, I have her war journal here with me-’

‘War journal?’

‘Her diary from the time. Bits and pieces about how she felt, the people she met, the place itself.’

‘Why then, there’s probably mention of my own mum in there,’ said Mrs Bird, straightening proudly.

It was my turn to be surprised. ‘Your mum?’

‘She worked at the castle. Started as a maid when she was sixteen; finished up as head housekeeper. Lucy Rogers, though it was Middleton back then.’

‘Lucy Middleton,’ I said slowly, trying to recall any mention in Mum’s journal. ‘I’m not sure; I’ll have to check.’ Mrs Bird’s shoulders had slumped a little under the weight of her disappointment and I felt personally responsible, clutching at ways to make it better. ‘She hasn’t told me much about it, you see; I only found out about her evacuation recently.’

I regretted saying it immediately. Hearing myself speak the words made me more acutely aware than ever how strange it was for a woman to have kept such a thing secret; and I felt implicated somehow, as if Mum’s silence might be due to a personal failing of mine. And I felt foolish, too, because if I’d been a little more circumspect, a little less eager to absorb Mrs Bird’s interest, I wouldn’t be in this predicament. I prepared myself for the worst, but Mrs Bird surprised me. With a knowing nod, she leaned a little closer and said, ‘Parents and their secrets, eh?’

‘Yes.’ A lump of charcoal popcorned in the hearth and Mrs Bird lifted a finger, signalling that she’d be back in just a minute; she squeezed herself out of her chair and disappeared through a concealed exit in the papered wall.

Rain blew softly against the wooden door, filling the pond outside, and I pressed my palms together, held them prayer-like against my lips, before tilting them to lean my cheek on the back of my fire-warmed hand.

When Mrs Bird returned with a bottle of whisky and two cut-glass tumblers, the suggestion so suited the moody, inclement evening that I smiled and accepted gladly.

We clinked glasses across the table.

‘My mother nearly didn’t marry,’ said Mrs Bird, pressing her lips and savouring the whisky warmth. ‘What do you think of that? I almost didn’t exist.’ She laid a hand against her brow in a performance of quelle horreur!

I smiled.

‘She had a brother, you see, an adored older brother. The way she tells it, he was responsible for making the sun rise each morning. Their father died young and Michael – that was his name – stepped in and took over. Real man about the house, he was; even as a boy he used to work after school and at weekends, cleaning windows for tuppence. Giving the coins to his mum so she could keep the house nice. Handsome, too – hang on! I’ve a photograph.’ She hurried to the hearth, wriggled her fingers above the host of frames cluttering the mantelpiece, before diving in and fishing out a small brass square. She used the plumped-out front of her tweed skirt to wipe dust from its face before handing it to me. Three figures caught in a long-ago instant: a young man whose destiny made him handsome, an older woman on one side, a pretty girl of about thirteen on the other.

‘Michael went with all the rest of them to fight in the Great War.’ Mrs Bird was standing behind me, peering heavily over my shoulder. ‘His last request, when my mum was seeing him off on the train, was that if anything happened to him she should stay at home with their mother.’ Mrs Bird took back the photo and sat down again, straightening her glasses on her nose to look at it further as she spoke. ‘What was she to say? She assured him she’d do as he asked. She was young – I don’t suppose she thought it would come to anything. People didn’t, not really. Not at the start of the Great War. They didn’t know then.’ She pulled out the frame’s cardboard stand and set it on the table by her glass.

I sipped my whisky and waited, and at length she sighed. She met my eyes; opened her hand upwards in a sudden motion, as if to toss invisible confetti. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘history happened. He was killed and poor old Mum resigned herself to doing as he’d asked. Can’t say I’d have been so obliging, but people were different back then. They stuck by their word. Grandmother was a right old harridan, to be honest, but Mum supported them both, gave up hopes of marriage and children, accepted her lot.’

A flurry of heavy rain drops spat against the nearby window and I shivered into my cardigan. ‘And yet. Here you are.’

‘Here I am.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Grandmother died,’ said Mrs Bird, with a matter-of-fact sort of nod, ‘very precipitously in June 1939. She’d been ill for a time, something to do with her liver, so it was no surprise. Rather a relief, I’ve always gathered, though Mum was far too kind to admit such a thing. By the time the war was nine months old, Mum was married and expecting me.’

‘A whirlwind romance.’

‘Whirlwind?’ Mrs Bird bunched her lips, considering. ‘I suppose so, by today’s standards. Not at the time, though, not in a war. I’m not so sure about the “romance” part, either, to be honest. I’ve always suspected it was a practical decision on Mum’s part. She never said as much, not in so many words, but children know such things, don’t they? No matter that we’d all prefer to believe we were the product of grand love affairs.’ She smiled at me, but in a tentative way, as if she were sizing me up, wondering whether she could trust me further.

‘Did something happen?’ I asked, edging closer. ‘Something to make you feel like that?’

Mrs Bird drained the rest of her whisky and twisted the glass back and forth, making rings on the table top. She frowned then at the bottle, seemed to be engaged in some deep and silent debate; I can’t say whether she won or lost, but she took the top off and poured us each another.

‘I found something,’ she said. ‘A few years back. After Mum passed away and I was taking care of her affairs.’

Whisky hummed warm in my throat. ‘What was it?’

‘Love letters.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not from my father.’

‘Oh!’

‘Hidden in a tin at the back of her dressing-table drawer. I almost didn’t find them, you know. It wasn’t until an antiques dealer came to see about buying some of the furniture. I was showing him the pieces and I thought the drawer was stuck, so I pulled it, rather harder than I needed to, and the tin came scuttling to the front.’

‘Did you read them?’

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘I opened the tin later. Terrible, I know.’ She flushed and began smoothing the hair by her temples, hiding, it seemed, behind her curled hands. ‘I just couldn’t help it. By the time I realized what I was reading, well, I had to keep on with it, didn’t I? They were lovely, you see. Heartfelt. To the point, but almost the more meaningful for their brevity. And there was something else, an air of sadness in those letters. They were all written before she married my dad – Mum wasn’t the type to play up once she was wed. No, this was a love affair from back when her own mother was still alive, when there was no chance that she might marry or move away.’

‘Who was it, do you know? Who wrote the letters?’

She left her hair alone then, flattened her hands on the table. The stillness was arresting, and when she leaned towards me, I felt myself incline to meet her. ‘I really shouldn’t say,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t like to gossip.’

‘Of course not.’

She paused and a thread of excitement plucked at her lip; she shot a surreptitious glance over each shoulder in turn. ‘I’m not one hundred per cent certain; they weren’t signed with a full name, just a single initial.’ She met my eyes, blinked, then smiled, almost slyly. ‘It was an R.’

‘An R.’ I echoed her accentuated pronunciation of the letter, thought about it a moment, chewed the inside of my cheek and then I gasped. ‘Why, you don’t think…?’ But why not? She meant R for Raymond Blythe. The King of the Castle and his long-time housekeeper: it was almost a cliché, and clichés only got that way because they happened all the time. ‘That would explain the secrecy in the letters, the impossibility of being open about their relationship.’

‘It would explain something else, too.’

I looked at her, still dazed by the whole proposition.

‘There’s a coldness in the eldest sister, Persephone; a coldness towards me. It’s nothing I’ve done, certainly, and yet I’ve always felt it. Once, when I was a girl, she caught me playing by the pool, the circular one with the swing. Well – the look in her eyes; it was as if she’d seen a ghost. I half believed she might be going to throttle me, then and there. Since I found out about my mum’s affair, though, the likelihood that it was with Mr Blythe, well, I’ve wondered whether Percy might not have known; whether she might not have found out somehow and taken umbrage. Things were different back then, between the classes. And Percy Blythe is a rigid sort of person, one for rules and traditions.’

I was nodding, but slowly; it certainly didn’t sound implausible. Percy Blythe didn’t strike me as the type ever to be warm and fuzzy, but I’d noticed on my first visit to the castle that she was particularly short with Mrs Bird. And there was definitely some sort of secret being kept at the castle. Was it possible that this love affair was the very thing Saffy had wanted to tell me about; the detail she hadn’t felt comfortable discussing with Adam Gilbert? And was that why Percy was so adamant that Saffy should not be interviewed further? Because she sought to stop her twin from giving up their father’s secret, from telling me about Raymond Blythe’s longstanding relationship with his housekeeper?

But why would Percy care so much? Not from loyalty to her own mother, surely: Raymond Blythe had married more than once, so presumably Percy had come to terms with the realities of the human heart. And even if it were as Mrs Bird proposed, that Percy was old-fashioned and didn’t approve of the classes mingling romantically, I was doubtful as to whether she would care so deeply after all these decades, especially when so much else had happened to bring perspective to their lives. Could she really consider it such a travesty that her father had once been in love with his long-term housekeeper that she would fight to keep the fact forever hidden from public record? I just couldn’t see it. Whether Percy Blythe was old-fashioned or not was neither here nor there: she was a pragmatist; I had seen enough of her to realize that a flint of steely realism lay within Percy’s heart. If she was keeping secrets, it wasn’t for reasons of prudery or social morality.

‘Even more than that,’ said Mrs Bird, sensing perhaps my wavering opinion, ‘I’ve sometimes wondered whether – I mean, Mum never so much as hinted at it, but – ’ She shook her head and flapped her fingers forward, ‘No – no, it’s silly.’

She was now holding her hands clutched against her chest almost coyly, and it took me a confused moment to make out why; what it was she wanted me to think. I picked my way slowly along the prickly notion and said, ‘You believe he might have been your father?’

Her eyes met mine and I knew I’d guessed correctly. ‘Mum loved that house, the castle, all of the Blythe family. She talked about old Mr Blythe sometimes, about how clever he was, how proud she was to have worked for such a famous writer. But she was funny about it, too. Didn’t like to drive past if we could help it. Clammed up right in the middle of a story and refused to go any further, got this sad, wistful look in her eyes.’

It would certainly explain a lot of things. Percy Blythe might not have minded that her father carried on a relationship with his housekeeper, but for him to have fathered another child? A younger daughter, another half-sister for his girls? There would be implications if that was so, implications that had nothing to do with prudery or morality, implications that Percy Blythe, defender of the castle, protector of her family legacy, would do anything to avoid.

And yet, even as I thought such things, acknowledged the possibilities and drew quite tangible connections, there was something in Mrs Bird’s suggestion that I just could not accept. My resistance wasn’t rational and I would have struggled to explain it if asked; nonetheless, it was fierce. Loyalty, however misguided, to Percy Blythe, to the three old ladies on the hill who were such a closed coterie that it was impossible for me to imagine there might be any addition to their number.

The clock above the fireplace chose that moment to announce our arrival at the hour, and it was as if an enchantment had been broken. Mrs Bird, her burden lightened for having been shared, began to clear the salt and pepper shakers from the tables. ‘The room isn’t going to do itself, I expect,’ she said. ‘I keep hoping, but I’ve been disappointed thus far.’

I stood, too, gathering our empty tumblers.

Mrs Bird smiled at me as I arrived at her side. ‘They can surprise us, can’t they, our parents? The things they got up to before we were born.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Almost like they were real people once.’

The Night He Didn’t Come

On my first day of official interviews, I started early for the castle. It was cold and grey and although the previous night’s drizzle had lifted, it had taken much of the world’s vitality with it and the landscape looked to have been bleached. There was something new in the air, too, a bitter chill that made me drive my hands deep into my pockets as I walked, cursing myself because I’d forgotten to bring gloves.

The Sisters Blythe had told me not to knock, but to come in directly when I arrived and make my way to the yellow parlour. ‘It’s on Juniper’s account,’ Saffy had explained discreetly as I left the day before: ‘a knock at the door and she thinks it’s him, arrived at last.’ She didn’t explain further the identity of him; she didn’t have to.

The last thing I wanted to do was upset Juniper so I was on guard, particularly after my faux pas the day before. I did as I’d been told, pushed open the front door, stepped into the stone entrance hall and followed the dark corridor. Holding my breath, for some reason, as I went.

When I reached the parlour, no one was there. Even Juniper’s green velvet chair was empty. I stood for a moment, wondering what to do next, whether I’d somehow got the timing wrong. Then I heard footsteps and turned to see Saffy at the door, dressed in her usual pretty fashion, but with an air of fuss about her, as if I’d caught her unawares.

‘Oh!’ She stopped abruptly at the edge of the rug. ‘Edith, you’re here. But of course you are,’ a glance at the mantel clock, ‘it’s almost ten o’clock.’ She brushed a fine hand against her forehead and attempted a smile. It refused to form easily or fully and she dropped it. ‘I’m so sorry if I’ve kept you waiting. Only, we’ve had rather an eventful morning and time quite slipped away.’

A creeping sense of dread had followed her into the room and it settled now around me. ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, and she wore a pallor of such utter bereavement on her face that my first shocking thought, given the empty chair, was that something had happened to Juniper. It was almost a relief when she said, ‘It’s Bruno. He’s disappeared. He’d gone from Juniper’s room when I went to help her dress this morning and we’ve seen neither hide nor hair since.’

‘Perhaps he’s playing somewhere,’ I suggested. ‘In the woods or the gardens?’ Even as I said it, I remembered the way he’d looked the day before, the shortness of breath, the sagging shoulders, the ridge of grey along his spine, and I knew it wasn’t so.

Sure enough, Saffy shook her head: ‘No. No, he wouldn’t, you see. He rarely strays from Juniper, and then only ever to sit by the front stairs, watching for visitors. Not that we ever have any. Present company excepted.’ She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, as if she feared I might have taken offence. ‘This is different, though. We’re all terribly worried. He hasn’t been well and he’s not been acting himself. Percy had to go looking for him yesterday, and now this.’ Her fingers knotted together at her belt, and I wished there was something I could do to help. There are certain people who exude vulnerability, whose pain and discomfort are particularly difficult to witness, and for whom you would endure almost any inconvenience if it promised to ease their suffering. Saffy Blythe was one of them.

‘Why don’t I go and have a look at the spot where I saw him yesterday?’ I said, starting for the door. ‘Perhaps he’s gone back there for some reason.’

‘No – ’

She said it so sharply that I turned immediately; one of her hands reached out to me, the other worried the neckline of her knitted cardigan against her fragile skin.

‘What I mean is – ’ her outstretched arm dropped to her side – ‘how kind it is of you to offer, but that it’s unnecessary. Percy’s on the telephone right now, calling Mrs Bird’s nephew so that he might come around and help us search… I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear. Forgive me, but I’m rather flummoxed, only – ’ she glanced beyond me, at the door – ‘I had hoped that I might catch you like this.’

‘You had?’

She pressed her lips together, and I saw that she wasn’t merely worried for Bruno’s safety, she was nervous about something else. ‘Percy will be along in a minute,’ she said softly. ‘She’s going to take you to see the notebooks, just as she promised – but before she comes, before you go with her, there’s something I need to explain.’

Saffy looked so serious then, so vexed, that I went to her, placed a hand on the side of her birdlike shoulder. ‘Here,’ I said, leading her to the sofa, ‘come and sit down. Is there something I can get for you? A cup of tea while we wait?’

