The Distant Hours

Herbert lent me his car to drive to Milderhurst, and as soon as I was off the motorway I wound down the window and let the breeze buffet my cheeks. The countryside had changed in the months between my visits. Summer had come and gone, and autumn was now in its final days. Enormous dried leaves lay in golden piles by the side of the road, and as I slipped deeper and deeper into the weald of Kent, great tree branches reached across the road to meet at its centre. Every time the wind blew, a fresh layer was shed; lost skin, an ended season.

There was a note waiting for me when I arrived at the farmhouse.

Welcome, Edie. I had some errands that couldn’t wait and Bird’s laid up with the flu. Please find attached a key and settle yourself into Room 3 (first floor). So sorry to miss you. Will see you at dinner, seven o’clock in the dining room.

Marilyn Bird.

PS I had Bird move a better writing desk into your room. It’s a little cramped, but I thought you might appreciate being able to spread out with your work.

A little cramped was putting it midly, but I’ve always had a thing for small, dark spaces and I set about immediately making an artful arrangement of Adam Gilbert’s interview transcripts, my copy of Raymond Blythe’s Milderhurst and the Mud Man, and assorted notebooks and pens; then I sat down, running the fingers of each hand along the table’s smooth edge. A small sigh of satisfaction escaped as I leaned my chin on my hands. It was that first-day-of-school feeling, but a hundred times better. The four days stretched ahead and I felt infused with enthusiasm and possibility.

I noticed the telephone then, an old-fashioned Bakelite affair, and was possessed by an unfamiliar urge. It was being back at Milderhurst, of course; in the very same location where my mum had found herself.

The phone rang and rang and just as I was about to hang up, she answered, somewhat breathlessly. There was a moment’s pause after I said hello.

‘Oh, Edie, sorry. I was looking for your father. He got it into his head to -. Is everything all right?’ Her tone had sharpened like a pencil.

‘Everything’s fine, Mum. I just wanted to let you know that I’d arrived.’

‘Oh.’ A pause as she caught her breath. I’d surprised her: the safe-arrival phone call was not a part of our usual routine; it hadn’t been for around a decade, since I convinced her that if the government trusted me to vote, perhaps it was time she trusted me to take the tube without calling in my successful journey. ‘Well. Good. Thank you. That’s very kind of you to let me know. Your father will be pleased to hear it. He misses you; he’s been moping since you left.’ Another pause, a longer one this time in which I could almost hear her thinking, and then, all in a rush: ‘You’re there then? Milderhurst? How – how is it? How does it look?’

‘It looks glorious, Mum. Autumn’s turning everything to gold.’

‘I remember. I remember how it looked in autumn. The way the woods stayed green for a time but the outer tips burned red.’

‘There’s orange, too,’ I said. ‘And the leaves are everywhere. Seriously, everywhere, like a thick carpet covering the ground.’

‘I remember that. The wind comes in off the sea and they fall like rain. Is it windy, Edie?’

‘Not yet, but it’s forecast to come in blustery during the week.’

‘You wait. The leaves fall like snow then. They crunch beneath your feet when you run across them. I remember.’

And her last two words were soft, somehow fragile, and I don’t know where it came from but I was overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, and I heard myself say, ‘You know, Mum – I finish here on the fourth. You should think about driving down for the day.’

‘Oh, Edie, oh no. Your father couldn’t-’

‘You should come.’

‘By myself?’

‘We could get lunch somewhere nice, just the two of us. Go for a walk around the village.’ The suggestion was met with the eerie whistling of the telephone line. I lowered my voice. ‘We don’t have to go near the castle, not if you don’t want to.’

Silence, and I thought for a moment she was gone, then a small noise and I knew that she hadn’t. I realized, as it continued, that she was crying, very lightly, against the phone.

I wasn’t due up at the castle to meet with the Sisters Blythe until the following day, but the weather was predicted to turn and it seemed wasteful to spend a clear afternoon sitting at my desk. Judith Waterman had suggested that the article include my own sense of the place so I decided to go for a walk. Once again, Mrs Bird had left a fruit basket on the bedside table and I selected an apple and a banana, then tossed a notebook and pen into my tote. I was surveying the room, about to leave, when Mum’s journal caught my eye, sitting small and quiet to one side of the desk. ‘Come on then, Mum,’ I said, snatching it up. ‘Let’s take you back to the castle.’

When I was a child, on the rare occasions that Mum wasn’t going to be waiting for me at home after school, I caught the bus instead to my dad’s office in Hammersmith. There I was supposed to find a patch of carpet – a desk, if I was lucky – in one of the junior partners’ rooms, a place to do my homework, or decorate my school diary, or practise signing the surname of my most recent boy-crush; anything really, so long as I stayed off the telephone and didn’t get in the way of industry.

One afternoon I was sent to a room I’d not been inside before, through a door I’d never noticed, right at the end of the very long hallway. It was small, little more than a cupboard with lighting, and although it was painted beige and brown, there were none of the glitzy copper-tone mirror tiles and glass bookshelves of the other corporate rooms. Instead, there was a small wooden table and chair, and a thin, towering bookcase. On one of the shelves, beside the jowly accounting tomes, I spied something interesting. A snow globe: you know the sort, a wintry scene in which a small stone cottage stood bravely on a pine-planted hill, flakes of white dusting the ground.

The rules of Dad’s workplace were clear. I wasn’t supposed to touch anything, and yet I couldn’t help it. The globe transfixed me: it was a tiny splinter of whimsy in a beige-brown world, a doorway at the back of the cupboard, an irresistible emblem of childhood. Before I knew it I was on the chair, dome in hand, tipping and righting it, watching as the snowflakes fell, over and over, the world within oblivious to that without. And I remember feeling a curious longing to be inside that dome, to stand with the man and woman behind one of the gold-lit windows, or with the pair of tiny children pushing a maroon sledge, in a safe place that knew nothing of the hustle and the noise outside.

That’s what it felt like to approach Milderhurst Castle. As I walked up the hill, nearer and nearer, I could almost feel the air changing around me, as if I were crossing an invisible barrier into another world. Sane people do not speak of houses having forces, of enchanting people, of drawing them closer, but I came to believe that week, as I still do now, that there was some indescribable force at work deep within Milderhurst Castle. I’d been aware of it on my first visit, and I felt it again that afternoon. A sort of beckoning, as if the castle itself were calling to me.

I didn’t go the same way as before; I cut across the field to meet the driveway and followed it over a small stone bridge, then a slightly larger one, until finally the castle itself came into view, tall and imposing at the peak of the hill. I walked on and I didn’t stop until I reached the very top. Only then did I turn to view the direction from which I’d come. The canopy of the woods was spread out beneath me and it looked as if autumn had taken a great torch to the trees, burnishing them gold, red and bronze. I wished I’d brought a camera so I could take a shot back for Mum.

I left the driveway and skirted along a large hedge, looking up as I went at the attic window, the smaller one attached to the nurse’s room with the secret cupboard. The castle was watching me, or so it seemed, all its hundred windows glowering down from beneath their drooping eaves. I didn’t look at it again, continuing along the hedge until I reached the back.

There was an old chicken coop, empty now, and on the other side a dome-like structure. I went closer, and that’s when I recognized what it was. The bomb shelter. A rusty sign had been planted nearby – from the days of the regular tours, I supposed – labelling it ‘The Anderson’ and although the writing had faded over time, I could make out enough to see that it contained information about the role of Kent in the Battle of Britain. A bomb had landed only a mile away, it said, killing a young boy on his bicycle. This sign said that the shelter had been constructed in 1940, which meant, surely, that it was the very one in which my mum must have crouched when she was at Milderhurst during the Blitz.

There was no one around to ask, so I figured it would be OK to take a look inside, climbing down the steep stairs and beneath the corrugated iron arch. It was dim, but sufficient light slanted through the open doorway for me to see that it had been decorated like a stage set with paraphernalia from the war. Cigarette cards with Spitfires and Hurricanes on them, a small table with a vintage wood-panelled wireless in the centre, a poster with Churchill’s pointed finger warning me to ‘Deserve Victory!’ just as if it were 1940 again, the alarm had panicked, and I was waiting for the bombers to fly overhead.

I climbed out again, blinked into the glare. The clouds were skimming fast across the sky, and the sun was covered now by a bleak white sheet. I noticed then a little nook in the hedge, a raised hillock that I couldn’t resist sitting on, I pulled Mum’s journal from my bag, leaned back, and opened to the first page. It was dated January 1940.

Dearest and most lovely notebook! I have been saving you for such a long time – a whole year now, even a little bit longer – because you were a gift to me from Mr Cavill after my examinations. He told me that I was to use you for something special, that words lasted forever, and that one day I would have a story that warranted such a book. I didn’t believe him at the time: I’ve never had anything special to write about – does that sound terribly sad? I think it might and I really don’t mean it that way, I wrote it only because it’s true: I’ve never had anything special to write about and I didn’t imagine that I would. But I was wrong. Terribly, totally, wonderfully wrong. For something has happened and nothing will ever be the same again.

I suppose the first thing I should tell you is that I’m writing this in a castle. A real castle, made of stone, with a tower and lots of winding staircases, and enormous candle holders on all the walls with wax mounds, decades and decades of blackening wax, drooping from their bases. You might think that this, my living in a castle, is the ‘wonderful’ thing, and that it’s greedy to expect anything more on top, but there is more.

I’m sitting on the windowsill in the attic, the most marvellous place in the whole castle. It is Juniper’s room. Who is Juniper, you might ask, if you were able? Juniper is the most incredible person in the world. She is my best friend and I am hers. It was Juniper who encouraged me finally to write in you. She said she was tired of seeing me carrying you around like a glorified paperweight and that it was time I took the plunge and marked your beautiful pages.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages. That’s all writing is, apparently, capturing sights and thoughts on paper. Spinning, like a spider does, but using words to make the pattern. Juniper has given me this fountain pen. I think it might have come from the tower, and I’m a little frightened that her father will decide to go looking for whoever stole it, but I use it nonetheless. It is truly a glorious pen. I think it is quite possible to love a pen, don’t you?

Juniper suggested that I write about my life. She is always asking me to tell her stories about Mum and Dad, Ed and Rita, and Mrs Paul next door. She laughs very loudly, like a bottle that’s been shaken then opened, bubbles exploding everywhere: alarming, in a way, but lovely, too. Her laugh is not at all how you might expect. She’s so smooth and graceful, but her laugh is throaty like the earth. It’s not only her laugh that I love; she scowls, too, when I tell her the things that Rita says, scowls and spits in all the right places.

She says that I am lucky – can you imagine? Someone like her saying that of me? – that all my learning has been done in the real world. Hers, she says, was acquired from books. Which sounds like heaven to me, but evidently was not. Do you know, she hasn’t been to London since she was tiny? She went with her entire family to see the premiere of a play from the book that her father wrote, The True History of the Mud Man. When Juniper mentioned that book to me, she said its name as if, surely, I would be familiar with it, and I was very embarrassed to admit that I was not. Curses on my parents for having kept me in the dark about such things! She was surprised, I could tell, but she didn’t make me feel bad. She nodded, as if she quite approved, and said that it was no doubt only because I was far too busy in my real world with real people. And then she got the sad look that she gets sometimes, thoughtful and a bit puzzled, as if trying to work out the answer to a complex problem. It is the look, I think, that my mother despises when it sets in on my own face, the one that makes her point her finger and tell me to shake off the grey skies and get on with things.

Oh, but I do enjoy grey skies! They’re so much more complex than blue ones. If they were people, those are the ones I’d make the time to learn about.

It’s far more interesting to wonder what might be behind the layers of clouds than to be presented always with a simple, clear, bland blue.

The sky outside today is very grey. If I look through the window it’s as if someone has stretched a great, grey blanket over the castle. It’s frosty on the ground, too. The attic window looks down upon a very special place. One of Juniper’s favourites. It’s a square plot, enclosed by hedges, with little gravestones rising from beneath the brambles, all stuck out at odd angles like rotting teeth in an old mouth.

Clementina Blythe

1 year old

Taken cruelly

Sleep, my little one, sleep

Cyrus Maximus Blythe

3 years old

Gone too soon

Emerson Blythe

10 years old

Loved

The first time I went there, I thought it was a graveyard for children, but Juniper told me they were pets. All of them. The Blythes care very much for their animals, especially Juniper, who cried when she told me about her first dog, Emerson.

Brrr… But it’s freezing cold in here! I’ve inherited an enormous assortment of knitted socks since I arrived at Milderhurst. Saffy is a great one for knitting but a terrible one for counting, the upshot of which is that a third of the socks she’s made for the soldiers are far too tight to cover so much as a burly man’s big toe, but perfect for my twiglet ankles. I have put three pairs on each foot, and another three singletons on my right arm, leaving only my left exposed so that I might hold a pen. Which explains the state of my writing. I apologize for that, dear journal. Your beautiful pages deserve better.

So here I am, alone in the attic room, while Juniper is busy downstairs reading to the hens. Saffy is convinced that they lay better when they’re stimulated; Juniper, who loves all animals, says that there is nothing so clever or soothing as a hen; and I enjoy eggs very much indeed. So there. We are all happy. And I am going to start at the beginning and write as quickly as I can. For one thing, it will keep my fingers warm

Fierce barking, of the sort that makes one’s heart contract like a slingshot, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

A dog appeared above me, Juniper’s lurcher; lips pulled back, teeth bared, a low growl emanating from deep within him.

‘There, boy,’ I said, my voice tight with fear. ‘There now.’ I was debating whether to reach out and stroke him, whether he might that way be calmed, when the end of a stick appeared in the mud. A pair of brogue-clad feet followed, and I looked up to see Percy Blythe glaring at me.

I’d quite forgotten how thin and severe she was. Hunched over her cane, peering down, and dressed in much the same fashion as the last time we’d met, pale trousers and a well-cut shirt that might have seemed manly if not for her incredibly narrow frame and the dainty watch that hung loosely around her gaunt wrist.

‘It’s you,’ she said, clearly as surprised as I was. ‘You’re early.’

‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you, I-’

The dog growled again and she made an impatient noise, waving her fingers. ‘Bruno! That’s enough.’ He whimpered and slunk back to her side. ‘We were expecting you tomorrow.’

‘Yes, I know. Ten in the morning.’

‘You’re still coming?’

I nodded. ‘I arrived from London today. The weather was clear and I know it’s expected to come in rainy over the next few days so I thought I’d take a walk, make some notes, I didn’t think you’d mind, and then I found the shelter and – I didn’t mean to be a nuisance.’

At some point during my explanation her attention had waned. ‘Well,’ she said, without a whiff of gladness, ‘you’re here now. I suppose you might as well come in for tea.’

A Faux Pas and a Coup

The yellow parlour seemed more down at heel than I remembered. On my previous visit I had thought the room a warm place, a patch of life and light in the middle of a dark, stone body. It was different this time, and perhaps the change of seasons was to blame, the loss of summer’s brilliance, the sneaking chill that presaged winter, for it wasn’t only the alteration in the room which struck me.

The dog was panting hard and he collapsed against the tattered screen. He, too, had aged, I realized, just as Percy Blythe had aged since May, just as the room itself had faded. The notion popped into my head then that Milderhurst really was somehow separate from the real world, a place outside the usual bounds of space and time. That it was under some enchantment: a fairy-tale castle in which time could be slowed down, speeded up, at the whim of an unearthly being.

Saffy was standing in profile, her head bent over a fine porcelain teapot. ‘Finally, Percy,’ she said, as she tried to replace the lid. ‘I was beginning to think we might need to gather a search – Oh!’ She’d looked up and seen me at her sister’s side. ‘Hello there.’

‘It’s Edith Burchill,’ said Percy, matter-of-factly. ‘She’s arrived rather unexpectedly. She’s going to join us for tea.’

‘How lovely,’ said Saffy, and her face lit up so fully that I knew she wasn’t just being polite. ‘I was about to pour, if only I could get this lid to sit as it should. I’ll lay another setting – I say, what a treat!’

Juniper was by the window, just as she had been when I’d come in May, but this time she was asleep, snoring lightly with her head tucked into the pale green wing of the velvet chair. I couldn’t help but think, when I saw her, of Mum’s journal entry, of the enchanting young woman whom Mum had loved. How sad it was, how terrible, that she should have been reduced to this.

‘We’re so glad you could come, Miss Burchill,’ said Saffy.

‘Please call me Edie – it’s short for Edith.’

She smiled with pleasure. ‘Edith. What a lovely name. It means “blessed in war”, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure, I said apologetically.’

Percy cleared her throat and Saffy continued quickly. ‘The gentleman was very professional, but – ’ she shot a glance at Juniper – ‘well. One finds it so much easier to speak with another woman. Isn’t that so, Percy?’

‘It is.’

Seeing them together like that, I realized that I hadn’t imagined the passing of time. On my first visit, I’d noticed that the twins were the same height, even though Percy’s authoritative character added stature. This time, however, there was no mistaking it, Percy was smaller than her twin. She was frailer, too, and I couldn’t help thinking of Jekyll and Hyde, the moment in which the good doctor encounters his smaller, darker self.

‘Sit, won’t you,’ said Percy tartly. ‘Let’s all sit and get on with it.’

We did as she said, and Saffy poured the tea, conducting a rather one-sided conversation with Percy about Bruno, the dog – where had she found him? How had he been? How had he managed the walk? – And I learned that Bruno wasn’t well, that they were worried about him, very worried. They kept their voices low, sneaking glances at the sleeping Juniper, and I remembered Percy telling me that Bruno was her dog, that they always made sure she had an animal, that everybody needed something to love. I studied Percy over the top of my teacup, I couldn’t help it. Although she was prickly, there was something in her bearing that I found fascinating. As she gave short answers to Saffy’s questions, I watched the tight lips, the sagging skin, the deep lines etched by years of frowning, and I wondered whether she’d been speaking, in some part, of herself when she said that everybody needed something to love. Whether she, too, had been robbed of someone.