Her smile was lit with the gratitude of a person unused to being the recipient of kindness. ‘Bless you, but no. There isn’t time. Sit with me, please.’

A shadow shifted by the doorway and she stiffened slightly, listening. There was nothing but silence. Silence and the odd corporeal noises to which I was growing accustomed: the gurgle of something behind the pretty ceiling cornice, the gentle breathing of the shutters against the window pane, the grinding of the house’s bones.

‘I feel I must explain,’ she said in an undertone, ‘about Percy, about yesterday. When you asked about Juniper, when you mentioned him, and Percy was such a tyrant.’

‘You really don’t need to explain.’

‘But I do, I must, only it isn’t easy to find a private moment – ’ a grim smile – ‘such an enormous house and yet one is never really alone.’

Her nervousness was contagious and although I was doing nothing wrong a strange feeling came over me. My heart had started to race and I matched her subdued voice. ‘Is there somewhere else we could meet? The village perhaps?’

‘No.’ She said it quickly, shook her head. ‘No. I couldn’t do that. It isn’t possible.’ Another glance at the empty doorway and she said, ‘It’s best if we speak here.’

I nodded agreement and waited as she gathered her thoughts carefully, like a person collecting scattered pins. When she had them together, she told her story quickly, in a low, determined voice. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘A terrible, terrible thing. Over fifty years ago now, yet I remember the evening as if it were yesterday. Juniper’s face as she came through the door that night. She was late, she’d lost her key, so she knocked and we answered and in she came, dancing across the threshold – she never walked, not like an ordinary person – and her face – I’ll never stop seeing it when I close my eyes at night. That instant. It was such a relief to see her. A terrible storm had blown up during the afternoon, you see. It was raining and the wind was howling, the buses were running late… We’d been so worried.

‘We thought it was him when we heard the knock. I was nervous about that, too; worried about Juniper, nervous about meeting him. I’d guessed, you see, that they were in love, that they planned to marry. She hadn’t told Percy – Percy, like Daddy, had rather fixed opinions about such things – but Juniper and I were always very close. And I desperately wanted to like him; I wanted him to be worthy of her love. I was curious, too, on that count: Juniper’s love was not easily won.

‘We sat together for a time in the good parlour. We talked at first, of trivial things, Juniper’s life in London, and we told each other that he’d been held up on the bus, that transport was the culprit, the war was to blame, but at some point we stopped.’ She glanced sideways at me and memory shadowed her eyes. ‘The wind was blowing, the rain was hammering against the shutters, and the dinner was spoiling in the oven… the smell of rabbit – ’ her face turned at the thought – ‘it was everywhere. I’ve never been able to stomach it since. It tastes like fear to me. Lumps of horrid, charred, fear… I was so frightened, seeing Juniper like that. It was all we could do to stop her from running out into the storm, searching for him. Even when midnight passed and it was clear he wasn’t coming, she wouldn’t give up. She became hysterical, we had to use Daddy’s old sleeping pills to calm her – ’

Saffy broke off; she’d been speaking very quickly, trying to get her story told before Percy arrived, and her voice had dwindled. She coughed against a delicate lace handkerchief she’d pulled from her sleeve. There was a jug of water on the table near Juniper’s chair and I poured her some. ‘It must have been awful,’ I said, handing her the glass.

She sipped gratefully, then cradled the glass in both hands on her lap. Her nerves were stretched taut it seemed, the skin around her jaw appeared to have contracted during the telling and I could see the blue veins beneath.

‘And he never came?’ I prompted.

‘No.’

‘And you never knew why? There was no letter? No telephone call?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And Juniper?’

‘She waited and waited. She waits still. Days went by, then weeks. She never gave up hope. It was dreadful. Dreadful.’ The last word Saffy allowed to hang between us. She was lost in that time, all those years ago, and I didn’t probe further.

‘Madness isn’t sudden,’ she said eventually. ‘It sounds so simple – “she fell into madness” – but it isn’t like that. It was gradual. First she withdrew. She showed signs of recovery, she talked about going back to London, but only vaguely, and she never went. She stopped writing, too; that’s when I knew that something fragile, something precious, had been broken. Then one day she threw everything out of the attic window. All of it: books, papers, a desk, even the mattress…’ She tailed off and her lips moved silently around things she thought better of adding. With a sigh, she said, ‘The papers blew far and wide, down the hillsides, into the lake, like discarded leaves, their season ended. Where did they all go, I wonder?’

I shook my head: she was asking the whereabouts of more than papers, I knew, and there was nothing I could think to say. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been to see a beloved sibling regress in such a way; to watch countless layers of potential and personality, talent and possibility, disintegrate, one by one. How hard it must have been to witness, especially for someone like Saffy, who, according to Marilyn Bird, had been more like a mother to Juniper than a sister.

‘The furniture remained in a broken heap on the lawn. We none of us had the heart to carry it back upstairs, and Juniper didn’t want it. She took to sitting by the cupboard in the attic, the one with the hidden doorway, convinced that she could hear things on the other side. Voices calling to her, though of course they were in her head. The poor love. The doctor wanted to send her away when he heard that, to an asylum…’ Her voice caught on the ghastly word, her eyes implored me to find in it the same horror she did. She’d started kneading the white handkerchief with a balled hand, and I reached out to touch her forearm very gently.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

She was trembling with anger, with distress. ‘We wouldn’t hear a word of it; I wouldn’t hear a word of it. There was no way I was letting him take her from me. Percy spoke to the doctor, explained that such things were not done at Milderhurst Castle, that the Blythe family looked after its own. Eventually he agreed – Percy can be very persuasive – but he insisted on leaving stronger medicine for Juniper.’ She pressed the painted fingernails of her hand against her legs, like a cat, releasing tension, and I saw in the set of her features something I hadn’t noticed before. She was the softer twin, the submissive twin, but there was strength there, too. When it came to Juniper, when it came to fighting for the little sister whom she loved, Saffy Blythe was rock hard. Her next words shot like steam from a kettle, so hot they scalded: ‘Would that she’d never gone to London, never met that fellow. The greatest regret of my life is that she went away. Everything was ruined afterwards. Nothing was ever the same; not for any of us.’

And that’s when I began to glimpse her purpose in telling me this story, why she thought it might help to explain Percy’s brusqueness; the night Thomas Cavill failed to arrive had been life-altering for all of them. ‘Percy,’ I said, and Saffy gave a slight nod. ‘Percy was different afterwards?’

There came a noise then in the corridor, the deliberate gait, the unmistakable beating of Percy’s cane; as if she’d heard her name, intuited somehow that she was the subject of an illicit conversation.

Saffy used the arm of the sofa to push herself to standing. ‘Edith has just arrived,’ she said quickly, as Percy appeared at the door. She gestured towards me with the hand which held her handkerchief. ‘I was telling her about poor Bruno.’

Percy looked between us: from me, still seated on the sofa, to Saffy, standing right beside me.

‘Did you reach the young man?’ Saffy pressed on, her voice wavering a little.

A short nod. ‘He’s on his way. I’m going to meet him at the front door; give him some idea of where to look. ’

‘Yes,’ said Saffy, ‘good. Good.’

‘Then I’ll take Miss Burchill downstairs.’ She met my unspoken query. ‘The muniment room. As promised.’

I smiled, but instead of continuing the search for Bruno, as I’d expected, Percy walked into the parlour and went to stand by the window. She made a show of scrutinizing its wooden frame, scratching at a mark on the glass, leaning closer, but it was apparent that the impromptu inspection was a ruse so she might remain in the room with us. I realized then that Saffy had been right. For some reason Percy Blythe didn’t want me to be alone with her twin, and I returned to my suspicion of the day before – that Percy was worried Saffy might tell me something she shouldn’t. The control Percy wielded over her sisters was astonishing; it intrigued me, it caused a small voice inside my head to urge prudence, but more than anything it made me greedy to hear the conclusion of Saffy’s story.

The five or so minutes that followed, in which Saffy and I made small talk about the weather, and Percy continued to glare at the glass and prod at the dusty sill, were amongst the longest I’d experienced. At last, relief, as the sound of a car motor came closer. We all gave up our performances, falling instead into stillness and silence.

The motor grew very near and stopped. A heavy clunk as the car door closed. Percy exhaled. ‘That will be Nathan.’

‘Yes,’ said Saffy.

‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’

And then, finally, she left. Saffy waited, and only when the footsteps had receded completely did she sigh, once, shortly, and swivel in her seat to face me. She smiled, and in it I read apology and discomfort. When she picked up the thread of her story, there was a new determination to her voice. ‘Perhaps you can tell,’ she began, ‘Percy is the strongest of us. She’s always seen herself as a protector, even when we were girls. For the most part I’ve been glad. A champion can be a very fortunate thing to have.’

I couldn’t help but notice the way her fingers were moving against one another, the way she continued to glance towards the doorway. ‘Not always though,’ I said.

‘No. Not always. Not for me, and not for her either. The attribute has been a great burden in her life, not least after Juniper was… after it happened. We both took it hard, Juniper was our baby sister, is still our baby sister, and to see her like that,’ her head was shaking as she spoke, ‘it was unspeakably difficult. But Percy – ’ Saffy’s gaze picked at the space above my head, as if she might find there the words she sought to explain – ‘Percy was in such a black mood afterwards. She’d been crotchety in the lead up – my twin was one of those women who found purpose during the war and when the bombs stopped falling, when Hitler turned his sights on Russia, she was rather disappointed – but after that evening, it was different. She took the young man’s desertion of Juniper personally.’

This was a curious turn. ‘Why would that have been?’

‘It was strange, almost as if she felt responsible in some way. She wasn’t, of course, and there was nothing she could have done that would have made things turn out differently. But that’s Percy: she blamed herself because that’s what Percy does. One of us was hurt and there was nothing she could do to fix it.’ She sighed, folding her handkerchief over and over to form a small, neat triangle. ‘And I suppose that’s why I’m telling you all this, though I fear I’m doing it all wrong. I want you to understand that Percy’s a good person, that despite the way she is, the way she comes across, she has a good heart.’

It was important to Saffy, I could tell, that I should not think poorly of her twin, so I returned the smile she’d given me. But she was right – there was something about her story that didn’t make sense. ‘Why, though?’ I said. ‘Why would she have felt responsible? Did she know him? Had she met him before?’

‘No, never.’ She looked at me searchingly. ‘He lived in London; that’s where he and Juniper met. Percy hadn’t been to London since before the war.’

I was nodding, but I was thinking, too, about my mum’s journal, the entry she’d made in which she mentioned that her teacher, Thomas Cavill, had come to visit her at Milderhurst in September 1939. That was the first time Juniper Blythe had met the man she would one day fall in love with. Percy might not have been to London, but there was every possibility that she’d met Thomas Cavill while he was here, in Kent. Though Saffy, it was evident, had not.

A cool gust crept into the room and Saffy pulled her cardigan closer. I noticed that the skin across her collarbone had reddened, she was flushed; she regretted saying as much as she had, and she moved quickly now to sweep her indiscreet comments back beneath the rug. ‘My point is only that Percy took it very hard, that it changed her. I was glad when the Germans started with the doodlebugs and V2s because it gave her something new to worry about.’ Saffy laughed, but it had a hollow ring. ‘She’d have been happiest, I sometimes think, had the war continued indefinitely.’

She was uncomfortable and I felt bad for her; sorry, too, that it was my probing that had caused her this new worry. She’d only meant to assuage any bruised feelings I’d suffered the day before and it seemed cruel to saddle her with a new social anxiety. I smiled and tried to change the subject. ‘And what about you? Did you work during the war?’

She cheered up a little. ‘Oh, we all did our bit; I didn’t do anything as exciting as Percy, of course. She’s the better suited to heroics. I sewed and cooked and made do; knitted a thousands socks. Though not particularly well in some cases.’ She was poking fun at herself and I smiled with her, an image coming to mind of a young girl shivering in the castle’s attic, shrunken socks layering both ankles and the hand that didn’t hold her pen. ‘I almost spent it employed as a governess, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. A family of children who went to America for the duration. I received the offer of employment but had to turn it down.’

‘Because of the war?’

‘No. The letter arrived at the same time as Juniper’s great disappointment. Now, don’t you look like that. No need for a long face on my account. I don’t believe in regrets, not generally, there’s not much point, is there? I couldn’t have taken it, not then. Not when it took me so far away, not with Juniper. How could I have left her?’

I didn’t have siblings; I wasn’t sure how these things worked. ‘Percy couldn’t have-?’

‘Percy has many gifts, but caring for children and invalids has never been among them. It takes a certain – ’ her fingertips fussed, and she searched the antique firescreen as if the words she sought might be written there – ‘softness, I suppose. No. I couldn’t have left Juniper with only Percy to care for her. So I wrote a letter, turning the position down.’

‘It must have been very difficult.’

‘One doesn’t have a choice when it comes to family. Juniper was my baby sister. I wasn’t about to leave her, not like that. And besides, even if the fellow had come as he was supposed to, if they’d married and moved away, I probably wouldn’t have been able to leave anyway.’

‘Why not?’

She turned her elegant neck, didn’t meet my eye.

A noise in the corridor, just as before, a muffled cough and the sharp beat of a cane coming towards us.

‘Percy…’ And in the moment before she smiled I glimpsed the answer to my question. I saw in her pained expression a lifetime of entrapment. They were twins, two halves of a whole, but where one had longed for escape, to lead a single existence, the other had refused to be left alone. And Saffy, whose softness made her weak, whose compassion made her kind, had been unable ever to wrest herself free.

The Muniment Room and a Discovery

I followed Percy Blythe along corridors and down sets of stairs into the increasingly dim depths of the castle. Never chatty, that morning she was resolutely stony. Stony and coated with stale cigarette smoke; the smell was so strong I had to leave a pace between us as we walked. The silence suited me, at any rate; after my conversation with Saffy, I was in no mood for awkward chatter. Something in her story, or perhaps not in the story itself so much as the fact that she’d told it to me, was disquieting. She’d said it was an attempt to explain Percy’s manner, and I could well believe that both the twins had been shattered by Juniper’s abandonment and subsequent collapse, but why had Saffy been so adamant that it was harder for Percy? Especially when Saffy herself had taken on the maternal role with her wounded little sister. She’d been embarrassed by Percy’s discourtesy the day before, I knew, and she’d sought to show her twin’s human face; yet it was almost as if she protested too much, was too determined that I should see Percy Blythe in a saintly light.

Percy stopped at a juncture of corridors and took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. Gristly knuckles balled as she fidgeted with a match, finally bringing it to life; in the flame’s light I glimpsed her face and I saw there proof that she was shaken by the morning’s events. As the sweet, smoky smell of fresh tobacco mushroomed around us, and the silence deepened, I said, ‘I’m really sorry about Bruno. I’m sure Mrs Bird’s nephew will find him.’

‘Are you?’ Percy exhaled and her eyes scanned mine without kindness. A twitch on one side of her lip. ‘Animals know when their end is coming, Miss Burchill. They do not wish to be a burden. They are not like human beings, seeking always to be comforted.’ She inclined her head, indicating that I should follow her around the corner, and I felt foolish and small and resolved to offer no further words of sympathy.

We stopped again at the first door we came to. One of the many we’d passed during the tour all those months ago. Cigarette resting on her lip, she pulled from her pocket a large key and rattled it in the lock. After a moment’s difficulty, the old mechanism turned and the door creaked open. It was dark inside, there were no windows, and from what I could make out the walls were lined with heavy wooden filing cabinets, the sort you might find in very, very old legal firms in the City. A single light bulb hung from a fine, frail wire, drifting a little back and forth in the new breath of air from the open door.

I waited for Percy to lead the way, and when she didn’t I looked at her, uncertain. She drew on her cigarette and said only, ‘I don’t go in there.’

Perhaps my surprise showed for she added, with a tremor so slight I almost missed it, ‘I don’t enjoy small spaces. There’s a paraffin lamp around that corner. Pull it out and I’ll light it for you.’

I glanced back into the room’s black depths. ‘Does the light bulb not work?’

She regarded me a moment, then pulled a string and the bulb flared then dulled, settling at a low level, so that the shadows shifted. The light penetrated only far enough to illuminate a patch three feet in diameter. ‘I’d suggest you take the lamp too.’

I smiled grimly and found it easily enough, tucked around the corner just as she’d said it would be. There was a sloshing sound as I retrieved it, at which Percy Blythe said, ‘That’s promising. Not much good without paraffin inside.’ As I held the base, she removed the glass flue, fiddled with a coin-sized dial to lengthen the fabric wick before lighting it. ‘I’ve never enjoyed the smell,’ she said, restoring the flue. ‘It signals bomb shelters to me; ghastly places. Filled with fear and helplessness.’

‘And safety, I’d have thought. Comfort?’

‘Perhaps for some, Miss Burchill.’

She said no more, and I found occupation familiarizing myself with the thin metal handle at the top, testing it to make sure it would hold the lamp’s weight.

‘No one’s been inside for an age,’ said Percy Blythe. ‘There’s a desk at the back. You’ll find the notebooks in boxes beneath. I wouldn’t imagine that they’re in good order: Daddy died during the war; there were other things to contend with. No one had much time for filing.’ She said it defensively, as if I might be about to take her to task for slovenly housekeeping.

‘Of course.’

A flicker of doubt crossed her face, but dissolved when she coughed heavily into her hand. ‘Well then,’ she said, once recovered. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

I nodded, keen suddenly that she might stick around just a little longer. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’m really very grateful for the opportunity-’

‘Be careful with the door. Don’t let it close behind you.’

‘OK.’

‘It’s self-locking. We lost a dog that way.’ Her lips distorted, a grimace that didn’t quite become a smile. ‘I’m an old lady, you know. I can’t be relied upon to remember where I left you.’

The room was long and thin, and low brick arches spanned the width, holding up the ceiling. I clutched the lamp tightly, lifting it out ahead of me so that light flickered against the walls as I took slow, cautious steps deeper inside. Percy had told the truth when she said that no one had been inside for a long time. The room bore an unmistakable signature of stillness. There was silence, too, church silence and I had the uncanny sense that something greater than me was watching.

You’re being fanciful, I told myself sternly. There is no one here but you and the walls. But that was half my problem. These weren’t just any walls, these were the stones of Milderhurst Castle, beneath whose skin the distant hours were whispering, watching. The further into the room I went, the more aware I was of a strange, heavy feeling. A depth of aloneness – loneliness, almost – cloaking me. It was the dark, of course, my recent interaction with Saffy, Juniper’s melancholy story.

But this was my one and only opportunity to see Raymond Blythe’s notebooks. I had only a single hour, and then Percy Blythe would be back to collect me. Chances were, I wouldn’t be permitted a second visit to the muniment room, so it was as well to pay close attention now. I made a mental checklist as I walked: wooden filing cabinets lining both walls; above them – I lifted the lamp to see – maps and architectural plans of all vintages. A little further along was hung a collection of tiny framed daguerreotypes.

It was a series of portraits, the same woman in each: in one she was reclined along a chaise longue in a state of some déshabillé, in the others she was facing the camera directly, Edgar Allan Poe-style, dressed in a high-necked Victorian collar. I leaned closer, brought my lamp high to observe the face within the bronze, blowing once to scatter some of the layered dust. I felt an odd coldness creep up my spine as the face was revealed. She was beautiful, but in a vaguely nightmarish way. Smooth lips; perfect, poreless skin stretched taut along high cheekbones; teeth large and polished. I held the lamp near enough to read the name engraved in cursive writing at the bottom of the picture: Muriel Blythe. Raymond’s first wife, the twins’ mother.

How strange that all her portraits had been relegated to the muniment room. Had it been the result of Raymond Blythe’s grief, I wondered, or the jealous decree of his second wife? Whatever the case, and although I can’t say what made me so pleased to do it, I shifted the lamp then, casting her back into darkness. There wasn’t time to explore each and every hollow of the room. I resolved to find Raymond Blythe’s notebooks, absorb as much from them as I could in the hour allotted, then leave behind this strange, stale place. I held the lamp before me and kept on walking.

But then the pictures on the walls gave way to shelves, stretching from floor to ceiling, and despite myself I slowed. It was like being inside a treasure trove; all manner of items had been stacked along them: books – lots of books – vases and Chinese porcelain, and even crystal jugs. Precious things, from what I could tell, not junk or detritus. What they were doing, languishing on shelves in the muniment room, I could not begin to guess.

Beyond them was something interesting enough to make me stop: a collection of forty or fifty boxes, all of the same size, covered in pretty paper – floral for the most part. There were little labels on some of them and I went close enough to read one: Heart Reclaimed: a novel by Seraphina Blythe. I lifted the lid and peeked inside: a stack of paper with typewritten text all over it, a manuscript. I remembered Mum telling me that the Blythes had all been writers, all except Percy. I held the lamp higher so that I could take in the entire collection of boxes, smiling in wonder. These were Saffy’s stories. She was so prolific. It oppressed me, in some way, to see them all huddled down here together: stories and dreams, people and places invested at one time with great energy and industry, only to be left in the dark over years to turn back into dust. Another label read Marriage to Matthew de Courcy. The publisher in me couldn’t help it: I lifted the lid and pulled the papers from inside. This one didn’t contain a manuscript, though; it was a collection of assorted papers – research, I supposed. Old sketches – wedding dresses, floral arrangements – newspaper clippings describing various society weddings, scribbled notes as to orders of service, and then, further down, a 1924 notice of the engagement of Seraphina Grace Blythe and Matthew John de Courcy.

I set the papers down. This was research, but not for a novel. This box contained the planning for Saffy’s own wedding that never was. I put the lid back on and stepped away, guilty suddenly for my intrusion. It struck me then that every item in this room was the remnant of a bigger story, the lamps, the vases, the books, the duffel bag, Saffy’s floral boxes. The muniment room was a tomb, just like those in ancient times. A pharaoh’s dark, cool tomb where precious things went to be forgotten.

By the time I reached the table at the very end, I felt as if I’d walked a marathon through Alice’s Wonderland. It was a surprise, then, when I turned around, to see that the swaying light bulb, the door – carefully propped open with a wooden box – was only forty-five feet or so behind me. I found the notebooks just where Percy had said they’d be and, just as she’d said, piled into boxes, as if someone had walked along Raymond Blythe’s study shelves and desk, swept everything in together, then left them here. I understood that there were other concerns during the war; nonetheless, it seemed odd that neither of the twins had found time to return in the decades since. Raymond Blythe’s notebooks, his journals and letters, deserved to be on display in a library somewhere, protected and valued, available for scholars to access for many years to come. Percy, in particular, I’d have thought, with her keen eye to posterity would have sought to protect her father’s legacy.

I set my lamp at the back of the desk, far enough away so that I wouldn’t accidentally knock it, and slid the boxes from beneath the table, lifting them one by one onto the chair and rummaging until I found the journals spanning 1916 to 1920. Raymond Blythe had helpfully labelled each with the year, and it didn’t take long before I had 1917 spread out before me. I took my notebook from my bag and began jotting down anything I could think of that might be helpful for the article. Every so often I paused, just so that I could appreciate again that these were actually his journals, that this looping script, these ideas and sentiments, had originated with the great man himself.

Can I possibly convey here, with only words at my disposal, the incredible moment when I turned that fateful page and sensed a shift in the scrawl beneath my fingers? The handwriting was heavier, more purposeful, the script looked to have been written faster: lines and lines, filling each page, and when I bent closer, began to decipher the rough scrawl, I realized, with a thrill that started deep inside my heart, that this was the first draft of the Mud Man. Seventy-five years later, I was witnessing the birth of a classic.

Page after page I turned, scanning the text, devouring it, delighting in the small changes as I compared what was written with my memories of the published text. At length, I reached the end, and although I knew I shouldn’t, I laid my open palm across the final page, closed my eyes, and focused on the pen marks beneath my skin.

And that was when I felt it: the small ridge running down the side of the page, about an inch from the outer margin. Something had been tucked between the journal’s leather cover and its final page. I turned over, and there it was, a stiff piece of paper with scalloped serrations around the rim, the sort found in an expensive correspondence set. It had been folded in half.

Was there ever any chance I wasn’t going to open it? I doubt it. I didn’t have a very good track record with leaving letters unread, and the moment I saw it something began to caper beneath my skin. I felt eyes upon me, eyes in the dark, urging me to look inside.

It was neatly handwritten but faded, and I had to hold it close to the lamp to make out the words. It picked up mid-sentence, a single sheet in a longer letter:

… don’t need me to tell you that it’s a wonderful story. Never before has your writing taken the reader on such a vivid journey. The writing is rich and the tale itself captures, with an almost eerie prescience, Man’s eternal quest to shed the past and move beyond old, regrettable actions. The girl, Jane, is a particularly moving creature, her situation on the verge of adulthood perfectly rendered.

I couldn’t help noticing, however, as I read the manuscript, deep similarities to another story with which we’re both familiar. For that reason, and knowing you to be a fair and a kind man, I must beseech you, as much for your own sake as for the other, not to publish The True History of the Mud Man. You know as well as I do that it is not your story to tell. It is not too late to withdraw the manuscript. I fear that if you do not, the consequences will be of a most distressing

I turned it over but there was nothing further. I searched the notebook for the rest. Flicked back through the pages, even held it by the spine and shook it very carefully. Nothing.

But what could it mean? Which similarities? Which other story? What consequences? And who had seen fit to deliver such a warning?

A shuffling in the corridor. I sat stone-still, listening. Someone was coming. My heart hammered in my chest; the letter shook between my fingertips.

A split second of indecision, then I stuffed it inside my notebook and pressed the cover flat. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Percy Blythe and her cane silhouetted in the doorway.

A Long Way to Fall

How I made it back to the farmhouse I cannot tell you; I don’t remember a second of the walk. Presumably I managed to say farewell to Saffy and Percy, then stumble back down the hill without doing myself bodily harm. I was in a daze, completely unaware of anything that took place between leaving the castle and arriving back at my room; I couldn’t stop thinking about the contents of the letter, the letter I had stolen. I needed to speak to someone immediately. If I were reading its contents correctly – and the wording wasn’t especially complicated – someone had accused Raymond Blythe of plagiarism. Who was this mystery person, and to which earlier story were they referring? Whoever it was had specified having read Raymond Blythe’s manuscript, which meant that they’d read the story and written the letter before the book was published in 1918; that fact narrowed the possibilities but was still no real help. I didn’t have a clue as to whom the manuscript might have been sent to. Well, I had a clue: I work in publishing, I knew it would have been read by editors, proofreaders, a few trusted friends. But those were general terms; I needed names, dates, specifics before I could ascertain how seriously I should take the letter’s claims. For if they were true, if Raymond Blythe had misappropriated the story of the Mud Man, the ramifications were enormous.

It was the sort of discovery scholars and historians – convalescent fathers in Barnes – dreamed of, a career-making scoop, yet all I felt was nauseated. I didn’t want it to be true, I longed for it to be some sort of joke, a misunderstanding even. My own past, my love of books and reading, was inextricably linked with Raymond Blythe’s Mud Man. To accept that it had never been his story, that he had pinched it from somewhere else, that it didn’t have its roots in the fertile soil of Milderhurst Castle, was not only the breaking apart of a literary legend, it was a brutal, personal blow.

Be that as it may, I had found the letter, and I was being paid to write about Raymond Blythe’s composition, specifically the origins, of the Mud Man. I couldn’t just ignore a claim of plagiarism because I didn’t like it. Particularly when it seemed to explain so much of Raymond Blythe’s reticence about discussing his inspiration.

I needed help, and I knew just the person to give it to me. Back at the farmhouse, I avoided Mrs Bird and made a bee-line for my room. I’d picked up the telephone receiver before I’d even sat down. My fingers tripped over themselves in their rush to dial Herbert’s number.

The phone rang out.

‘No!’ I grouched at the receiver. It stared back blankly.

I waited impatiently, then tried again, listened and listened to the faraway lonely ring. I chewed my nails and read my notes and tried again, with no more satisfaction. I even considered calling my dad, stopped only by fears of what the excitement might do to his heart. And that’s when my gaze fell upon Adam Gilbert’s name on the original interview transcript.

I dialled, I waited; no answer. I tried again.

The click of someone picking up. ‘Hello, Mrs Button speaking.’

I could have wept with joy. ‘This is Edith Burchill. I’m ringing to speak with Adam Gilbert.’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Burchill. Mr Gilbert’s gone up to London for a hospital appointment.’

‘Oh.’ A trembly deflation rather than a word.

‘He’s due back in the next day or two. I could leave a message and have him telephone you when he returns at the end of the week, if you’d like?’

‘No,’ I said; it was too late, I needed help now – and yet, it was better than nothing. ‘Yes, all right. Thank you. If you could let him know that it’s rather important. That I think I might have stumbled on something related to the mystery we were discussing recently.’

I spent the rest of the evening staring at the letter, scribbling indecipherable patterns in my notebook, and dialling Herbert’s number; listening to the phantom voices trapped inside that empty phone line. At eleven o’clock I accepted finally that it was too late to continue stalking Herbert’s empty house; that, for now at any rate, I was alone with my problem.

As I headed for the castle next morning, exhausted and bleary-eyed, I felt as if I’d spent the night tumbling through the wash. I had the letter concealed within the inside pocket of my jacket and I kept slipping my hand in to check it was still there; I can’t explain why exactly, but as I left my room I’d been compelled to retrieve it, to tuck it away safely and carry it on my person. To leave the letter behind on the desk was unthinkable, somehow. It wasn’t a rational decision; it wasn’t through fear that someone else might happen upon it during the day. It was a strange and burning conviction that the letter belonged with me, that it had presented itself to me, that we were attached in some way now and I had been entrusted with unravelling its secrets.

When I arrived Percy Blythe was waiting for me, pretending to pull weeds from a plant pot by the entrance stairs. I saw her before she noticed me, which is how I know she was pretending. Right up until the moment that some creeping sixth sense made her aware of my presence, she’d been standing upright, leaning against the stone of the stairs, arms wrapped across her middle, attention fixed on something in the distance. She’d been so still, so pale, that she’d looked like a statue. Though not the sort of statue most people would choose to stand in front of their house.