I was so deep in thought that when Percy turned to look directly at me, I worried for an instant that she’d somehow read my mind. I blinked and heat rushed to my cheeks, and that’s when I realized Saffy was speaking to me, that Percy had looked up only to see why I hadn’t answered.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘I was somewhere else.’

‘I was just asking about your journey from London,’ said Saffy; ‘it was comfortable, I hope?’

‘Oh, yes – thank you.’

‘I remember when we used to go up to London as girls. Do you remember that, Percy?’

Percy gave a low noise of acknowledgement.

Saffy’s face had come alive with the memory. ‘Daddy used to take us every year; we went by train at first, sitting in our very own little compartment with Nanny, and then Daddy purchased the Daimler and we all went up by motorcar. Percy preferred it here at the castle, but I adored being in London. So much happening, so many glorious ladies and handsome gentlemen to watch; the dresses, the shops, the parks.’ She smiled, sadly, though, it seemed to me. ‘I always assumed…’ The smile flickered, and she looked down at her teacup. ‘Well. I expect all young women dream of certain things. Are you married, Edie?’ The question was unexpected, causing me to draw breath, at which she held out a fine hand. ‘Forgive me for asking. How impertinent I am!’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind. And no, I’m not married.’

Her smile warmed. ‘I didn’t think so. I hope you don’t think I’m prying, but I noticed that you don’t wear a ring. Though perhaps young people don’t these days. I’m afraid I’m rather out of touch. I don’t get away often.’ She glanced, almost imperceptibly, at Percy. ‘None of us does.’ Her fingers fluttered a little before coming to rest on an antique locket that hung on a fine chain around her neck. ‘I was almost married, once.’

Beside me, Percy shifted in her seat. ‘I’m sure Miss Burchill doesn’t need to hear our tales of woe-’

‘Of course,’ said Saffy, flushing. ‘How foolish of me.’

‘Not at all.’ She looked so embarrassed I was anxious to offer reassurance; I had a feeling she’d spent much of her long life doing just as Percy bade her. ‘Please, do tell me about it.’

A sizzle as Percy struck a match and lit the cigarette she’d trapped between her lips. Saffy was torn, I could see, a blend of timidity and longing playing on her face as she watched her twin. She was reading a subtext to which I was blind, assessing a battleground scored with the blows of previous scuffles. She returned her attention to me only when Percy stood up and took her cigarette to the window, switching on a lamp as she went. ‘Percy’s right,’ she said tactfully, and I knew then that she had lost this skirmish. ‘It’s self-indulgent of me.’

‘Not at all, I-’

‘The article, Miss Burchill,’ Percy interrupted. ‘How is it progressing?’

‘Yes,’ said Saffy, recovering herself, ‘tell us how it’s going, Edith. What are your plans while you’re here? I expect you’ll want to start with interviews.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Mr Gilbert did such a thorough job that it won’t be necessary for me to take up too much of your time.’

‘Oh – oh, I see.’

‘We’ve spoken of this already, Saffy,’ said Percy, and I thought I detected a note of warning in her voice.

‘Of course.’ Saffy smiled at me, but there was sadness behind her eyes. ‘Only sometimes one thinks of things… later.’

‘I’d be very happy to speak with you if there’s something you’ve thought of that you might not have told Mr Gilbert,’ I said.

‘That won’t be necessary, Miss Burchill,’ said Percy, returning to the table to tip some ash from her cigarette. ‘As you said, Mr Gilbert has amassed quite a dossier.’

I nodded, but her adamant stance perplexed me. Her position that further interviews were unnecessary was so emphatic, it was clear that she didn’t want me to speak alone with Saffy, and yet it was Percy who’d dropped Adam Gilbert from the project and insisted that I replace him. I wasn’t vain or mad enough to believe it had anything to do with my writing prowess or the fine rapport we’d struck up on my previous visit. Why, then, had she asked for me? And why was she so determined that I should not speak with Saffy? Was it about control? Was Percy Blythe so accustomed to ordering the lives of her sisters that she couldn’t permit so much as a conversation to be carried on without her? Or was it more than that? Was she concerned about whatever it was Saffy wanted to tell me?

‘Your time here will be better spent seeing the tower and getting a feel for the castle itself,’ continued Percy. ‘The way Daddy worked.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course. That’s certainly important.’ I was disappointed in myself, unable to shake the feeling that I, too, was submitting myself meekly to Percy Blythe’s direction. Deep inside me, a small pig-headed something stirred. ‘All the same,’ I heard myself say, ‘there seem to be a few things that weren’t covered.’

The dog whimpered from the floor and Percy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh?’

‘I noticed that Mr Gilbert hadn’t interviewed Juniper and I thought I might-’

‘No.’

‘I understand that you don’t want her disturbed, and I promise-’

‘Miss Burchill, I assure you there is nothing to be gained in speaking with Juniper about our father’s work. She wasn’t even born when the Mud Man was written.’

‘That’s true, but the article is supposed to be about the three of you and I’d still like to-’

‘Miss Burchill.’ Percy’s voice was cold. ‘You must understand that our sister is not well. I told you once before that she suffered a great setback in her youth, a disappointment from which she never recovered.’

‘You did, and I would never dream of mentioning Thomas to her – ’

I broke off as Percy’s face blanched. It was the first time I could think of that I’d seen her rattled. I hadn’t meant to say his name and it hung like smoke in the air around us. She snatched up a new cigarette. ‘Your time here,’ she repeated with a stern, slow finality, belied by the quivering matchbox in her hand, ‘would be best spent seeing the tower. Gaining an understanding of the way Daddy worked.’

I nodded, and a strange unsettled weight shifted in the pit of my stomach.

‘If there are any questions you still need answered, you will ask them of me. Not my sisters.’

Which was when Saffy intervened, in her own inimitable fashion. She’d kept her head down during my exchange with Percy, but she looked up then, a pleasant, mild expression arranged on her face. She spoke in a clear voice, perfectly guileless. ‘Which means, of course, that she must take a look at Daddy’s notebooks.’

Was it possible that the whole room chilled when she said it? Or did it only seem that way to me? Nobody had seen Raymond Blythe’s notebooks; not when he was alive, and not in the fifty years of posthumous scholarship. Myths had begun to form around their very existence. And now, to hear them mentioned like this, so casually; to glimpse a possibility that I might touch them, might read the great man’s handwriting and run my fingertip, ever so lightly, over his thoughts, right as they were forming – ‘Yes,’ I managed, in little more than a whisper, ‘yes, please.’

Percy, meanwhile, had turned to look at Saffy and although I had no more hope of understanding the dynamics that stretched between them and back over nearly nine decades than I did untangling the undergrowth of Cardarker Wood, I knew that a blow had been struck. A fierce blow. I knew too, that Percy did not want me to see those notebooks. Her reluctance only fed my desire, my need, to take them in my hands, and I held my breath as the twins continued their dance.

‘Go on, Percy,’ said Saffy, blinking widely and allowing her smile to wilt a little at the corners, as if perplexed, as if she couldn’t understand why Percy needed prodding. She sneaked the briefest glance at me, sufficient only for me to know that we were allies. ‘Show her the muniment room.’

The muniment room. Of course that’s where they were! It was just like a scene from the Mud Man itself: Raymond Blythe’s precious notebooks, concealed within the room of secrets.

Percy’s arms, the cage of her torso, her chin: all were rigid. Why didn’t she want me to see those books? What was inside them that she feared?

‘Percy?’ Saffy softened her tone the way one might with a child who needs cajoling to speak up. ‘Are the notebooks still there then?’

‘I expect so. I certainly haven’t moved them.’

‘Well then?’ The tension between them was so thick I could barely stand to breathe as I watched and hoped. Time stretched painfully; a gust of wind outside made the shutters vibrate against the glass. Juniper stirred. Saffy spoke again. ‘Percy?’

‘Not today,’ Percy said finally, driving her spent cigarette into the little crystal ashtray. ‘The dark comes in quickly now. It’s almost evening.’

I glanced at the window and saw that she was right. The sun had slid away quickly and the cool night air was sifting into place. ‘When you come tomorrow, I’ll show you the room.’ Her eyes were hard on mine. ‘And Miss Burchill?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll hear no more from you about Juniper or him.’

ONE

London, June 22nd, 1941

It was a small flat, little more than a pair of tiny rooms at the top of a Victorian building. The roof sloped on one side until it met the wall that someone, at some time, had erected so that one draughty attic might become two, and there was no kitchen to speak of, only a small sink beside an old gas cooker. It wasn’t Tom’s flat, not really; he hadn’t a place of his own because he’d never needed one. He’d lived with his family near Elephant and Castle until the war began, and then with his regiment as it dwindled to a small band of stragglers on their way to meet the coast. After Dunkirk, he’d slept in a bed at Chertsey Emergency Hospital.