‘Any sign of Bruno?’ I called, wondering at my ability to sound normal.

She made a small performance of surprise at my arrival and rubbed her fingers together so that tiny pieces of dirt sifted to the ground. ‘I don’t hold out high hopes. Not with the cold come in as it has.’ She waited for me to reach her, then extending her arm, invited me to follow: ‘Come.’

It was no warmer inside the castle than out. Indeed, the stones seemed somehow to trap the cold air, making the whole place greyer, darker, more bleak than before.

I expected that we would follow the usual corridor towards the yellow parlour but Percy led me instead to a small hidden doorway, tucked behind an alcove within the entrance hall.

‘The tower,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

‘For your article.’

I nodded, and then, because she’d started up the narrow, winding staircase, I began to follow.

With each step, my sense of unease grew. It was true what she had said – seeing the tower was important for my article – and yet there was something indefinably strange in Percy Blythe suggesting that she should show it to me. She’d been so reticent thus far, so reluctant that I should speak to her sisters or see her father’s notebooks. To find her waiting for me this morning, outside in the cold, for her to propose showing me the tower room without my having to ask first – well, it was unexpected, and I am not made comfortable by unexpected things.

I told myself I was reading too much into it: Percy Blythe had selected me for the task of writing about her father, and she was nothing if not proud of her castle. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Or perhaps she’d decided that the sooner I saw what I needed to, the sooner I’d be on my way and they would be left once more to their own devices. But no matter how much sense I made, the niggling had started. Was there any way, I wondered, that she knew what I had found?

We’d reached a small platform of uneven stone; a narrow archer’s window had been cut into the dusky wall and I was able to glimpse through it a thick sweep of Cardarker Wood; so glorious when seen in full, yet ominous somehow in section.

Percy Blythe pushed open the narrow round-topped door. ‘The tower room.’

Once again, she stepped aside so that I might go first. I went gingerly, stopping in the centre of the small, circular room on a faded rug of sooty shades. The first thing I noticed was that the fire had been freshly set, in preparedness for our visit, I supposed.

‘There,’ she said, closing the door behind us. ‘Now we are alone.’

Which set my heart to racing, though why precisely I could not say. My fear made little sense. She was an old lady, a frail old lady who’d just employed what scant energy she had in climbing the stairs. If the two of us were to engage in a physical tussle, I was pretty sure I’d hold my own. And yet. There was something in the way her eyes still shone, a spirit that was stronger than her body. And all I could think was that it was an awfully long drop from here to the ground and that a lot of people already had died plummeting from that window right there…

Happily, Percy Blythe was unable to read my mind and see written there the sorts of horrors that belong only in melodramatic fiction. She rolled a wrist slightly and said, ‘This is it. This is where he worked.’

And hearing her say it, I was able finally to creep out from beneath my own clouded thoughts and appreciate that I was standing in the middle of Raymond Blythe’s tower. These bookshelves, built to mould against the curving walls, were where he’d kept his favourites, the fireplace had been that by which he’d sat, day and evening, working on his books. My fingers ran along the very desk at which he’d written the Mud Man.

The letter whispered against my skin. If indeed he wrote the book himself.

‘There’s a room,’ said Percy Blythe, as she struck a match and set the fire burning, ‘behind the tiny door in the entrance hall. Four storeys below, but right beneath the tower. We used to sit there sometimes, Saffy and I. When we were young. When Daddy was working.’ It was a rare moment of expansiveness, and I couldn’t help but watch her as she spoke. She was tiny, thin and wan, and yet there was something deep inside Percy Blythe, a strength – of character perhaps? – that drew one like a moth. As if sensing my interest, she withdrew her light, that twist of a smile breezed across her face, and she straightened. Nodded at me as she tossed the spent matchstick into the flames. ‘Please yourself,’ was all she said. ‘Have a look around.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t go too near the window, though. It’s a long way to fall.’

Giving her what little smile I could manage, I began to take in the details of the room. The shelves were quite empty now; most of their former contents, I supposed, were lining the walls of the muniment room; but there were still framed pictures on the wall. One in particular caught my eye. It was an image with which I was familiar: Goya’s Sleep of Reason. I paused before it, taking in the foreground human figure, slumped – in despair it seemed – over his writing desk, while a host of bat-like monsters flurried above, arising from and feeding on, his sleeping mind.

‘That was my father’s,’ said Percy. Her voice made me jump, but I didn’t turn, and when I looked again at the picture my perception had changed so that I saw my own shadowy reflection, and hers behind me, in the glass. ‘It used to frighten us terribly.’

‘I can understand why.’

‘Daddy said to fear was foolish. That we’d do better to draw a lesson.’

‘Which lesson was that?’ I turned now to face her.

She touched the chair by the window.

‘Oh no, I – ’ another weak smile – ‘I’m happy to stand.’

Percy blinked slowly and I thought for a moment that she might insist. She didn’t though, saying only, ‘The lesson, Miss Burchill, was that when reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.’

My hands were clammy and a spreading heat was climbing up my arms. But surely she had not read my mind. She couldn’t possibly know the monstrous things I’d been imagining since I found the letter, my morbid fantasies of being pushed from the window.

‘Goya anticipated Freud by some time, in that respect.’

I smiled somewhat sickly, and then the fever hit my cheeks and I knew that I could stand the suspense, the subterfuge, no longer. I was not formed for games like these. If Percy Blythe knew what I had found in the muniment room, if she knew that I had taken it with me and that I was bound to investigate further; if this was all an elaborate ploy to have me admit to my deception, and for her to try, by whatever means she could, to prevent me from exposing her father’s lie, then I was ready. What was more, I was going to strike the first blow. ‘Miss Blythe,’ I said, ‘I found something yesterday. In the muniment room.’

A dreadful look came over her, a leaching of colour that was instant and absolute. As quickly as it had appeared she managed to conceal it again. She blinked. ‘Well? I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to guess, Miss Burchill. You’re going to have to tell me what it was.’

I reached into my jacket and retrieved the letter, tried to steady my fingers as I handed it to her. I watched as she dug reading glasses from her pocket, held them before her eyes and scanned the page. Time slowed interminably. She shifted her fingertips lightly over its surface. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see.’ She seemed almost relieved, as if my discovery was not what she’d feared.

I waited for her to continue and when it was clear she had no intention of doing so, I said, ‘I’m rather worried – ’ it was, without doubt, the most difficult conversation I’d ever had to initiate. ‘If there’s any question, you see, that the Mud Man was – ’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘stolen’. ‘If there’s any chance at all that your father might have read it elsewhere first,’ I swallowed, the room was swimming a little before my eyes, ‘as this letter seems to suggest, the publishers will need to know.’

She was folding the letter very carefully and crisply, and only when she’d finished did she say, ‘Let me set your mind at ease, Miss Burchill. My father wrote every word of that book.’

‘But the letter – are you sure?’ I had made a huge mistake in telling her. What had I expected her to do? Speak honestly with me? Give me her blessing while I made enquiries that stood to strip her father of his literary credibility? It was natural, of course, for his daughter to support him, especially a daughter like Percy.

‘I am very sure, Miss Burchill,’ she said, meeting my gaze. ‘It was I who wrote that letter.’

‘You wrote it?’

A curt nod.

‘But why? Why did you write such a thing?’ Especially if it was true that every word was his.

There was fresh colour in her cheeks and her eyes were bright, her energy much improved, almost as if she were feeding in some way on my confusion. Enjoying it. She looked at me slyly, a look to which I was becoming accustomed, a look that suggested she had something more to tell me than what I’d thought to ask. ‘There comes a time in the lives of all children, I expect, when the shutters are lifted and they become aware that their parents are not immune to the worst of human frailties. That they are not invincible. That sometimes they will do things to suit themselves, to feed their own monsters. We are a selfish species by nature, Miss Burchill.’

My thoughts were swimming in a deep and clouded soup. I wasn’t quite sure how one thing related to the other, but assumed it must have something to do with the distressing consequences that her letter had prophesied. ‘But the letter-’

‘That letter is nothing,’ she snapped, with a wave of her hand. ‘Not any more. It’s an irrelevance.’ She glanced at it briefly and her face seemed to flicker like a projection screen, a film running backwards across seventy-five years. In a single sudden motion she tossed it onto the fire, where it sizzled and burned and made her flinch. ‘As it happens, I was wrong. It was his story to tell.’ She smiled then, wryly, a little biliously. ‘Even if he didn’t know it at the time.’

I was utterly confused. How could he not know that it was his story, and how could she have thought it otherwise? It made no sense.

‘I knew a girl once, in the war.’ Percy Blythe had gone to sit on the chair behind her father’s desk and she leaned back into the chair’s arms as she continued: ‘She worked in the cabinet rooms; met Churchill a number of times in the corridors. There was a sign they had hanging, one that he’d put there. It said, “Please understand there is no depression in this house, and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.” ’ She sat for a moment, her chin lifted and her eyes slightly narrowed, her own words hanging still around her. Through the wash of smoke, with her neat haircut, her fine features, the silk blouse, she almost looked like she were back in the Second World War. ‘What do you think of that?’

I do not do well with these sorts of games; I never have, particularly riddles without even the most tenuous link to the rest of the conversation. I shifted my shoulders miserably.

‘Miss Burchill?’

A statistic came to me then, something I’d read or heard once about the way suicide rates plummet during times of war; people are too busy trying to survive to give much thought to how miserable they are. ‘I think wartime is different,’ I said, unable to avoid the rising tone that betrayed my discomfort. ‘I think the rules are different. I imagine depression is probably akin to defeat during war. Maybe that’s what Churchill meant.’

She nodded, a slow smile playing at her lips. She was making things difficult for me on purpose, and I didn’t understand why. I’d come to Kent at her behest, but she wouldn’t let me interview her sisters, she wouldn’t answer any of my questions directly, she preferred to play cat-and-mouse games in which I was cast always as the quarry. She might just as easily have let Adam Gilbert continue with the project. He’d done his interviews, he needn’t have bothered them again. You may take it as an indication of my profound discomfort and frustration that I said then, ‘Why did you ask me to come, Miss Blythe?’

A single scar-like brow shot up like an arrow. ‘What’s that?’

‘Judith Waterman from Pippin Books told me you rang. That you asked specifically for me.’

A twitch at the corner of her mouth and she looked straight at me; you don’t realize how rare that is until someone actually does it. Stares, unflinchingly, right down deep into your soul. ‘Sit,’ she said, just as you might instruct a dog or a disobedient child, and the word was so brittle in her mouth that this time I did not argue; I spotted the nearest chair and did precisely as I was told.

She tapped a cigarette on the desk, then lit it. She drew hard, eyeing me as she exhaled. ‘There’s something different about you,’ she said, resting her other wrist across her body, leaning back into the chair. All the better to appraise me.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

She squinted then, dissecting, watery eyes looking me up and down with an intensity that made me shiver. ‘Yes. You’re less chirpy than you were before. The last time you came.’

I couldn’t argue with that so I didn’t. ‘Yes,’ I said. My arms were threatening to flail around so I crossed them. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Don’t be,’ said Percy, lifting her cigarette and her chin. ‘I like you better this way.’

Of course she did. And, happily, before I was faced with the impossibility of formulating a reply, she returned to my initial question: ‘I asked for you, in the first instance, because my sister wouldn’t tolerate an unknown man in the house.’

‘But Mr Gilbert had already finished his interviews. There was no need for him to come back to Milderhurst if Juniper didn’t like it.’

That sly smile reappeared. ‘You’re astute. Good. I had hoped you might be. I wasn’t entirely sure after our first meeting and I didn’t fancy dealing with an imbecile.’

I was torn between ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sod off’ and elected to compromise with a cool smile.

‘We don’t know many people,’ she continued on an exhalation, ‘not any more. And then when you came to visit, and that Bird woman told me that you worked in publishing. Well, I began to wonder. Then you told me that you hadn’t any siblings.’

I nodded, trying to follow the logic in her explanation.

‘And that’s when I decided.’ She drew again on her cigarette, performed a piece of fussy stage business in retrieving an ashtray. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be biased.’

I was feeling less and less astute by the second. ‘Biased about what?’

‘About us.’

‘Miss Blythe, I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of this has to do with the article I’ve been commissioned to write; with your father’s book and your memories of its publication.’

She waved her hand impatiently and ash fell to the floor. ‘Nothing. Nothing. It has nothing at all to do with any of that. It has to do with what I’m going to tell you.’

Was that when I felt it, the ominous creeping beneath my skin? Perhaps it was only that a gust of autumn chill came then, blustering beneath the door, angering the lock so that the key fell to the floor. Percy ignored it and I tried to do the same. ‘With what you’re going to tell me?’

‘Something that needs to be set right, before it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘I’m dying.’ She blinked with customary cold frankness.

‘I’m so sorry-’

‘I’m old. It happens. Please don’t patronize me with unnecessary sympathy.’ A change came over her face, like clouds scudding across the wintry sky, covering the last of the sun’s feeble light. She looked old, tired. And I saw that what she said was true – she was dying. ‘I was dishonest when I telephoned that woman, that publisher, and asked for you. I regret any inconvenience caused to the other fellow. I’ve little doubt he’d have done an excellent job. He was nothing if not professional. Nonetheless, it was all I could think to do. I wanted you to come and I didn’t know how else to make that happen.’

‘But why?’ There was something new in her manner, an urgency that made my breathing grow shallow. The back of my neck prickled, with cold but with something else, too.

‘I have a story. I am the only one who knows it. I am going to tell it to you.’

‘Why?’ It came out little louder than a whisper and I coughed, then asked again. ‘Why?’

‘Because it needs to be told. Because I value accurate records. Because I cannot carry it further.’ Did I imagine that she glanced then at Goya’s monsters?

‘But why tell me?’

She blinked. ‘Because of who you are, of course. Because of who your mother was.’ The slightest of smiles and I glimpsed that she was taking certain pleasure from our conversation, from the power, perhaps, that she wielded over my ignorance. ‘It was Juniper who picked it up. She called you Meredith. That’s when I realized. And that’s when I knew you were the one.’

The blood drained from my face and I felt as shameful as a child caught telling lies to their teacher. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, I only thought-’

‘Your reasons don’t interest me. We all have secrets.’

I caught the rest of my apology before it tumbled from my lips.

‘You are Meredith’s daughter,’ she continued, her pace quickening, ‘which means you are like family. And this is a family story.’

It was the last thing I’d expected her to say and I was floored; something inside me beat with glad empathy for my mother, who had loved this place and long believed herself so poorly used. ‘But what do you want me to do?’ I said. ‘With your story, I mean.’

‘Do with it?’

‘Do you want me to write it down?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Not write it down, just set it right. I need to trust you to do that…’ She pointed a sharp finger but the stern gesture was weakened when the face behind it fell to repose. ‘Can I trust you, Miss Burchill?’

I nodded, even though her manner gave me grave misgivings as to precisely what it was she asked of me.

She seemed relieved, but her guard dropped only for an instant before she picked it up again. ‘Well then,’ she said bluntly, turning her gaze towards the window from which her father had fallen to his death. ‘I hope you’re able to go without lunch. I haven’t time to waste.’

Percy Blythe’s Story

Percy Blythe began with a disclaimer. ‘I am not a storyteller,’ she said, striking a match, ‘not like the others. I only have one tale to tell. Listen carefully; I won’t be telling it twice.’ She lit her cigarette and leaned back in her chair. ‘I told you that this has nothing to do with the Mud Man, but I was wrong. In one way or another, this story begins and ends with that book.’

An arm of wind reached down the chimney to tease the flames and I opened my notebook. She’d said it wasn’t necessary, but I nursed a strange feeling of disquiet and it soothed me in some way to hide behind the purpose of my creamy black-lined pages.

‘My father told us once that art was the only form of immortality. That was the sort of thing he used to say; something, I imagine, that his own mother told him. She was a gifted poet and a great beauty, but she was not a warm woman. She could be cruel. Not intentionally; her talent made her cruel. She gave my father all sorts of odd ideas.’ Percy’s mouth twisted and she paused to smooth the hair at the nape of her neck. ‘He was wrong, anyway. There is another type of immortality, far less sought or celebrated.’

I leaned forward a little, waiting for her to tell me what it was, but she didn’t. I would become used to her sudden shifts of topic that stormy afternoon, the way she shone a spotlight on a certain scene, brought it to life only to turn her abrupt attention to another.

‘I’m quite sure my parents were happy once,’ she said, ‘before we were born, but there are two types of people in this world. Those who enjoy the company of children and those who don’t. My father was of the former type. I think he surprised even himself with the force of his affection when Saffy and I were born.’ She glanced at the Goya painting and a muscle twitched in her neck. ‘He was a different man when we were young, before the Great War, before he wrote that book. He was an unusual man for his time and class. He adored us, you see – never mere fondness; he delighted in us and we in him. We were spoiled. Not with objects, though there was no shortage of those, but with his attention and his faith. He thought that we could do no wrong and indulged us accordingly. I don’t imagine it is ever good for children to find themselves the subject of such idolatry. Would you like a glass of water, Miss Burchill?’

I blinked. ‘No. No, thank you.’

‘I will, if you don’t mind. My throat – ’ She set her cigarette in the ashtray and took up a jug from a set of low shelves, filling a cut-glass tumbler. She gulped, and I noticed that despite her clear, flat tone, those piercing eyes, her fingers were shaking. ‘Did your parents spoil you when you were small, Miss Burchill?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think they did.’

‘I don’t think they did either. You don’t carry the sense of entitlement of a child who’s been placed front and centre.’ Her gaze drifted again to the window, where the weather was gathering greyly. ‘Daddy used to put the two of us in an old perambulator that had been his when he was small and take us on long walks about the village. When we got older he’d have Cook make up elaborate picnics and the three of us would explore the woods, stroll across the fields, and he would tell us stories, speaking to us about matters that seemed grave and wonderful. That this was our home, that our ancestors’ voices would always speak to us, that we could never be alone as long as we were within reach of our castle.’ A faint smile tried to settle on her lips. ‘At Oxford, he’d been a great one for languages, the old tongues, and bore a particular fondness for Anglo-Saxon. He used to do translations for his own pleasure, and from a very early age we were allowed to help. Up here in the tower, usually, but sometimes in the gardens. One afternoon we lay together, the three of us on a picnic rug, looking back towards the castle on the hilltop, and he read to us from “The Wanderer”. It was a perfect day. Those are rare and it’s as well to remember them.’ She paused then, her face relaxing somewhat as she slipped deeper into memory. When finally she spoke again, her voice was reedy. ‘The Anglo-Saxons had a gift for sadness and longing, and heroics, of course; children, I suspect, are predisposed to all three. Seledreorig.’ The word was like an incantation in the round stone room. ‘Sadness for the lack of a hall,’ she said. ‘There’s no word like it in the English language, and yet there ought to be, don’t you think?… There now. I’ve drifted off track.’

She straightened in her chair, reached for her cigarette only to find it fallen to ash. ‘The past is like that,’ she said, as she battled another from the pack. ‘Always waiting to lure you away.’ She struck the match, drew impatiently and squinted at me through the haze. ‘I’ll be more careful from here on.’ The flame extinguished swiftly, as if to underline the intention. ‘My mother had struggled to have children and when she did she was waylaid with a depression so strong she could barely raise herself from her bed. When she finally recovered, she found that her family were no longer waiting for her. Her children hid behind her husband’s legs when she tried to hold them, cried and fought if she came too close. We took to using words from other languages, too, those that Daddy had taught us, so she wouldn’t understand. He would laugh and encourage us, delighting in our precocity. How ghastly we must have been. We hardly knew her, you see. We refused to be with her, we only wanted to be with Daddy and he with us, and so she grew lonely.’

Lonely. I wasn’t certain that a word had ever sounded quite as ominous as that one did on Percy Blythe’s lips. I remembered the daguerreotype images of Muriel Blythe I’d seen in the muniment room. I’d thought it odd then that they’d been hung in such a dark, forgotten place; now it seemed positively menacing. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

She looked at me sharply. ‘All in good time.’

An explosion of thunder sounded outside and Percy glanced towards the window. ‘A storm,’ she said with disgust. ‘Just what we need.’

‘Would you like me to close the window?’

‘No, not yet. I enjoy the air.’ She frowned at the floor as she pulled on her cigarette; she was collecting her thoughts and when she found them she met my eyes. ‘My mother took a lover. Who could blame her? It was my father who brought them together – not intentionally. This isn’t that type of story – he was trying to make amends. He must’ve known he was ignoring her, and he arranged for extensive improvements to the castle and gardens. Shutters were added to the downstairs windows to remind her of those she’d admired in Europe, and work was carried out on the moat. The digging went on for such a long time, and Saffy and I used to watch from the attic window. The architect’s name was Sykes.’

‘Oliver Sykes.’

She was surprised. ‘Well done, Miss Burchill. I knew you were astute but I didn’t suspect you of such architectural erudition.’

I shook my head and explained about Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst. What I didn’t tell her was that I also knew of Raymond Blythe’s bequest to the Pembroke Farm Institute. Which meant, of course, that he hadn’t known of the affair.

‘Daddy didn’t know,’ she said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we did. Children know such things. It never occurred to us to tell him, though. As far as we were concerned, we were his world and he cared as little about Mother’s activities as we did.’ She shifted slightly and her blouse rippled. ‘I do not hold stock with regrets, Miss Burchill, nonetheless we are all accountable for our actions and I’ve wondered many times since whether that was the moment when the cards fell ill for the Blythes, even those not yet born. Whether it all might have turned out differently had Saffy and I only told him about seeing Mother and that man together.’

‘Why?’ Foolish of me to break her train of thought, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why would it have been better if you’d told him?’ I should have remembered that the stubborn streak in Percy Blythe took interruption hard.

She stood up, pressed her palms against the small of her narrow back and bowed her pelvis forward. Took a last draw on her cigarette stub, then tapped it out in the ashtray and walked stiffly to the window. I could see from where I sat that the sky hung dark and heavy, but her eyes narrowed at the distant glare still quavering on the horizon. ‘That letter you found,’ she said, as thunder rumbled closer, ‘I didn’t realize Daddy had kept it, but I’m glad he did. It took a lot for me to write it – he was so excited by the manuscript, the story. When Daddy returned from the war he was a shadow of himself. Skinny as a stovepipe with a horrid glassy shallowness to his eyes. We were kept from visiting much of the time – too disruptive, the nurses said – but we sneaked in anyway, through the castle veins. He’d be sitting by this window, looking out yet seeing nothing, and he’d speak of a great absence within him. His mind itched, he said, to be put to creative use, yet when he held a pen nothing came. “I am empty,” he said, over and over, and he was right. He was. You can imagine then, the restorative thrill when he began work on the notes that would become the Mud Man.’

I nodded, remembering the notebooks downstairs, the changed handwriting, heavy with confidence and intent from first line until last.

Lightning struck and Percy Blythe flinched. She waited out the answering thunder. ‘The words in that book were his, Miss Burchill; it was the idea he stole.’

From whom? I wanted to shout, but I bit my tongue this time.

‘It pained me to write that letter, to dampen his enthusiasm when the project so sustained him, but I had to.’ Rain began to fall, an instant sheen. ‘Soon after Daddy returned from France, I contracted scarlet fever and was sent away to recover. Twins, Miss Blythe, do not do well with solitude.’

‘It must have been awful-’

‘Saffy,’ she continued, as if she’d forgotten I were there, ‘was always the more imaginative. We were a balanced pair in that way, illusion and reality were kept in check. Separated, though, we each sharpened to opposing points.’ She shivered and stepped back from the window; spots of rain were falling on the sill. ‘My twin suffered terribly with nightmare. The fanciful among us often do.’ She glanced at me. ‘You will notice, Miss Burchill, that I did not say nightmares. There was only ever one.’

The glowering storm outside had swallowed the day’s last light and the tower room fell to darkness. Only the fire’s orange flicker provided jagged relief. Percy returned to the desk and switched on its lamp. Light shone greenly through the coloured glass shade, casting dark shadows beneath her eyes. ‘She’d been dreaming about him since she was four years old. She would wake in the night screaming, bathed in sweat, convinced that a man coated in mud had climbed from the moat to claim her.’ A slight tilt of the head and Percy’s cheekbones leaped into relief. ‘I always soothed her. I told her it was just a dream, that no harm could come while I was there.’ She exhaled thornily. ‘Which was all well and good until July 1917.’

‘When you went away with the fever.’

A nod, so slight I might have imagined it.

‘So she told your father instead.’

‘He was hiding from his nurses when she found him. She was no doubt in quite a state – Saffy was never one for reserve – and he asked her what was wrong.’

‘And then he wrote it down.’

‘Her demon was his saviour. In the beginning, anyway. The story fired him: he sought her out, hungry for details. His attention flattered her, I’m sure, and by the time I returned from hospital things were very different. Daddy was bright, recovered, delirious almost, and he and Saffy shared a secret. Neither of them mentioned the Mud Man to me. It wasn’t until I saw proof copies of The True History of the Mud Man, on this desk right here, that I guessed what had happened.’

The rain was teeming now, and I got up to close the window so that I could hear. ‘And so you wrote the letter.’

‘I knew, of course, that for him to publish such a thing would be terrible for Saffy. He wouldn’t be convinced though, and he lived with the consequences for the rest of his life.’ Her attention drifted to the Goya again. ‘The guilt of what he’d done, his sin.’

‘Because he’d stolen Saffy’s nightmare,’ I said. Sin was taking it a bit far, perhaps, but I certainly understood how such a thing might impact upon a young girl, particularly one with a bent for the fantastic. ‘He sent it out into the world and gave it new life. He made it real.’

Percy laughed, a wry, metallic sound that made me shiver. ‘Oh, Miss Burchill, he did more than that. He inspired the dream. He just didn’t know that then.’

A growl of thunder rolled up the tower and the lamplight dulled; Percy Blythe, however, did not. She was possessed by her story’s purpose, and I leaned closer, desperate to know just what she meant, what Raymond Blythe could possibly have done to spark Saffy’s nightmare. Another cigarette was lit; her eyes shone, and perhaps she smelled my interest for she shifted the spotlight. ‘Mother kept her affair secret for the better part of a year.’

The change of subject was a physical blow and I deflated. Rather obviously, I’m afraid, for it did not escape my host’s attention. ‘Am I disappointing you, Miss Burchill?’ she snapped. ‘This is the story of the Mud Man’s birth. It’s quite a scoop, you know. We all played our part in his creation, even Mother, though she was dead before dream was dreamed or book was writ.’ She brushed a trail of ash from the front of her blouse and picked up her story. ‘Mother’s affair carried on and Daddy had no idea. Until one night when he came home early from a trip to London. He’d had good news – a journal in America had published an article of his, to great acclaim – and he was of a mind to celebrate. It was late. Saffy and I, just four years old, had been put to bed hours before, and the lovers were in the library. Mother’s lady’s maid tried to stop Daddy, but he’d been drinking whisky all afternoon and he wouldn’t be calmed. He was jubilant, he wanted his wife to share in his good mood. He burst into the library, and there they were.’ Her mouth darted to form a grimace, for she knew what was coming. ‘Daddy was enraged and a terrible fight ensued. He and Sykes, then when the other man lay injured on the floor, he and Mother. Daddy berated her, called her names, and then he shook her, not hard enough to hurt but with sufficient force that she fell against the table. A lamp toppled to the ground and broke, the flames catching the hem of her dress.

‘The fire was immediate and fierce. It raced up the chiffon of her dress and within an instant she was engulfed. Daddy was horrified, of course, dragging her to the curtains, trying to smother the flames. It only made matters worse. The curtains caught, the whole room soon after; fire was everywhere. Daddy ran for help: he dragged Mother out of the library, saved her life – albeit briefly – but he didn’t go back for Sykes. He left him there to die. Love makes people do cruel things, Miss Burchill.

‘The library burned completely but when the authorities arrived, no other body was found. It was as if Oliver Sykes had never existed. Daddy supposed that the body had disintegrated under such intense heat, Mother’s maid never spoke of it again for fear of tarnishing her mistress’s good name, and no one came looking for Sykes. In a great gift of fortune for Daddy, the man was a dreamer who’d spoken often of his desire to escape to the continent and slip from the world.’

What she’d told me was awful, that the fire that killed their mother had been caused in such a way, that Oliver Sykes had been left to die in the library, yet I knew I was missing something for I still couldn’t see what it had to do with the Mud Man.

‘I saw none of this myself,’ she said. ‘But someone did. High up in the attic, a small girl had woken from her sleep, left her twin alone in bed, and climbed up on the bookcase to see the strange and golden sky. What she saw was fire, leaping from the library, and, down on the ground, a man all black and charred and melted, screaming in agony as he tried to climb out of the moat.’

Percy refilled her water and drank shakily. ‘Do you remember when you first visited, Miss Burchill, and you mentioned the past singing in the walls?’

‘Yes.’ The tour that seemed a lifetime ago.

‘I told you it was nonsense, the distant hours. That the stones were old but that they didn’t tell their secrets.’

‘I remember.’

‘I was lying.’ She lifted her chin and set her eyes on mine, a challenge. ‘I do hear them. The older I get, the louder they become. This has not been an easy story to tell, but it’s been necessary. As I said, there is another type of immortality, a far more lonely one.’

I waited.

‘A life, Miss Burchill, a human life, is bracketed by a pair of events: one’s birth and one’s death. The dates of those events belong to a person as much as their name, as much as the experiences that happen in between. I am not telling you this story so that I might feel absolved. I am telling you because a death should be recorded. Do you understand?’

I nodded, thinking of Theo Cavill and his obsessive checking of his brother’s records, the ghastly limbo of not knowing.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘There must be no confusion on that count.’