Since his discharge, though, he’d been drifting from this spare room to that, waiting for his leg to heal and his unit to recall him. There were places empty all over London so it was never hard to find a new abode. It seemed that everything had been shuffled by the war – people, possessions, affections – and there was no longer one right way of doing things. This particular flat, this plain room that he would remember specially to his dying day, that was soon to become the repository for his life’s best and brightest memories, belonged to a friend with whom he’d studied at teacher training college, in a different version of his life, long ago.

It was early still, but Tom had already walked to Primrose Hill and back. He didn’t sleep late any more, nor deeply. Not after the months in France, living by his wits, in retreat. He woke with the birds, the sparrows in particular, a family of whom had taken up digs on his sill. It had been a mistake, perhaps, to feed them, but the bread had been mouldy to begin with and the fellow down at the Salvage Department fierce that it shouldn’t be thrown away. It was the heat of the room and the steam from the boiler turning Tom’s bread to mould. He kept the window open but the day’s sun accumulated in the flats beneath, spread up the staircase and shrugged through the floorboards, before hitting his ceiling and stretching out with proprietorial ease to shake hands with the steam. It had been just as well to accept it: the mould was his, as were the birds. He woke early, he fed them, he walked.

The doctors had said that walking was the best thing for his leg, but Tom would’ve done so regardless. There was something restless living inside him now, something he’d gained in France that needed to be exorcised daily. Each footfall on the pavement helped a little, and he was glad for the release, even though he knew it to be temporary. That morning, as he’d stood at the top of Primrose Hill and watched the dawn roll up its sleeves, he’d picked out the Zoo and the BBC and, in the distance, the dome of St Paul’s, rising clear of its blitzed surroundings. Tom had been in hospital during the worst of the raids and Matron had arrived on the thirtieth of December, The Times in hand (he’d been allowed the newspaper by then). She’d stood beside the bed, po-faced but not unkind, as he began to read, and before he’d finished the headline, she’d declared it an act of God. Although Tom had agreed that the dome’s survival was a wonder, he’d thought it had a bit more to do with luck than Lord. He had trouble with God, with the notion that a divine being might save a building when all of England was bleeding to death. To Matron, however, he’d nodded agreement: blasphemy would’ve been just the sort of thing to get her whispering to the doctor about worrying states of mind.

A mirror had been propped on the ledge of the narrow casement window and Tom, dressed in his undershirt and trousers, leaned towards it, rolling the stub of shaving soap across his cheeks. He watched dispassionately the mottled reflection in the stippled glass, the young man cocking his head so that milky sunlight lay across his cheek, running the razor carefully along his jaw, stroke by stroke, flinching as he negotiated the territory around his earlobe. The fellow in the mirror rinsed the razor in the shallow water, shook it a little, and started on the other side, just as a man might when he was tidying himself up to visit his mother on her birthday.

Tom caught himself drifting and sighed. He laid the razor gently on the sill and rested both hands on the outer curve of the basin. Screwed his eyes shut, beginning the familiar count to ten. This dislocation had been happening a lot lately, since he returned from France but even more so after leaving the hospital. It was as if he were outside himself, watching, unable quite to believe that the young man in the mirror with the amiable face, the mild expression, the day stretching ahead, could possibly be him. That the experiences of the past eighteen months, the sights and sounds – that child, dear God, lying dead, alone, on the road in France – could possibly live behind that still-smooth face.

You are Thomas Cavill, he told himself firmly when he’d reached ten; you are twenty-five years old, you are a soldier. Today is your mother’s birthday and you are going to visit her for lunch. His sisters would be there, the eldest with her baby son, Thomas – named for him – and his brother Joey, too; though not Theo, who’d been sent up north with his regiment for training and wrote cheery letters home about butter and cream and a girl named Kitty. They would be their usual rowdy selves, the wartime version of themselves, at any rate: never questioning, hardly complaining, and then only ever in a jocular fashion about the difficulties of obtaining eggs and sugar. Never doubting that Britain could take it. That they could take it. Tom could vaguely remember feeling the same way himself.

Juniper took out the piece of paper and checked the address once more. Turned it sideways, twisted her head, then cursed herself for her appalling handwriting. Too quick, too careless, too eager always to move on to the next idea. She looked up at the narrow house, spotted the number on the black front door. Twenty-six. This was it. It had to be.

It was. Juniper decisively shoved the paper in her pocket. Number and street name aside, she recognized this house from Merry’s stories as vividly as she would Northanger Abbey or Wuthering Heights. With a skip in her step, she climbed the concrete stairs and knocked on the door.

She had been in London for exactly two days and still she couldn’t quite believe it. She felt like a fictional character who’d escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her; taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free, into the unfamiliar pages of a story with far more dirt and noise and rhythm. A story she adored already: the shuffling, the mess, the disorder, the things and people she didn’t understand. It was exhilarating, just as she’d always known it would be.

The door opened and a scowling face caught her off guard, a person younger than she was but also somehow older. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve come to see Meredith Baker.’ Juniper’s voice was strange to her own ears, here in this other story. An image came to her of Percy, who always knew precisely how to behave out in the world, but it merged with another more recent memory – Percy, red-faced and angry after a meeting with Daddy’s solicitor – and Juniper let it turn to sand and scatter to the ground.

The girl – with those pursed and grudging lips she could only be Rita – looked Juniper up and down before arriving at an expression of haughty suspicion and, oddly, for they had never met before, strong dislike. ‘Meredith!’ she called finally from the side of her mouth. ‘Get yourself out here now.’

Juniper and Rita observed one another as they waited, neither speaking, and a host of words appeared in Juniper’s mind, knitting themselves together to form the beginning of a description she would later write back to her sisters. Then Meredith appeared with a clatter, spectacles on her nose and a tea cloth in her hand, and the words seemed unimportant.

Merry was the first friend Juniper had made and the first she’d had occasion to miss, so the immense weight of her friend’s absence had been totally unexpected. When Merry’s father had arrived without notice at the castle in March, insisting that his daughter return home this time, the two girls had clung to one another and Juniper had whispered in Merry’s ear, ‘I’m coming to London. I’ll see you soon.’ Merry had cried but Juniper hadn’t, not then; she’d waved and returned to the attic roof and tried to remember how it was to be alone. Her whole life had been spent that way – though in the silences left by Merry’s departure, there’d been something new. A clock was softly ticking, counting down the seconds to a fate that Juniper was stubbornly determined to outrun.

‘You came,’ said Meredith, nudging her spectacles with the back of her hand and blinking as if she might be seeing things.

‘I told you I would.’

‘But where are you staying?’

‘With my godfather.’

A grin broke across Meredith’s face and turned into a laugh. ‘Let’s get out of here then,’ she said, gripping Juniper’s hand tightly in her own.

‘I’m telling Mum you didn’t finish the kitchen like you were s’posed to,’ the sister shouted after them.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Meredith. ‘She’s in a snit because they won’t let her out of the broom cupboard at work.’

‘It’s a great pity no one’s thought to lock her in it.’

In the end, Juniper Blythe had taken herself to London. By train, just as Meredith had suggested when they sat together on the Milderhurst roof. Escaping hadn’t been nearly as hard as she’d expected. She’d simply walked across the fields and refused to stop until she reached the railway station.

She’d been so pleased with herself when she did, that it skipped her attention for a moment that she’d need to do anything further. Juniper could write, she could invent grand fictions and capture them within an intricacy of words, but she knew herself to be perfectly hopeless at everything else. Her entire knowledge of the world and its operation had been deduced from books and the conversations of her sisters – neither of whom was particularly worldly – and the stories Merry had told her of London. It wasn’t a surprise, therefore, as she stood outside the station, to realize she had no idea what to do next. Only when she noticed the kiosk labelled ‘Ticket Office’ did she remember that of course, she would need to purchase one of those.

Money. It was something Juniper had never known or needed, but there had been a small sum left when Daddy died. She hadn’t concerned herself with the details of the will and the estate – it was enough to know that Percy was angry, Saffy concerned, and Juniper herself the unwitting cause – but when Saffy mentioned a parcel of actual money, the sort that could be folded and held and exchanged for things, and offered to put it away safely, Juniper had said no. That she preferred to keep it, just to look at awhile. Saffy, dear Saffy, hadn’t blinked, accepting the odd request as perfectly reasonable because it had come from Juniper whom she loved and therefore would not question.

The train when it arrived was full but an older man in the carriage had stood and tipped his hat and Juniper had understood that he meant for her to slide into the seat he’d vacated. A seat by the window. How charming people were out here! She smiled and he nodded, and she sat with her suitcase on her lap, waiting for whatever might come. ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ the sign on the platform demanded. Yes, thought Juniper. Yes, it is. To remain at the castle, she knew with more certainty now than ever, would have been to submit herself to a future she refused to meet. The one she’d seen reflected in her father’s eyes when he took her shoulders between his hands and told her they were the same, the two of them, the same.

Steam swirled and eddied along the platform and she felt as excited as if she’d climbed onto the back of a great huffing dragon who was about to launch into the sky, carrying her with him as he flew away to a place of fascination and fancy. A shrill whistle sounded, making the hairs on Juniper’s arms stand up, and they were off, moving, the train lurching in mighty heaves. Juniper couldn’t help but laugh against the glass then, because she’d done it. She’d really done it.

Over time, the window misted with her breath and unnamed, unknown stations, fields and villages and woods, skimmed by: a blur – pastels of green and blue and streaky pink, run through with a watery brush. The skidding colours stopped sometimes, clarifying to form a picture, framed like a painting by the window’s rectangle. A Constable, or one of the other pastorals Daddy had admired. Renderings of a timeless countryside that he’d eulogized with the familiar sadness clouding his eyes.

Juniper had no patience for the timeless. She knew that there was no such thing. Only the here and now, and the way her heart was beating in its too-fast way, though not dangerously so, because she was sitting inside a train on her way to London while noise and movement and heat surrounded her.

London. Juniper said the word once beneath her breath, then again. Relished its evenness, its two balanced syllables, the way it felt on her tongue. Soft but weighted, like a secret, the sort of word that might be whispered between lovers. Juniper wanted love, she wanted passion, she wanted complications. She wanted to live and to love and to eavesdrop, to learn secrets and know how other people spoke to one another, the way they felt, the things that made them laugh and cry and sigh. People who weren’t Percy or Saffy or Raymond or Juniper Blythe.

Once, when she was a very small girl, a hot-air balloonist had launched from one of the Milderhurst fields; Juniper couldn’t remember why, whether he’d been a friend of Daddy’s or a famous adventurer, only that there’d been a breakfast picnic on the lawn to celebrate and they’d gathered, all of them, the northern cousins too, and a select few guests from the village, to watch the great event. The balloon had been tethered to the ground by ropes and as the flame leaped and the basket strained to follow it, men stationed at the base of each cord had worked to effect its release. Ropes screamed with tension, the flames raged higher, and for a moment, as all eyes widened, disaster had seemed imminent.

A single rope came loose while the others remained, and the whole contraption lurched to the side, flames licking perilously close to the fabric of the balloon. Juniper had glanced at Daddy. She was only a child and hadn’t then known the full horror of his past – it would be some time yet before he burdened his youngest daughter with his secrets – but she had known, even then, that he feared fire above all else. His face as he watched events unfold had been a sheer of white marble with dread cut clear upon it. Juniper had found herself adopting his expression, curious to know what it might feel like to be turned to stone and scored by fear. Just in time, the final ropes had released and the balloon had righted itself, jerked free and aimed for the sky, rising high into the blue beyond.

For Juniper, Daddy’s death had been like the release of that first rope. She had felt the liberation as her body, her soul, her whole being shifted sideways, and a significant portion of the weight that had shackled her fell away. The last ropes she’d cut herself: packing a small suitcase with a few mismatched clothes and the two addresses she had for people in London, and waiting until a day when both her sisters were busy so she could set off unobserved.

There remained now only a single piece of rope stretching between Juniper and her home. It was the hardest to sever, tied neatly in a careful knot by Percy and Saffy. And yet it had to be done, for their love and concern entrapped her just as surely as Daddy’s expectations. As Juniper had reached London, and the smoke and the bustle of Charing Cross Station had enwrapped her, she’d imagined herself a shining pair of scissors and leaned to slice the rope right through. She’d watched as it fell back upon itself, hesitated for an instant like an excised tail, before receding fast into the distance, gaining speed as it slithered back towards the castle.

Free at last, she’d asked directions to a postbox and sent the letter home, explaining briefly what she’d done and why. It would reach her sisters before they’d time to worry too deeply or send out search parties to bring her back. They would fret, she knew; Saffy in particular would be waylaid by fear, but what else could Juniper have done?

One thing was certain. Her sisters would never have agreed to let her go alone.

Juniper and Meredith lay side by side on the sun-bleached grass of the park, slivers of light playing hide and seek within the glancing leaves above. They’d hunted for deckchairs but most had been broken, left to lean against tree trunks in the hope that someone might find and fix them. Juniper didn’t mind: the day was sweltering and the cool of the grass, the earth beneath it, was a welcome pleasure. She lay with one arm folded behind her head. In the other hand she held a cigarette, smoking slowly, closing her left eye in a wink, then her right, watching as the foliage shifted against the sky, listening as Meredith outlined the progress of her manuscript.

‘So,’ she said, when her friend had finished, ‘when are you going to show it to me?’

‘I don’t know. It’s nearly ready. Nearly. But…’

‘But what?’

‘I don’t know. I feel so…’

Juniper turned her head sideways, sliding her palm flat across her eyes to block the glare. ‘So what?’

‘Nervous.’

‘Nervous?’

‘What if you hate it?’ Meredith sat up suddenly.

Juniper did the same, crossing her legs. ‘I’m not going to hate it.’

‘But if you do, I’ll never, ever write another thing again.’

‘Well then, little chicken – ’ Juniper pretended to be stern, furrowing her brow and feeling like Percy – ‘if that’s the case you might just as well stop immediately.’

‘Because you think you will hate it!’ Meredith’s face took on the shadows of despair and Juniper was caught unawares. She’d only been fooling, making fun as they always had. She’d expected Merry to laugh and adopt the same strict tones, to say something equally meaningless. Met with such a confusing response, Juniper’s own expression faltered and she let the imperious facade drop away.

‘That’s not what I mean at all,’ she said, laying a hand flat on her friend’s blouse, near enough her heart that she could feel its beat beneath her fingertips. ‘Write what’s in here because you must, because it pleases you, but never because you want someone else to like what you’ve said.’

‘Even you?’

‘Especially me! God, Merry – what on earth would I know?’

Meredith smiled and the desolation faded, and she began to speak with abrupt energy about a hedgehog that had turned up in her family’s Anderson shelter. Juniper listened and laughed and left only the smallest part of her attention free to circle the strange new tension in her friend’s face. Had she been a different sort of person, someone for whom made-up people and places didn’t present so easily, for whom words sometimes refused to form, she might have understood Merry’s anxiety better. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t, and after a time she let it go. To be in London, to be free, to be sitting on the grass with the sun now creeping up her back, was all that mattered.

Juniper extinguished her cigarette and saw that a button had loosened on Meredith’s blouse. ‘Here,’ she said, reaching out, ‘you’re coming all undone, chicken. Let me get you sorted.’

TWO

Tom decided to walk towards the Elephant and Castle. He didn’t like the tube; the trains travelled too deeply underground and made him feel nervous and enclosed. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d taken Joey to sit on the platform and listen for the oncoming roar. He unballed the fists that hung now by his sides and remembered how it had felt to hold that plump little hand – sweating, always sweating with the thrill and the heat – as they peered into the tunnel together, awaiting the glow of headlights, the stale and dusted fist of wind that announced the train’s arrival. He remembered especially looking down at Joey’s face, as joyous each time as it had been the first.

Tom paused a moment and closed his eyes, letting the memory fray and fade. When he opened them again he almost stepped into the path of three young women, younger than him, surely, but so neat in their utility suits, walking with such smart purpose, that they made him feel foolish and wrong-footed by comparison. They smiled as he stepped aside and each girl lifted a hand to form a victory sign with her fingers as she passed. Tom smiled back, a little too stiffly, a little too late, and then continued on towards the bridge. Behind him the girls’ laughter, coy and bubbling like a cool drink before the war, the brisk tapping of their shoes, receded, and Tom had the vague sense that he’d missed an opportunity, though for what he couldn’t say. He didn’t stop and he didn’t see them glance over their shoulders, heads close together as they sneaked another look at the tall young soldier, commented on his handsome face and serious dark eyes. Tom was too busy walking, one foot after the other – just as he’d done in France – and thinking about that symbol. The V sign. It was everywhere, and he wondered where it had started, who had decided what it meant, and how everyone seemed to know to do it.

As he crossed Westminster Bridge and came closer to his mother’s house, Tom allowed himself to notice something he’d been trying to avoid. The restless feeling was back again, the gnawing absence beneath his rib cage. It had been smuggled in on the back of his memories of Joey. Tom drew a deep breath and walked faster, though he knew he had more chance that way of outrunning his shadow. It was strange, the experience of something that was missing; odd that a vacancy might exert as much pressure as a solid object. The effect was a little like homesickness, a fact which perplexed him; first, because he was a grown man and should surely be beyond such feelings; second, because he was at home.