Her talk of absolution reminded me of Raymond’s guilt, for that was why he’d converted to Catholicism, of course. Why he’d left a great deal of his wealth to the Church. The other recipient had been Sykes’s Farm Institute. Not because Raymond Blythe admired the group’s work, but because he was guilty. I thought of something. ‘You said before that your father didn’t know that he’d inspired the dream at first: did he realize later?’

She smiled. ‘He received a letter from a doctoral student in Norway writing a thesis on physical injury in literature. He was interested in the Mud Man’s blackened body because at times, the student felt, the descriptions painted him in a way that mirrored other representations of burn victims. Daddy never wrote back, but he knew then.’

‘When was that?’

‘The mid-thirties. That’s when he began to see the Mud Man in the castle.’

And when he added a second dedication to his book: MB and OS. Not the initials of his wives, but an attempt to atone in some way for the deaths he’d caused. Something struck me: ‘You didn’t see it happen. How do you know about the fight in the library? Oliver Sykes being there that night?’

‘Juniper.’

‘What?’

‘Daddy told her. She suffered a traumatic event of her own when she was thirteen. He was always on about how similar they were: I expect he thought it would comfort her to know that we are all capable of behaving in ways we might regret. He could be grand and foolish like that.’

She fell silent then, reaching for her glass of water, and the room itself seemed to exhale. Relief, perhaps, that the truth had finally been disclosed. Was Percy Blythe relieved? I wasn’t so sure. Glad that her duty had been discharged, no doubt, but there was nothing in her bearing that seemed lightened by the telling. I had a feeling I knew why: any comfort she might have drawn was far exceeded by her grief. Grand and foolish. They were the first words I’d heard her speak ill about her father and on her lips, she who was so fiercely protective of his legacy, they’d weighed especially heavily.

And why shouldn’t they? What Raymond Blythe had done was wicked, no one could argue with that, and it was little wonder he’d been driven mad by guilt. I remembered that photograph of the elderly Raymond in the book I’d bought from the village shop: the fearful eyes, the contracted features, the sense that his body was burdened by black thoughts. A similar appearance, it occurred to me, to the one his eldest daughter presented now. She had shrunk into the chair and her clothing seemed oversized, draping from one bone to the next. Her story had left her spent, her eyelids sagging and the fragile skin shot through with blue; it struck me as wretched that a daughter should have to suffer the sins of her father in such a way.

Rain was falling hard outside, beating against the already sodden ground, and inside the room had darkened with the passing afternoon. Even the fire, which had flickered alongside Percy’s story, was dying now, taking the last of the study’s warmth with it.

I closed my notebook. ‘Why don’t we finish up for the afternoon?’ I said, with what I hoped was kindness. ‘We can pick up again tomorrow, if you like.’

‘Almost, Miss Burchill, I’m almost done.’

She rattled her cigarette box and tipped a final stick onto the desk. Fiddled with it a bit before her match took and the cigarette end glowed. ‘You know now about Sykes,’ she said, ‘but not about the other one.’

The other one. My breath caught.

‘I see by your face, you know of whom I speak.’

I nodded, stiltedly. There was an enormous crack of thunder and I shivered where I sat. Let my notebook fall open again.

She drew hard on her cigarette, coughed as she exhaled. ‘Juniper’s friend.’

‘Thomas Cavill,’ I whispered.

‘He did arrive that night. October 29th, 1941. Write that down. He came as he’d promised her. Only she never knew it.’

‘Why? What happened?’ Perched on the fringes of enlightenment, I almost didn’t want to know.

‘There was a storm, rather like this one. It was dark. There was an accident.’ She spoke so softly I had to lean very close to hear. ‘I thought he was an intruder.’

There was nothing I could think to say.

Her face was ashen and in its lines I read decades of guilt. ‘I never told anyone. Certainly not the police. I was concerned they might not believe me. That they might think I was covering for someone else.’

Juniper. Juniper with the violent incident in her past. The scandal with the gardener’s son.

‘I took care of it. I did my best. But nobody knows and that, finally, must be set to rights.’ I was shocked then to see that she was weeping, tears rolling freely down her old, old face. Shocked, because it was Percy Blythe, but not surprised. Not after what she’d just confessed.

Two men’s deaths, two concealments: there was much to process – so much that I could neither see nor feel distinctly. My emotions had run together like the colours in a set of waterpaints so that I didn’t feel angry or frightened or morally superior, and I certainly wasn’t feverish with glee at having learned the answers to my questions. I just felt sad. Upset and concerned for the old woman sitting across from me, who was weeping for her life’s spiny secrets. I wasn’t able to alleviate her pain, but I couldn’t just sit there staring either. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘let me help you downstairs.’

And this time, she wordlessly agreed.

I kept a gentle hold of her as we went. Slowly, carefully, winding down the stairs. She insisted on carrying the walking cane herself and it dragged behind, marking our progress, step by step, with a drear tattoo. Neither of us spoke; we were both too tired.

When finally we reached the closed door behind which was the yellow parlour, Percy Blythe stopped. By sheer force of will she composed herself, drawing her frame erect and finding an extra inch of height. ‘Not a word to my sisters,’ she said. Her voice was not unkind, but its sinew caused me to startle. ‘Not a word, do you hear?’

‘Stay for dinner, won’t you, Edith?’ said Saffy, brightly, as we came through the door. ‘I prepared extra when it got so late and you were with us still.’ She glanced at Percy, a pleasant expression on her face, yet I could tell she was perplexed, wondering what it was her sister had been saying that had taken the whole day.

I demurred, but she was already laying a place and it was pouring with rain outside.

‘Of course she’ll stay,’ said Percy, letting go of my arm and making her way slowly but certainly to the far side of the table. She turned to regard me when she reached it and beneath the room’s electric light I could see how thoroughly, how astonishingly, she’d managed to resurrect her spirits for the benefit of her sisters. ‘I kept you working over lunch. The least we can do is feed you dinner.’

We ate together, all four of us, a meal of smoked haddock – bright yellow in colour, slimy in consistency, lukewarm in preparation – and the dog, who’d been found, finally, holed up in the butler’s pantry, spent most of the time lying across Juniper’s feet as she fed him pieces of fish from her plate. The storm did not let up, in fact it gained in strength. We ate a dessert of toast and jam; we drank tea, and then more tea, until finally we ran out of amiable chat. At irregular intervals the lights flickered, signalling the like li hood of power outage, and each time they revived we exchanged smiles of reassurance. All the while, rain sluiced over the eaves, and swept across the windows in great sheets.

‘Well,’ said Saffy eventually, ‘I don’t see that there’s any choice about it. We’ll make you up a bed and you can stay here the night. I’ll telephone the farmhouse and let them know.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, with more alacrity than was perhaps polite. ‘I don’t want to impose.’ I didn’t want to impose – neither did I fancy the idea of staying in the castle overnight.

‘Nonsense,’ said Percy, turning from the window. ‘It’s as black as pitch. You’re as likely to fall into the brook and be swept away like a piece of driftwood.’ She straightened. ‘No. We don’t want any accidents. Not when we have room to spare here.’

A Night at the Castle

It was Saffy who showed me to my bedroom. We walked quite a distance from the wing in which the Sisters Blythe now lived, and although our passage was long and dark, I was grateful that I wasn’t being led downstairs. It was enough that I was staying in the castle overnight; I didn’t fancy sleeping anywhere near the muniment room. We each carried a paraffin lamp up a set of stairs to the second floor and along a wide, shadowy corridor. Even when the electric bulbs weren’t flickering, the glow was a peculiar sort of half-light. Finally, Saffy stopped.

‘Here we are,’ she said, opening the door. ‘The guest chamber.’

She – or perhaps it had been Percy – had put sheets on the bed and arranged a small pile of books by the pillow. ‘It’s rather cheerless, I’m afraid,’ she said, glancing about the room with an apologetic smile. ‘We don’t entertain often; we’re rather out of the habit. It’s been such a long time since anybody came to stay.’

‘I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble.’

She was shaking her head. ‘Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all. I always loved having guests. Entertaining was one of the things I found the most fulfilling in life.’ She started towards the bed and set her lamp down on the side table. ‘Now, I’ve laid out a nightgown and found some books, too. I can’t imagine facing the end of the day without a story to drop into on my way towards sleep.’ She fingered the book on the top of the pile. ‘Jane Eyre was always a favourite of mine.’

‘Of mine, too. I always carry a copy, though my edition’s not nearly as beautiful as yours.’

She smiled, pleased. ‘You remind me a little of myself, you know, Edith. The person I might have become if things had been different. If times had been different. Living in London, working with books. When I was young, I dreamed of becoming a governess. Travelling and meeting people, working in a museum. Meeting my own Mr Rochester perhaps.’

She became shy then, and wistful, and I remembered the floral boxes I’d found in the muniment room, in particular the one marked Marriage to Matthew de Courcy. I knew Juniper’s tragic love story well enough, but very little of Saffy’s and Percy’s romantic pasts. Surely they, too, had once been young and filled with lust; yet both had been sacrificed to Juniper’s care. ‘You mentioned that you were engaged once?’

‘To a man called Matthew. We fell in love when we were very young. Sixteen.’ She smiled softly, remembering. ‘We planned to marry when we were twenty-one.’

‘Do you mind me asking what happened?’

‘Not at all.’ She began folding down the bed, smoothing back the blanket and sheet at a neat angle. ‘It didn’t work out; he married someone else.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. So much time has passed. Both of them have been dead for years.’ Perhaps she was uncomfortable that the conversation had taken a self-pitying turn for she made a joke then: ‘I was fortunate, I suppose, that my sister was kind enough to let me live on at the castle for such a bargain rate.’

‘I can’t imagine Percy would have minded that at all,’ I said lightly.

‘Perhaps not, though it was Juniper I meant.’

‘I’m afraid I…?’

Saffy blinked at me, surprised. ‘Why, the castle is hers. Didn’t you know? We’d always supposed that it would pass to Percy, of course – she was the eldest and the only one who loved it as he did – but Daddy changed his will at the last.’

‘Why?’ I was thinking aloud; I hadn’t really expected her to answer, but she appeared to be wrapped up in the telling of her story.

‘Daddy was obsessed with the impossibility of creative women being able to continue with their art once saddled with the burden of marriage and children. When Juniper showed such promise, he became fixated on the idea that she might marry and waste her talent. He kept her here, never let her go out to school or to meet other people, and then had his will changed so that the castle was hers. That way, he reasoned, she would never have to concern herself with the business of making a living, nor with marrying a man who’d keep her. It was terribly unfair of him, though. The castle was always meant to be Percy’s. She loves this place as other people love their sweethearts.’ She gave the pillows a final plump before collecting her lamp from the table. ‘I suppose in that respect it’s fortunate that Juniper didn’t marry and move away.’

I failed to make the connection. ‘But wouldn’t Juniper have been happy in that case to have a sister who cared so much for the old place living here and looking after it?’

Saffy smiled. ‘It wasn’t so simple. Daddy could be cruel when it came to getting his own way. He put a condition on the will. If Juniper were to marry, the castle would no longer be hers, passing instead to the Catholic Church.’

‘The Church?’

‘He suffered with guilt, did Daddy.’

And after my meeting with Percy, I knew exactly why that would be. ‘So if Juniper and Thomas had married, the castle would have been lost?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s right. Poor Percy would never have borne it.’ She shivered then. ‘I am sorry. It’s so cold in here. One never realizes. We have no need to use the room ourselves. I’m afraid there’s no heating along this wing, but there are extra blankets in the bottom of the wardrobe.’

A spectacular bolt of lightning struck then, followed by a crack of thunder. The feeble electric light wavered, flickered, then the bulb went dark. Saffy and I both raised our lamps, as if puppets drawn by the same string. We gazed together at the cooling bulb.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘there goes our power. Thank goodness we thought to bring the lamps.’ She hesitated. ‘Will you be all right, alone up here?’

‘I’m sure I will.’

‘Well then,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

Night-time is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. Particularly when one is sleeping in a strange, old castle with a storm outside. Even more particularly when one has spent the afternoon listening to an elderly lady’s confession. Which is why, when Saffy left, closing the door behind her, I didn’t even consider snuffing my lamp’s flame.

I changed into the nightdress and sat white and ghost-like on the bed. Listened as the rain continued to pour and the wind rattled the shutters, just as if someone were on the other side, struggling to get in. No – I pushed the thought aside, even managed to smile at myself. I was thinking of the Mud Man, of course. Understandable when I was spending the night in the very place in which the novel was set, on a night that might have materialized from its pages.

I tucked myself under the covers and turned my thoughts to Percy. I’d brought my notebook with me and now I opened it, jotting down ideas as they came to me. Percy Blythe had given me the story of the Mud Man’s genesis, which was a great coup. She’d also answered the mystery of Thomas Cavill’s disappearance. I should have felt relieved, and yet I was unsettled. The sensation was recent, something to do with what Saffy had told me. As she’d spoken of her father’s will, unpleasant connections were being made in my mind, little lights turning on that made me feel increasingly uncomfortable: Percy’s love for the castle, a will that specified its loss if Juniper should marry, Thomas Cavill’s unfortunate death…

But no. Percy had said it was an accident and I believed her.

I did. What reason did she have to lie? She might just as well have kept the whole thing to herself.

And yet…

Round and round the snippets went: Percy’s voice, then Saffy’s, and my own doubts thrown in for good measure. Not Juniper’s voice, though. I only ever seemed to hear about the youngest Blythe, never from her. Finally, I closed my notebook with a frustrated slap.

That was enough for one day. I heaved a sigh and glanced through the books that Saffy had provided, seeking something that might still my mind: Jane Eyre, The Mysteries of Udulpho, Wuthering Heights. I grimaced – good friends, all, but not the sort with whom I felt like keeping company on this cold and stormy night.

I was tired, very tired, but I warded off the moment of sleep, loath to blow out the lamp and submit myself finally to the dark. Eventually, though, my eyelids began to droop, and after I’d jerked myself awake a few times, I figured I was tired enough for sleep to claim me quickly. I blew out the flame, closed my eyes as the smell of dying smoke thinned in the cold air around me. The last thing I remember was a rush of rain slipping down the glass.

I woke with a jolt; suddenly and unnaturally at an unknown hour. I lay very still, listening. Waiting, wondering what it was that had woken me. The hairs on my arms were standing on end and I had the strongest, eeriest sense that I was not alone, that there was someone in the room with me. I scanned the shadows, my heart hammering, dreading what I might see.

I saw nothing, but I knew. Someone was there.

I held my breath and listened, but it was still raining outside and with the howling wind rattling the shutters, its wraiths gliding along the stone corridor, there was little chance of hearing anything else. I had no matches and no means of relighting my lamp, so I talked myself back to a state of comparative calm. I told myself it was my pre-sleep thoughts, my obsession with the Mud Man. I’d dreamed a noise. I was imagining things.

And just when I had myself almost convinced, there was a huge lightning flash and I saw that my bedroom door was open. Saffy had closed it behind her. I’d been right. Someone had been in the room with me; was still there, perhaps, waiting in the shadows-

‘Meredith…’

Every vertebra in my body straightened. My heart pounded, my pulse ran electric in my veins. That wasn’t the wind or the walls; someone had whispered Mum’s name. I was petrified and yet a strange energy gripped me. I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t sit the entire night out, wrapped in my blanket, wide eyes scanning the dark room.