He had thought – lying on the wet wooden boards of the boat that brought him back from Dunkirk, in the crisp-sheeted hospital bed, in the first borrowed flat in Islington – that the sensation, the dull, unquenchable ache, would be alleviated when he set foot again inside his family home; the instant his mother wrapped her arms around him and wept against his shoulder and told him that he was home now and everything would be all right. It hadn’t, though, and Tom knew why. The hunger wasn’t really homesickness at all. He’d used the term lazily, perhaps even hopefully, to describe the feeling, the awareness that something fundamental had been lost. It wasn’t a place that he was missing, though; the reality was far worse than that. Tom was missing a layer of himself.

He knew where he’d left it. He’d felt it happen on that field near the Escaut Canal, when he’d turned and met the eyes of the other soldier, the German fellow with his gun pointed straight at Tom’s back. He’d felt panic, a hot liquid surge, and then his load had lightened. A layer of himself, the part that felt and feared, had peeled away like a piece of tobacco paper in his father’s tin and fluttered to the ground, been left discarded on the battlefield. The other part, the hard remaining kernel called Tom, had put his head down and run, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, aware only of the rasping breaths, his own, in his ears.

The separation, Tom knew, the dislocation, had made him a better soldier but it had left him an insufficient man. It was the reason he no longer lived at home. He looked at things and people now as if through smoky glass. He could see them, but not clearly, and he certainly couldn’t touch them. The doctor had explained it to him in the hospital, told him that he’d seen other fellows with the same complaint, which was all very well but didn’t make it any less terrifying when Tom’s mum smiled at him as she had when he was a boy, when she insisted that he pull off his socks and let her at them with her needle, and all he felt was emptiness. When he drank from his pa’s old cup; when his little brother Joey – a large man now, yet always his little brother Joey – let out a yelp and came at him with a clumsy gallop, the tattered copy of Black Beauty clutched to his chest; when his sisters arrived and started fussing over how much weight he’d lost and how they were going to pool their rations and fatten him up. Tom felt nothing and the fact made him want to -

‘Mr Cavill!’ His father’s name and Tom’s heart skipped a beat. In the electric instant that followed, he sickened with relief because it meant his father was still alive and well and things might therefore be mended. These past weeks, when he’d glimpsed the old man walking down the London street towards him, waving across the battlefield, reaching down to grip Tom’s hand on that boat crossing the channel, he hadn’t been imagining things at all. That is, he had, but not the things he’d thought: this world, this place of bombs and bullets, and a gun in his hands, leaky boat trips across the sly, dark Channel, and months languishing in hospitals where excessive cleanliness masked the smell of blood, of children left dead on blast-scorched roads; this was the horrid invention. In the real world, he realized with the swelling, sudden, giddy gladness of a boy, everything was well because his father was still alive. He must be, for someone was calling him. ‘Mr Cavill!’

Tom turned and saw her then, a girl, waving her hand; a familiar face coming towards him. A girl walking in the way of young girls who long to be older – shoulders back, chin set, wrists turned out – yet hurrying like an excited child from a seat in the park, through the barrier where the iron railings used to stand, railings that were being turned now into rivets and bullets and aeroplane wings.

‘Hello, Mr Cavill,’ she said breathlessly, arriving right before him. ‘You’re back from the war!’

The expectation of meeting his father deflated; hope, joy, relief leaked like air from a thousand pin pricks in his skin. Tom perceived with a winded sigh that he was Mr Cavill, and this girl in the middle of the pavement, blinking through her spectacles, expecting something from him, was a pupil of his; had been a pupil of his, once. Before, when he’d had such things, when he’d spoken with trite authority of grand concepts he hadn’t begun to understand. Tom winced to remember himself back then.

Meredith. It came to him suddenly and certainly. That was her name, Meredith Baker, but she’d grown since last they met. She was less of a girl, taller, stretched, anxiously filling her extra inches. He felt himself smile, managed the word hello, and was visited by a pleasant sensation he couldn’t immediately place, something connected to the girl, to Meredith, and to the last time he’d seen her. Just as he was beginning to frown, to wonder, the memory to which the feeling was attached surfaced: a hot day, a circular pool, a girl.

And then he saw her. The girl from the pool, right there in the London street, plain as day, and for a moment he knew he must be imagining things. How could it be otherwise? The girl from his dreams, whom he’d seen sometimes while he was away, radiant, hovering, smiling, as he traipsed across France; when he’d collapsed beneath the weight of his mate Andy – dead over his shoulder for how long before Tom knew? – as the bullet struck and his knee gave way and his blood began to stain the soil near Dunkirk -

Tom stared and then shook his head a little, beginning the silent count to ten.

‘This is Juniper Blythe,’ said Meredith, fingering a button near her collar as she grinned up at the girl; Tom followed her gaze. Juniper Blythe. Of course that was her name.

She smiled then with astonishing openness, and her face was utterly transformed. It made him feel transformed, as if, for a split second, he really was that young man again, standing by a glittering pool on a hot day before the war got started. ‘Hello,’ she said.

Tom nodded in reply, words still too slippery to manage.

‘Mr Cavill was my teacher,’ said Meredith. ‘You met him once at Milderhurst.’

Tom sneaked another glance while Juniper’s attention was on Meredith. She was no Helen of Troy; it wasn’t the face itself that drove him to distraction. On any other woman, the features would’ve been considered pleasant but flawed: the too-wideset eyes, the too-long hair, that gap between her front teeth. On her, though, they were an abundance, an extravagance of beauty. It was her peculiar form of animation that distinguished her, he decided. She was an unnatural beauty, and yet she was entirely natural. Brighter, more lustrous than everything else.

‘By the pool,’ Meredith was saying. ‘Remember? He came to check where I was living.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl, said Juniper Blythe, turning back to Tom so that something inside him folded over. His breath snagged when she smiled. ‘You were swimming in my pool.’ She was teasing and he longed to say something light in return, to banter as he might once have done.

‘Mr Cavill is a poet, too,’ said Meredith, her voice seeming to come from somewhere else, a long way away.

Tom tried to focus. A poet. He scratched his forehead. He no longer thought of himself as that. He distantly remembered going to war to gain experience, believing he might unlock the secrets of the world, see things in a new, more vivid way. And he had. He did. Only the things he saw, the things that he had seen, did not belong in poems.

‘I don’t write much any more,’ he said. It was the first sentence he’d managed and he felt bound to improve it. ‘I’ve been busy. With other things.’ He was looking only at Juniper now. ‘I’m in Notting Hill,’ he said.

‘Bloomsbury,’ she answered.

He nodded. Seeing her here, like this, after imagining her so many times and in so many different ways, was almost embarrassing.

‘I don’t know many people in London,’ she continued, and he couldn’t decide whether she was artless or entirely aware of her charm. Whatever the case, something in the way she said it made him bold.

‘You know me,’ he said.

She looked at him curiously, inclined her head as though listening to words he hadn’t said, and then smiled. She took a notepad from her bag and wrote something. When she handed it to him her fingers brushed his palm and he experienced a jolt, as if from electricity. ‘I know you,’ she agreed.

And it seemed to him then, and every time thereafter that he replayed the conversation, that no three words had ever been finer, contained more truth, than those.

‘Are you going home, Mr Cavill?’ This was Meredith. He’d forgotten she was there.

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s Mum’s birthday.’ He glanced at his wristwatch, the numbers made no sense. ‘I should be getting on.’

Meredith grinned and held up two fingers in the V symbol; Juniper only smiled.

Tom waited until he was on his mother’s street before opening the piece of paper, but by the time he reached the front door, he’d committed the Bloomsbury address to memory.

Not until late that night was Meredith finally alone and able to write it all down. The evening had been torturous: Rita and Mum had argued all through dinner, Dad had made them sit together and listen to Mr Churchill’s announcement on the wireless about the Russians, and then Mum – still punishing Meredith for her betrayal at the castle – had found a huge pile of socks that needed darning. Consigned to the kitchen, which always sweltered in summer, Meredith had run the day over and over in her mind, determined not to forget a single detail.

And now, at long last, she’d escaped to the quiet of the room she shared with Rita. She was sitting on the bed, her back against the wall; her journal, her precious journal, resting on her knees as she scribbled furiously across its pages. It had been wise to wait, torture or not; Rita was particularly obnoxious at the moment and the consequences if she were to find the journal would be dire. Thankfully, the coast was clear for the next hour or so. Through some black magic Rita had managed to get the assistant from the butcher’s across the way to pay her notice. It must be love: the fellow had taken to putting sausages aside and giving them to Rita on the sly. Rita, of course, considered herself the bee’s knees and was quite convinced that marriage would be next.

Love, unfortunately, had not softened her. She’d been waiting when Meredith got home that afternoon, demanding to know who the woman was at the door that morning, where they’d gone in such a hurry, what Meredith was up to. Meredith hadn’t told her, of course. She hadn’t wanted to. Juniper was her own secret.

‘Just someone I know,’ she’d said, trying not to seem at all mysterious.

‘Mum won’t be happy when I tell her you’ve been shirking your chores and walking about with Lady Muck.’

But Meredith, for once, had possessed her own shot to fire. ‘Nor Dad when I tell him what you and the sausage man have been doing in the Anderson.’