The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed, but I did. I slid across the sheet and made my way on tiptoe to the door. The handle was cool, smooth beneath my hand and I pulled it lightly, noiselessly towards me, stepping out to scan the corridor.

‘Meredith…’

I almost screamed. It was right behind me.

I turned, slowly, and there was Juniper. She was wearing the same dress she’d put on during my first visit to Milderhurst, the dress – I knew now – that Saffy had made for her to wear when Thomas Cavill came to dinner.

‘Juniper,’ I whispered. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you, Merry. I knew you’d come. I have it for you. I’ve been keeping it safe.’

I had no idea what she meant, but she handed me something rather bulky. Firm edge, sharp angles, not too heavy. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

In the half-light, her smile faltered. ‘Oh, Meredith,’ she said, ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing.’

Which was precisely what she’d said to Saffy in the corridor at the end of my tour. My pulse began to beat a little faster. It was wrong to question her, but I couldn’t help saying, ‘What is it? What did you do?’

‘Tom is coming soon. He’s coming for dinner.’

I felt so sad for her then; she’d been waiting for him fifty years, convinced she’d been abandoned. ‘Of course he is,’ I said. ‘Tom loves you. He wants to marry you.’

‘Tom loves me.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I love him.’

‘I know you do.’

And just as I was enjoying the warm, pleased feeling of having swept her mind back to a happy place, her hands leaped to her mouth in horror and she said, ‘But there was blood, Meredith…’

‘What?’

‘… so much blood; all over my arms, all over my dress.’ She looked down at her dress then up at me and her face was a picture of misery. ‘Blood, blood, blood. And Tom didn’t come. But I don’t remember. I can’t remember.’

Then, with a swooping certainty, I understood.

Everything shifted into place and I saw what they were hiding. What had really happened to Thomas Cavill. Who had been responsible for his death.

Juniper’s habit of blacking out after traumatic events; the episodes after which she couldn’t recall what she’d done; the hushed-up incident in which the gardener’s son had been beaten. With dawning horror, I remembered too the letter she’d sent to Mum in which she’d mentioned her one fear: that she might turn out like her father. And she had.

‘I can’t remember,’ she was saying still. ‘I can’t remember.’ Her face was pathetically confused and although what she was telling me was ghastly, in that moment I wanted only to embrace her, to release her in some small way from the terrible burden she’d been carrying for fifty years. She whispered again, ‘I’ve done a terrible, terrible thing,’ and before I could say anything to calm her, she darted past me towards the door.

‘Juniper,’ I called after her. ‘Wait.’

‘Tom loves me,’ she said, as if the happy thought had just occurred to her. ‘I’m going to go and look for Tom. He must be coming soon.’

And then she disappeared into the dark corridor.

I threw the boxy object towards the bed and followed her. Round a corner, along another short corridor until she reached a small landing from which a staircase fell away. A biting gust of damp wind blew up from below and I knew she must have opened a door, that she was planning to vanish into the cold, wet night.

A split second’s indecision and I started down after her. I couldn’t just leave her to the elements. For all I knew, she was intending to follow the drive all the way to the road, looking for Thomas Cavill. I reached the bottom of the stairs and saw there was a door leading the way through a small antechamber that connected the castle to the outside world.

It was still raining heavily, but I could see it was a garden of sorts. Not much seemed to be growing there, a few odd statues were dotted about, the whole was enclosed by massive hedges – I drew breath. It was the garden I’d seen from the attic on my first visit, the square enclosure Percy Blythe had been at great pains to tell me was not a garden at all. And she was right. I’d read about it in Mum’s journal. This was the pets’ graveyard, the place that was special to Juniper.

Juniper had stopped at the centre of the garden, a frail old lady in a ghostly pale dress, drenched and wild looking. And suddenly it made sense to me what Percy had said earlier, about stormy weather adding to Juniper’s agitation. It had been stormy that night in 1941, just as it was now…

It was odd, but the storm appeared to calm around her as she stood there. I was transfixed for a short time, before realizing that of course I had to go outside and bring her in; that she couldn’t stay out in the weather. At that moment, I heard a voice and saw Juniper look to her right. Percy Blythe appeared from a gate in the hedge, dressed in a mackintosh and wellington boots, approaching her little sister, calling her back inside. She held out her arms and Juniper stumbled into her embrace.

I suddenly felt like an intruder; a stranger observing a personal moment. I turned to leave.

Someone was behind me. It was Saffy, her hair brushed over her shoulders. She was wrapped in a dressing gown and her face was all apology. ‘Oh, Edith,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry for the disturbance.’

‘Juniper – ’ I started, gesturing over my shoulder, trying to explain.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, a kind smile on her face. ‘She wanders sometimes. There’s nothing to worry about. Percy’s bringing her inside. You can go back to bed now.’

I hurried back up the stairs, along the corridor, and into my room, closing the door carefully behind me. I leaned against it, catching breaths that continued to run away from me. I flicked the electric switch, in the hope that power had been restored, but alas: a dull plastic clunk and no reassuring spill of light.

I tiptoed back to bed, shifted the mysterious box onto the floor and wrapped myself in the blanket. I lay with my head on the pillow, listening to my pulse race in my ear. I couldn’t stop replaying the details of Juniper’s confession, her confusion as she struggled to put the pieces of her fragmented mind together, the embrace she’d shared with Percy in the pets’ graveyard. And I knew then, why Percy Blythe had lied to me. I had no doubt that Thomas Cavill had indeed died on a stormy October night in 1941, but it wasn’t Percy who’d done it. She’d merely been protecting her little sister to the last.

The Day After

I must finally have slept because the next I knew, a weak misty light was stealing through the gaps in the shutters. The storm had passed, leaving only weary morning in its place. I lay for a time, blinking at the ceiling, sifting through the previous night’s events. By the welcome light of day I was more certain than ever that it was Juniper who’d been responsible for Thomas’s death. It was the only thing that made sense. I knew, too, that Percy and Saffy were anxious no one should ever learn the truth.

I hopped out of bed and almost tripped over a box on the floor. Juniper’s gift. With everything else that had happened, I’d completely forgotten. It was the same shape and size as those in Saffy’s collection in the muniment room, and when I opened it, a manuscript lay within, but it wasn’t one of Saffy’s. The cover page read: Destiny: A Love Story, by Meredith Baker, October 1941.

We’d all overslept and it was mid-morning. The breakfast table was laid in the yellow parlour when I came downstairs and all three sisters were seated, the twins chatting away as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the night. And perhaps it hadn’t; perhaps I’d witnessed only one upset of many. Saffy smiled and offered me a cup of tea. I thanked her and glanced at Juniper, sitting blankly in the armchair, none of the night’s excitement evident in her demeanour. Percy, I thought, watched me a little more closely than usual as I drank my tea, but that might have been the result of her confession, false or otherwise, the day before.

After I’d said my goodbyes, she walked me to the entrance hall and we spoke pleasantly enough of trivial matters until we reached the door. ‘With regard to what I told you yesterday, Miss Burchill,’ she said, planting her cane firmly. ‘I wanted to reiterate that it was an accident.’

She was testing me, I realized; this was her way of ascertaining whether I still believed her story. Whether Juniper had told me anything in the night. This was my chance to reveal what I had learned, to ask her outright who had really killed Thomas Cavill. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand completely.’ To what end would I have told her? To satisfy my own curiosity at the expense of the sisters’ peace of mind? I couldn’t do it.

She was visibly relieved. ‘I’ve suffered endlessly. I never intended for it to happen.’

‘I know. I know you didn’t.’ I was touched by her sisterly sense of duty, a love so strong that she would confess to a crime she didn’t commit. ‘You must put it out of your mind,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen before, one which I am hard pressed to describe. Part anguish, part relief, but with hints of something else mixed in as well. She was Percy Blythe, though, and she didn’t go in for sentiment. She coolly composed herself and nodded sharply. ‘Don’t forget your promise, now, Miss Burchill. I’m relying on you. I am not the sort who likes to trust to chance.’

The ground was wet, the sky was white, and the entire landscape had the blanched look of a face in the aftermath of a hysterical rage. A little the way I imagined my own face might be looking. I went carefully, keen to avoid being swept away like a log downstream, and by the time I reached the farmhouse Mrs Bird had already moved on to lunch preparation. The strong, dense smell of soup hung thickly in the air, a simple but tremendous pleasure for someone who’d spent a night in company with the castle’s ghosts.

Mrs Bird herself was setting tables in the main room and her plump, apron-wrapped figure was such an ordinary, comforting sight, that I felt possessed by a strong urge to hug her. I might have, too, had I not then noticed that we weren’t alone.

There was someone else, another guest, leaning forward to pay close attention to the black-and-white photographs on the wall.

A very familiar person.

‘Mum?’

She looked up and offered me a tentative smile. ‘Hello, Edie.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘You said I should come. I wanted to surprise you.’

I don’t think I’d ever been so pleased or relieved to see another person in my life. I gave her my hug instead. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

Perhaps my vehemence showed, perhaps I held on just a mite too long, for she blinked at me and said, ‘Is everything all right, Edie?’

I hesitated as the secrets I’d learned, the grim truths I’d witnessed, shuffled like cards in my mind. Then I folded them away and smiled. ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. There was quite a storm last night.’

‘Mrs Bird was telling me, she said you’d been rained in at the castle.’ The buckle in her voice was only slight. ‘I’m glad I didn’t set off in the afternoon as I’d planned.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Only twenty minutes or so. I’ve been looking at these.’ She pointed to a nearby photograph, one of the Country Life pictures from 1910. It was the circular pool, when it was still under construction. ‘I learned to swim in that pool,’ she said, ‘when I was living at the castle.’

I bent closer to read the annotation beneath the photo: Oliver Sykes, overseeing the construction, shows Mr and Mrs Raymond Blythe the work on their new pool. There he was, the handsome young architect, the Mud Man who would end his days buried beneath the moat he was restoring. The brush of prescience swept across my skin and I felt heavily the burden of having learned the secret of that young man’s fate. Percy Blythe’s entreaty came drifting back to me: Don’t forget your promise. I’m relying on you.

‘Can I get you ladies some lunch?’ Mrs Bird said.

I turned away from Sykes’s smiling face. ‘What do you say, Mum? You must be hungry after the drive.’

‘Soup would be lovely. Is it all right if we sit outside?’

We sat at a table in the garden from which we could glimpse the castle; Mrs Bird had made the suggestion and, before I could demur, Mum had declared it perfect. As the farmhouse geese kept busy in the nearby puddles, ever hopeful that a crumb might fall their way, Mum began to talk about her past. The time she’d spent at Milderhurst, the way she’d felt about Juniper, the crush she’d had on her teacher, Mr Cavill; finally, she told me of her dreams of being a journalist.

‘What happened, Mum?’ I said, spreading butter on my bread. ‘Why did you change your mind?’

‘I didn’t change my mind. I just – ’ She shifted a little in the white iron seat that Mrs Bird had towel-dried – ‘I suppose I just… In the end I couldn’t…’ She frowned at her inability to find the words she needed, then continued with new determination. ‘Meeting Juniper opened a door for me and I desperately wanted to belong on the other side. Without her, though, I couldn’t seem to keep it open. I tried, Edie, I really did. I dreamed of going to university, but so many schools were closed in London during the war and in the end I applied for work as a typist. I always believed that it was temporary, that one day I would go on and do what I’d intended. But when the war ended I was eighteen and too old for school. I couldn’t go to university without my Higher.’

‘So you stopped writing?’

‘Oh no.’ She drew a figure eight in her soup with the tip of the spoon, round and round again. ‘No, I didn’t. I was rather stubborn back then. I set my mind to it and decided I wasn’t going to let a small matter like that stop me.’ She smiled a little without looking up. ‘I was going to write for myself, become a famous journalist.’

I smiled too, unfeasibly pleased by her description of the intrepid young Meredith Baker.

‘I embarked on a programme of my own, reading whatever I could find in the library, writing articles, reviews, stories sometimes, and sending them off.’

‘Was anything published?’

She shifted coyly in her seat. ‘A few small pieces here and there. I got some encouraging letters from the editors of the bigger journals, gentle but firm, telling me that I needed to learn more about their house style. Then, in 1952, a job came up.’ Mum glanced over to where the geese were flapping their wings and something in her bearing changed, some of the air went out of her. She set down her spoon. ‘The job was with the BBC, entry level, but exactly what I wanted.’

‘What happened?’

‘I saved up and bought myself a smart little outfit and a leather satchel so I’d look the part. I gave myself a stern talking to about acting confidently, speaking clearly, not letting my shoulders slouch. But then – ’ she inspected the backs of her hands, rubbed a thumb across her knuckles – ‘then there was a mix up with the buses and instead of taking me to Broad casting House, the driver let me off down near Marble Arch. I ran most of the way back, but when I got to the top of Regent Street, I saw all these girls sallying out of the building, laughing and joking, so smart and together, so much younger than I was, and looking as if they knew the answers to all life’s questions.’ She swept a crumb from the table to the ground before meeting my eyes. ‘I caught sight of myself then in a department store window and I looked such a fraud, Edie.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

‘Such a bedraggled fraud I despised myself and I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I might belong in such a place. I don’t think I’d ever felt so lonely. I turned away from Portland Place and walked in the other direction, tears streaming. What a mess I must’ve looked. I felt so desolate and sorry for myself and strangers kept telling me to keep my chin up, so when I finally passed a cinema I ducked inside to be miserable in peace.’

I remembered Dad’s account of the girl who’d cried the whole way through a film. ‘And you saw The Holly and the Ivy.’

Mum nodded, drew a tissue from somewhere and dabbed at her eyes. ‘And I met your father. And he took me to tea and bought me pear cake.’

‘Your favourite.’

She smiled through tears, fond of the memory. ‘He kept asking what the matter was and when I told him that the film had made me cry he looked at me with total disbelief. “But it’s not real,” he said, as he ordered a second slice of cake. “It’s all made up.” ’

We both laughed then; she’d sounded just like Dad.

‘He was so firm, Edie; so solid in his perception of the world and his place in it. Astonishingly so. I’d never met anyone quite like him. He didn’t see things unless they were there, he didn’t worry about them until they happened. That’s what I fell in love with, his assurance. His feet were planted firmly in the here and now and when he spoke I felt enveloped in his certainty. Happily, he saw something in me too. It may not sound exciting, but we’ve been very happy together. Your father’s a good man, Edie.’

‘I know he is.’

‘Honest, kind, reliable. There’s a lot to be said for that.’

I agreed, and as we fell to sipping our soup a picture of Percy Blythe came into my mind. She was a bit like Dad in that respect: the sort of person who might be overlooked amongst more vibrant company, but whose sturdiness, steeliness even, was the foundation upon which everybody else could shine. Thoughts of the castle and the Sisters Blythe reminded me of something.

‘I can’t believe I forgot!’ I said, reaching for my bag and pulling out the box that Juniper had given me in the night.