Rita’s face had flushed with indignation and she’d thrown something, which turned out to be her shoe, and left a nasty bruise above Meredith’s knee, but she hadn’t mentioned Juniper to Mum.

Meredith finished her sentence, made an emphatic full stop, and then sucked thoughtfully on the end of her pen. She’d reached the moment in which she and Juniper had come across Mr Cavill, walking along the pavement, frowning at the ground with as much concentration as if he’d been counting his footsteps. From across the park Meredith’s body had known that it was him before her brain caught up. Her heart had lurched inside her, like it was spring-loaded, and she’d remembered at once the childish crush she used to harbour. The way she’d watched him and hung on his every word and imagined that one day they might even be married. It made her cringe to remember! Why, she’d only been a kid back then. What on earth had she been thinking?

How strange it was, though, how unfathomable, how wonderful, that Juniper and he should both rematerialize on a single day; the two people who had been most instrumental in helping her discover the path she wished to follow through life. Meredith knew herself to be fanciful, her mum was always accusing her of daydreaming, but she couldn’t help but feel it meant something. That there was an element of fate in their twinned arrival back in her life. Of destiny.

Seized by an idea, Meredith leaped off the bed and pulled her collection of cheap notebooks out from the hiding spot at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her story didn’t have a title yet, but she knew it must be given one before she handed it over to Juniper. Typing it up like a proper manuscript wouldn’t hurt either – Mr Seebohm at number fourteen had an old typewriter; perhaps if Meredith were to offer to fetch him lunch he might be induced to let her use it?

Kneeling on the floor, she hurried her hair behind her ears and flicked through the books, reading a few lines here, a few there, tensing as even those she’d been most proud of wilted under the imagined scrutiny of Juniper. She deflated. The whole story was too starchy by half, Meredith could see that now. Her characters spoke too much and felt too little and didn’t seem to know what it was they wanted from life. Most importantly, there was something vital missing – an aspect of her heroine’s existence, that she suddenly understood must be fleshed out. What a wonder that she hadn’t realized it before!

Love, of course. That’s what her story needed. For it was love, wasn’t it – the glorious lurching of a spring-loaded heart – that made the world go round?

THREE

London, October 17th, 1941

The windowsill in Tom’s attic was wider than most, which made it perfect for sitting on. It was Juniper’s favourite place to perch, a fact that she refused to believe had anything to do with her missing the attic roof at Milderhurst. Because she didn’t. She wouldn’t. In fact, during the months that she’d been gone, Juniper had resolved never to go back.

She knew now about her father’s will, the things he’d wanted for her and the lengths to which he’d been prepared to go to get his way. Saffy had explained it all in a letter, her intention not to make Juniper feel bad, only to agonize about Percy’s ill-humour. Juniper had read the letter twice, just to make sure she properly understood its meaning, and then she’d drowned it in the Serpentine, watching as the fine paper submerged and the ink ran blue and her temper finally subsided. It was precisely the sort of thing Daddy had always done, she could see that clearly from this distance, and it was just like the old man to try to pull his daughters’ strings from beyond the grave. Juniper, though, refused to let him. She wasn’t prepared to let even thoughts of Daddy bring black clouds upon her day. Today of all days was to be only sunshine – even if there wasn’t much of the real thing about.

Knees drawn up, back arched against the render, smoking contentedly, Juniper surveyed the garden below. It was autumn and the ground was thick with leaves, the little cat in raptures. He’d been busy for hours down there, stalking imaginary foes, pouncing and disappearing beneath the drifts, hiding in the dusk of dappled shadows. The lady from the ground-floor flat, whose life had gone up in flames in Coventry, was there too, putting down a saucer of milk. There wasn’t much to spare these days, not with the new register, but between them there was always enough to keep the stray kitten happy.

A noise came from the street and Juniper craned her neck to see. There was a man in uniform walking towards the building and her heart began its race. Only a second passed before she knew it wasn’t Tom, and she drew on her cigarette, suppressing a pleasant shiver of anticipation. Of course it wasn’t him, not yet. He’d be another thirty minutes at least. He was always an age when he visited his family, but he’d be back soon, full of stories, and then she would surprise him.

Juniper glanced inside at the small table by the gas cooker, the one they’d bought for a pittance and convinced a taxi driver to help them transport back to the flat in exchange for a cup of tea. Spread across its top was a feast fit for a king. A king on rations, anyway. Juniper had found the two pears at Portobello market. Lovely pears, and at a price they’d been able to pay. She’d polished them carefully and set them out alongside the sandwiches and the sardines and the newspaper-wrapped parcel. In the centre, standing proud atop an up-turned bucket, was the cake. The first that Juniper had ever baked.

The idea had come to her weeks ago that Tom must have a birthday cake and that she ought to make it for him. The plan had faltered, though, when Juniper realized that she hadn’t a clue how to go about doing such a thing. She’d also come to entertain serious doubts about the ability of their tiny gas cooker to cope with such a mighty task. Not for the first time, she’d wished that Saffy were in London. And not only to help with the cake; although Juniper didn’t mourn the castle, she found she missed her sisters.

In the end, she’d knocked on the door of the basement flat, hoping to find that the man who lived there – whose flat feet had kept him out of the army, much to the local canteen’s gain – would be at home. He was, and when Juniper explained to him her plight, he’d been delighted to lend a hand, drawing up a list of things they’d need to procure, almost seeming to relish the restraints that rationing imposed. He’d even donated one of his very own eggs to the cause, and as she was leaving, handed her something wrapped in newspaper, tied with twine – ‘A present for the two of you to share.’ There’d been no sugar for icing, of course, but Juniper had written Tom’s name on top with spearmint toothpaste and it really didn’t look half bad.

He’d been trying to leave for forty minutes, politely of course, and it wasn’t proving easy. His family were so happy to see him returned somewhat to normal, acting like ‘our Tom’, that they’d taken to directing each morsel of conversation his way. Never mind that his mother’s tiny kitchen was stretched to the seams with assorted Cavills, every question, every joke, every statement of fact hit Tom right between the eyes. His sister was talking now about a woman she knew, killed during the blackout by a double-decker bus. Shaking her head at Tom and tutting, ‘Such a shock, Tommy. Only stepped out to deliver a bundle of scarves for the service men.’

Tom agreed that it was awful; it was awful; and he listened as his Uncle Jeff related a neighbour’s similar run-in with a bicycle, then he shuffled his feet a little before standing. ‘Look, thank you, Mum-’

‘You’re leaving?’ She held up the kettle. ‘I was just about to put it on to boil again.’

He planted a kiss on her forehead, surprised to notice how far down he had to lean. ‘There’s no one brews tea better, but I really have to go.’

His mum raised a single brow. ‘When are we going to meet her, then?’

Little brother Joey was pretending to be a train and Tom gave him a playful pat, avoiding his mother’s eyes. ‘Ah, Mum,’ he said as he swung his satchel over his shoulder, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He walked briskly, keen to get back to the flat, to her; keen to get out of the thickening weather. It didn’t matter how fast he went, though, his mother’s words kept pace. They had claws because Tom longed to tell his family about Juniper. Every time he saw them he had to fight the urge to grab hold of their shoulders and exclaim like a child that he was in love and that the world was a wonderful place, even if young men were shooting one another and nice ladies – mothers with small children at home – were being killed by double-decker buses when they’d only set out to deliver scarves for soldiers.

But he didn’t because Juniper had made him promise not to. Her determination that nobody should know they were in love confounded Tom. The secrecy seemed an ill fit for a woman who was so forthright, so unequivocal in her opinions, so unlikely to apologize for anything she felt or said or did. He’d been defensive at first, wondering that perhaps she thought his people were beneath her, but her interest in them had quashed that notion. She talked about them, asked after them, like somebody who’d been friendly with the Cavills for years. And he’d since learned that she didn’t discriminate. Tom knew for a fact that the sisters she professed to adore were being kept just as deeply in the dark as his own family. Letters from the castle always came via her godfather (who seemed remarkably unfazed by the deception), and Tom had noticed her replies gave Bloomsbury as the return address. He’d asked her why, indirectly at first, then outright, but she’d refused to explain, speaking only vaguely about her sisters being protective and old-fashioned, and saying that it was best to wait until the time was right.

Tom didn’t like it, but he loved her so he did as she asked. For the most part. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from writing to Theo. His brother was in the north with his regiment, which seemed to make it somehow all right. Besides, Tom’s first letter about the strange and beautiful girl he’d met, the one who’d managed to mend his emptiness, had been written long before she’d asked him not to.

Tom had known from that first meeting in the street near Elephant and Castle that he must see Juniper Blythe again. He’d walked to Bloomsbury at dawn the very next day, just to look, he told himself, just to see the door, the walls, the windows behind which she was sleeping.

He’d watched the house for hours, smoking nervously, and finally she’d come out. Tom followed her a little way before he found the courage to call her name.

‘Juniper.’

He’d said it, thought it, so many times, but it was different when he called it out loud and she turned.