Mum laid down her spoon and wiped her fingers on the napkin in her lap. ‘A present? You didn’t even know that I was coming.’

‘It’s not from me.’

‘Then who?’

I was about to say, ‘Open it and find out,’ when I remembered that the last time I’d presented her with a box of memories and said the same thing it hadn’t worked out so well. ‘It’s from Juniper, Mum.’

Her lips parted and she made a tiny winded noise, fumbled with the box, trying to get it open. ‘Silly me,’ she said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, ‘I’m all thumbs.’ Finally, the lid came off and her hand went to her mouth in wonder. ‘Oh my.’ She took the delicate sheets of austerity paper from inside and held them, as if they were the most precious items in the world.

‘Juniper thought I was you,’ I said. ‘She’d been keeping this for you.’

Mum’s eyes darted to the castle on the hill and she shook her head with gentle disbelief. ‘All this time…’

She turned over the typewritten pages, scanning as she read bits here and there, her smile flickering. I watched her, enjoying the evident pleasure the manuscript was giving her. There was something else, too. A change had come over her, subtle but certain, as she realized that her friend had not forgotten her: the features of her face, the muscles in her neck, even the blades of her shoulders seemed to soften. A lifetime’s defensiveness fell away and I could glimpse the girl within as if she’d just been woken from a long, deep sleep.

I said gently, ‘What about your writing, Mum?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your writing. You didn’t continue?’

‘Oh, no. I gave up on all that.’ She wrinkled her nose a little and her expression cast a sort of apology. ‘I suppose that sounds very cowardly to you.’

‘Not cowardly, no.’ I continued carefully, ‘Only, if something gave you pleasure, I don’t understand why you would stop.’

The sun had broken through the clouds, skating off puddles to throw a layer of dappled shadow across Mum’s cheek. She readjusted her glasses, shuffled slightly in her chair, and pressed her hands delicately on the manuscript. ‘It was such a big part of my past, of who I’d been,’ she said. ‘The whole lot got all wrapped up together. My distress at having thought myself abandoned by Juniper and Tom, the feeling that I’d let myself down by missing the interview… I suppose I stopped finding pleasure in it. I settled down with your father and concentrated on the future instead.’

She glanced again at the manuscript, held a sheet of paper aloft and smiled fleetingly at whatever was written there. ‘It was such a pleasure,’ she said. ‘Taking something abstract, like a thought or a feeling or a smell, and capturing it on paper. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.’

‘It’s never too late to start again.’

‘Edie, love,’ she smiled with fond regret. ‘I’m sixty-five years old. I haven’t written more than a shopping list in decades. I think it’s safe to say that it’s too late.’

I was shaking my head. I met people of all ages, every day of my working life, who were writing just because they couldn’t stop themselves.

‘It’s never too late, Mum,’ I said again, but she was no longer listening. Her attention had drifted over my shoulder and back towards the castle. With one fine hand she drew her cardigan closed across her breasts. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing. I wasn’t sure quite how I’d feel, but now that I’m here, I don’t know that I can go back. I don’t know that I want to.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I have a picture in my mind. A very happy picture; I don’t want for that to change.’

Perhaps she thought I might try to convince her otherwise, but I didn’t. The castle was a sad place now, fading and falling to pieces, a little like its three inhabitants. ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘It’s all looking a bit tired.’

‘You’re looking a bit tired, Edie.’ She frowned at my face as if she’d only just noticed.

As she said it, I began to yawn. ‘Well, it was an eventful night. I didn’t get much sleep.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bird mentioned there was quite a storm – I’m very content to stroll around the garden. I’ve lots to keep me busy.’ Mum fingered the edge of her manuscript. ‘Why don’t you go and have yourself a little lie-down?’

I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when Mrs Bird caught my attention. Standing on the next landing, waving something over the rail and asking whether she could borrow me for a minute. She was so emphatically eager that, although I agreed, I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of trepidation.

‘I have something to show you,’ she said, darting a glance over her shoulder. ‘It’s a bit of a secret.’

After the twenty-four hours I’d had, this did not thrill me.

She pressed a greyish envelope into my hands when I reached her and said, in a stage whisper, ‘It’s one of the letters.’

‘Which letters?’ I’d seen a few over the past few months.

She looked at me as if I’d forgotten which day of the week it was. Which, come to think of it, I had. ‘The letters I was telling you about, of course, the love letters sent to Mum by Raymond Blythe.’

‘Oh! – Those letters.’

She nodded eagerly, and the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall behind her chose that moment to spit out its pair of dancing mice. We waited out the jig then I said, ‘You want me to look at it?’

‘You needn’t read it,’ said Mrs Bird, ‘not if you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that something you said the other evening got me thinking.’

‘It did?’

‘You said that you were going to be seeing Raymond Blythe’s notebooks and it occurred to me that you’d probably have a very good idea by now of what his handwriting looks like.’ She drew breath and then said, all in a rush, ‘I wondered, that is, I hoped…’

‘That I could take a look and let you know.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Sure, I guess-’

‘Wonderful!’ She clapped her hands together lightly beneath her chin as I slid the sheet of paper from within its envelope.

I knew at once that I was going to disappoint her, that the letter hadn’t been written by Raymond Blythe at all. Reading his notebook so closely, I’d become very familiar with his sloping handwriting, the long looping tails when he wrote G or J, the particular type of R he used to sign his name. No, this letter had been written by someone else.

Lucy, my love, my one, my only.

Have I ever told you how I fell in love? That it happened in the first instant that I saw you? Something in the way you stood, in the set of your shoulders, in the wisps of hair that had come loose to brush against your neck; I was yours.

I’ve thought of what you said when last we met. I’ve thought of little else. I wonder whether perhaps you might be right; that it is not a mere fancy. That we might just forget everything and everybody else and go far away together.

I didn’t read the rest. I skipped over the next few paragraphs and arrived at the single initial, just as Mrs Bird had said. But as I looked at it, variables shifted by degrees and a number of things slipped into alignment. I had seen this person’s handwriting before.

I knew who had written the letter and I knew who it was that Lucy Middleton had loved above all others. Mrs Bird had been right – it was a love that flew in the face of their society’s conventions – but it hadn’t been between Raymond and Lucy. It wasn’t an R at the end of those letters, it was a P, written in an old-fashioned hand so that a small tail emerged from the curve of the letter. Easy to confuse with an R, especially if that’s what one was looking for.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, tripping over my words because I felt forlorn, suddenly, thinking of those two young women and the long lives they’d spent apart.

‘So sad, don’t you think?’ She sighed, tucking the letter back inside her pocket, then she looked at me hopefully: ‘Such a beautifully written letter.’

When I’d finally extricated myself from Mrs Bird, having been as non-committal as I could, I made a beeline for my room and collapsed sideways across the bed. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my mind, but it was no use. My thoughts remained tethered to the castle. I couldn’t stop thinking of Percy Blythe, who had loved so well and so long ago; who people thought of as stiff and cold; who had spent most of her life keeping a terrible secret to protect her little sister.

Percy had told me about Oliver Sykes and Thomas Cavill on condition that I did ‘the right thing’. She’d spoken a lot about people’s closing dates, but what I couldn’t work out was why she’d needed to tell me at all; what she wanted me to do with the information that she couldn’t do herself. I was too tired that afternoon. I needed a sleep and then I was looking forward to spending the evening with Mum. So I resolved to visit the castle the following morning, to see Percy Blythe one final time.

And in the End

Only I never got the chance. After dinner with Mum I fell asleep quickly and soundly but, just past midnight, I woke with a start. I lay for a moment in my bed at the farmhouse, wondering why I’d emerged from sleep, whether it was something I’d heard, some nocturnal sound that had since subsided, or whether I’d somehow dreamed myself awake. One thing I did know: the sudden wakefulness didn’t feel anywhere near as frightening as it had the previous night. I had no sense this time that there was anyone with me in the room, and I could hear nothing untoward. Yet that pull I’ve spoken of, the connection I felt towards the castle was tugging at me. I slid out of bed and went to the window, drew aside the curtains. And that’s when I saw it. Shock buckled my knees, and I was hot and cold at once. Where the dark castle should have sat, all was bright: orange flames licking at the low and heavy sky.

The fire at Milderhurst Castle burned most of the night. By the time I called the fire brigade they were already on their way, but there was little they could do. The castle might have been built of stone but there was so much wood within, all that oak panelling, the struts, the doors, the millions of sheets of paper. As Percy Blythe had warned, one spark and the whole lot went up like a tinderbox.

The old ladies inside never stood a chance. So said one of the firemen next morning, at the breakfast Mrs Bird supplied. They’d all three been sitting together, he said, in a room on the first floor. ‘It looked as if they’d been caught unawares while dozing by the fire.’

‘Is that what started it?’ asked Mrs Bird. ‘A spark from the fire – just like what happened to the twins’ mother.’ She shook her head, tutting at the tragic parallel.

‘It’s hard to say,’ said the fireman, before proceeding to say much more. ‘It could’ve been anything, really. A stray ember from the fireplace, a dropped cigarette, an electrical fault – the wiring in those places is older than me, most times.’

The police or the fire brigade, I’m not sure which, had put barriers around the outside of the smouldering castle, but I knew the garden pretty well by now and was able to climb up the back way. It was grisly, perhaps, but I needed to have a closer look. I’d known the Sisters Blythe only briefly, but had come to feel such strong possession of their stories, their world, that to wake and find it all turned into ash provoked in me a feeling of deep bereavement. It was the loss of the sisters, of course, and their castle, but it was something more, as well. I was overcome by a sense that I’d been left behind. That a door so recently opened to me had closed again, swiftly and completely, and I would never step through it again.

I stood for a time, taking in the black and hollowed shell, remembering my first visit, all those months before, the sense of anticipation as I’d made my way past the circular pool and towards the castle. Everything I’d learned since.

Seledreorig… The word came into my head like a whisper. Sadness for the lack of a hall.

A small castle stone lay loose on the ground by my feet, and it made me more melancholy still. It was just a bit of rock. The Blythes were no more and their distant hours were silent.

‘I can’t believe it’s gone.’

I turned to see a young man with dark hair standing beside me. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of years old and it was destroyed in hours.’

‘I heard on the radio this morning and I had to come and see it for myself. I was hoping to see you, too.’

Perhaps I looked surprised, for he held out a hand and said, ‘Adam Gilbert.’

That name should have meant something, and it did: an elderly chap in tweeds and an antique office chair. ‘Edie,’ I managed. ‘Edie Burchill.’

‘I thought as much. The very same Edie who stole my job.’

He was joking and I needed a witty rejoinder. I came up instead with muddle-headed gibberish: ‘Your knee… Your nurse… I thought -?’

‘All better now. Or very nearly.’ He indicated the walking stick in his other hand. ‘Would you believe a rock-climbing incident?’ A crooked smile. ‘No? Oh, all right. I tripped over a pile of books in the library and shattered my knee. These are the dangers of the writing life.’ He dipped his head towards the farmhouse. ‘Heading back?’

A final glance at the castle and I nodded.

‘May I walk with you?’

‘Of course.’

We walked for a time, slowly due to Adam’s stick, talking over our memories of the castle and the Sisters Blythe; our mutual passion for the Mud Man when we were kids. When we reached the field that led to the farmhouse he stopped. I did the same.

‘God, I feel crass to ask this now,’ he said, gesturing at the distant smoking castle. ‘And yet…’ He seemed to listen to something I couldn’t hear. Nodded. ‘Yes, it appears I’m going to ask you anyway. Mrs Button gave me your message when I got in last night. Is it true? Did you find something out about the Mud Man’s origins?’

He had kind brown eyes, which made it hard for me to look at them and lie. So I didn’t. I looked at his forehead instead. ‘No,’ I said, ‘unfortunately not. It was a false alarm.’

He held aloft a palm and sighed. ‘Ah well. Then the truth dies with them, I suppose. There’s a certain poetry to that. We need our mysteries, don’t you think?’

I did, but before I could say so, something caught my attention, back at the farmhouse. ‘Will you excuse me just a minute?’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’

I’m not sure what Chief Inspector Rawlins thought when he saw a wild-haired, washed-out woman hurrying across the field towards him, and even less when I began telling him my story. To his credit, he managed to keep an extraordinarily straight expression when I suggested over the breakfast table that he might want to extend his investigation, that I had it on good authority that the remains of two bodies lay buried beneath the earth around the castle. He merely slowed his stirring spoon a fraction and said, ‘Two men, you say? I don’t s’pose you’d be knowing their names.’

‘I do, actually. One was called Oliver Sykes, the other Thomas Cavill. Sykes died in the 1910 fire that killed Muriel Blythe, and Thomas died by accident during a storm in October 1941.’

‘I see.’ He swatted a fly by his ear, without taking his eyes from mine.

‘Sykes is buried on the western side, where the old moat used to be.’

‘And the other one?’

I remembered the night of the storm, Juniper’s terrible flight down the corridors and into the garden; Percy knowing just where to find her. ‘Thomas Cavill is in the pets’ graveyard,’ I said. ‘Right in the centre, near the headstone marked Emerson.’

A slow appraisal as he sipped from his tea then added another half spoonful of sugar. Regarded me with slightly narrowed eyes as he stirred again.

‘If you check the records,’ I continued, ‘you’ll see that Thomas Cavill was reported as missing and that neither man’s death was ever recorded.’ And a person needed their set of dates, just as Percy Blythe had told me. It wasn’t enough to retain only the first. A person without a closed bracket could never rest.

I decided not to write the introduction for the Pippin Books edition of the Mud Man. I explained to Judith Waterman that I had a scheduling clash, that I’d barely had a chance to meet with the Sisters Blythe anyway before the fire. She told me that she understood; that she was sure Adam Gilbert would be happy enough to pick up where he’d left off. I had to agree that it made sense: he was the one who’d compiled all the research.

And I couldn’t have written it. I knew the answer to a riddle that had plagued literary critics for seventy-five years, but I couldn’t share it with the world. To do so would have felt like a tremendous betrayal of Percy Blythe. ‘This is a family story,’ she’d said, before asking whether she could trust me. It would also have made me responsible for unveiling a sad and sordid story that would overshadow the novel for ever. The book that had made me a reader.

To write anything else, though, to rehash the same old accounts of the book’s mysterious origins, would have been utterly disingenuous. Besides, Percy Blythe had hired me under false pretences. She hadn’t wanted me to write the introduction, she’d wanted me to set the official records straight. And I’d done that. Rawlins and his men broadened the investigation into the fire and two bodies were found in the castle grounds, right where I’d said they’d be. Theo Cavill finally learned what had become of his brother, Tom: that he’d died on a stormy night at Milderhurst Castle in the middle of the war.

Chief Inspector Rawlins pressed me for any further details I might have, but I told him nothing more. And it was true, I didn’t know more. Percy had told me one thing, Juniper another. I believed that Percy was covering for her sister, but I couldn’t prove it. And I wasn’t going to tell, either way. The truth had died with the three sisters, and if the foundation stones of the castle whispered still about what had happened that night in October 1941, I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t want to hear them. Not any more. It was time for me to go back to my own life.