They spent the whole sunlit day together, walking and talking, eating the blackberries they found growing over the cemetery wall, and when evening came, Tom wasn’t ready to let her go. He suggested that she might like to come to a dance, thinking that was the sort of thing girls enjoyed. Juniper, it seemed, did not. The look of distaste that crossed her face when he said it was so guileless that Tom was momentarily stunned. He regained his composure sufficiently to ask whether there was something else she’d rather do, and Juniper replied that of course they should keep walking. Exploring, she had called it.

Tom was a fast walker but she kept up, skipping from one side of him to the other, ebullient at times, silent at others. She reminded him in certain ways of a child; there was that same air of unpredictability and danger, the uneasy but somehow seductive sense that he had joined forces with someone for whom the ordinary rules of conduct had no pull.

She stopped to look at things then ran to catch up, completely heedless, and he began to worry that she’d trip on something in the blackout, a hole in the pavement or a sandbag.

‘It’s different to the country, you know,’ he said, an old teacherly note creeping into his voice.

Juniper only laughed and said, ‘I certainly hope so. That’s exactly why I’ve come.’ She went on to explain that she had especially good eyesight, like a bird; that it was something to do with the castle and her upbringing. Tom couldn’t remember the details, he’d stopped listening by then. The clouds had shifted, the moon was almost ripe, and her hair had turned to silver in its glaze.

He’d been glad she hadn’t caught him staring. Lucky for Tom, she’d crouched on the ground and started digging about in the rubble. He went nearer, curious as to what had claimed her focus, and saw that somehow, in the jumble of London’s broken streets, she’d found a tangle of honeysuckle, fallen to the ground after its fence railings were removed but growing still. She picked a sprig and threaded it through her hair, humming a strange and lovely tune as she did so.

When the sun had begun its rise and they’d climbed the stairs to his flat, she’d filled an old jam jar with water and put the sprig in it, on the sill. For nights after, as he lay alone in the warm and the dark, unable to sleep for thoughts of her, he’d smelled its sweetness. And it had seemed to Tom, as it still seemed now, that Juniper was just like that flower. An object of unfathomable perfection in a world that was breaking apart. It wasn’t only the way she looked, and it wasn’t only the things she said. It was something else, an intangible essence, a confidence, a strength, as if she were connected somehow to the mechanism that drove the world. She was the breeze on a summer’s day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

Something, though Juniper wasn’t certain what, made her glance towards the pavement. Tom was there, earlier than she’d expected, and her heart skipped a beat. She waved, almost falling from the window in her gladness to see him. He hadn’t noticed her yet. His head was down, checking the post, but Juniper couldn’t take her eyes from him. It was madness, it was possession, it was desire. Most of all, though, it was love. Juniper loved his body, she loved his voice, she loved the way his fingers felt upon her skin and the space beneath his collarbone where her cheek fitted perfectly when they slept. She loved that she could see in his face all the places that he’d been. That she never needed to ask him how he felt. That words were unnecessary. Juniper had discovered she was tired of words.

It was raining now, steadily, but nothing like the way it had rained the day she fell in love with Tom. That had been summer rain, one of those sudden, violent storms that sneak in on the back of glorious heat. They’d spent the day walking, wandering through Portobello Market, climbing Primrose Hill, and then winding back to Kensington Gardens, wading in the shallows of the Round Pond.

The thunder when it came was so unexpected that people stared into the sky, fearing a brand-new form of weapon was upon them. And then had come the rain, great big sobbing drops that brought an immediate sheen to the world.

Tom grabbed Juniper’s hand and they ran together, splashing through the instant puddles, and laughing from the shock of it, all the way back to his building, up the stairs and into the dim and the dry of his room.

‘You’re wet,’ Tom had said, his back against the door he’d just slammed shut. He was staring at her flimsy frock, the way it clung to her legs.

‘Wet?’ she said. ‘I’m soaked enough to benefit from a good wringing.’

‘Here,’ he slid his spare shirt from the hook behind the door and tossed it to her, ‘put this on while you dry.’

And she’d done as he suggested, pulling off her dress and slipping her arms inside his sleeves. Tom had turned away, pretending business at the small porcelain sink, but when she’d looked, interested to know what he was doing, she’d caught his eyes in the mirror. She’d held them just a moment longer than was usual, long enough to notice when something in them changed.

The rain continued, the thunder too, and her dress dripped in the corner where he’d hung it to dry. The two of them gravitated towards the window and Juniper, who didn’t usually suffer from shyness, said something pointless about the birds and where they went in the rain.

Tom didn’t answer. He reached out his hand, bringing his palm to rest on the side of her face. The touch was only light, but it was enough. It silenced her and she inclined towards it, turning just enough so that her lips grazed his fingers. Her eyes remained on his, she couldn’t have moved them if she’d tried. And then his fingers were on the shirt buttons, her stomach, her breasts, and she was aware, suddenly, that her pulse had shattered into a thousand tiny balls, all of them spinning now in concert, right throughout her body.

They’d sat together on the windowsill afterwards, eating the cherries they’d bought at the market and dropping the stones onto the puddled ground below. Neither of them spoke, but they caught one another’s attention occasionally, smiling almost smugly, as if they, and they alone, had been let in on a mighty secret. Juniper had wondered about sex, she’d written about it, the things she’d imagined she might do and say and feel. Nothing, though, had prepared her for the fact that love might follow it so closely. To fall in love.

Juniper understood why people referred to it as a fall. The brilliant, swooping sensation, the divine imprudence, the complete loss of free will. It had been just like that for her, but it had also been much more. After a lifetime spent shrinking away from physical contact, Juniper had finally connected. When they lay together in that sultry dusk, her face pressed warm against his chest, and she listened to his heart, absorbed its regular beat, she’d felt her own, calming to meet it. And Juniper had understood, somehow, that in Tom she’d found the person who could balance her, and that more than anything, to fall in love was to be caught, to be saved…

The front door shut with a bang, and there was noise then on the stairs, Tom’s footfalls winding up and up towards her, and with a sudden rush of blinding desire Juniper forgot about the past, she turned away from the garden, from the stray cat with his leaves and the sad old lady crying for Coventry Cathedral, the war outside the window, the city of stairs that led to nowhere, portraits on walls without ceilings, and kitchen tables of families who no longer needed them, and she flitted across the floor and back to bed, shedding Tom’s shirt on the way. In that moment, as his key turned in the door, there was only him and her and this small, warm flat with a birthday dinner laid out.

They’d eaten the cake in bed, two enormous slices each, and there were crumbs everywhere. ‘It’s because there’s not a lot of egg,’ said Juniper, sitting with her back against the wall and surveying the mess with a philosophical sigh. ‘It isn’t easy to make things stick together, you know.’

Tom grinned up at her from where he lay. ‘How knowledgeable you are.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’

‘And talented, of course. A cake like that one belongs in Fortnum & Mason.’

‘Well, I can’t tell a lie, I did have a little help.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Tom, rolling onto his side, stretching as far as he could towards the table and capturing the newspaper-wrapped parcel – just – within his fingertips. ‘Our resident cook.’

‘You know he’s not a cook, really, he’s a playwright. I heard him speaking with a man the other day who’s going to put on one of his plays.’

‘Now, Juniper,’ said Tom, carefully unwrapping the paper to reveal a jar of blackberry jam inside. ‘What business does a playwright have making anything as beautiful as this?’

‘Oh lovely! How heavenly,’ said Juniper, lunging for the jar. ‘Think of the sugar! Shall we have some now with toast?’

Tom pulled his arm back, holding the jam out of reach. ‘Is it possible,’ he said incredulously, ‘that the young lady is still hungry?’

‘Well no. Not exactly. But it isn’t a matter of hunger.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘It’s a matter of a new option presenting itself after the fact. A sweet and glorious new option.’

Tom turned the jar round in his fingers, paying close attention to the delicious red-black spoils inside. ‘No,’ he said at length, ‘I think we should save it for a special occasion.’

‘More special than your birthday?’

‘My birthday’s been special enough. This we should keep for the next celebration.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Juniper, nestling in against his shoulder so his arm contained her, ‘but only because it’s your birthday, and because I’m far too full to get up.’

Tom smiled around his cigarette as he lit it.

‘How was your family?’ said Juniper. ‘Is Joey over his cold?’

‘He is.’

‘And Maggie? Did she make you listen as she read the horoscopes?’

‘Very kind of her it was, too. How else am I supposed to know how to behave this week?’

‘How else indeed?’ Juniper took his cigarette and drew slowly. ‘Was there anything interesting, pray tell?’

‘Marginally,’ said Tom, sneaking his fingers beneath the sheet. ‘Apparently I’m going to propose marriage to a beautiful girl.’

‘Oh, really?’ She squirmed when he tickled her side and a smoky exhalation became a laugh. ‘That is interesting.’

‘I thought so.’

‘Though of course the real question is what the young lady is forecast to say by way of reply. I don’t suppose Maggie had any insight into that?’

Tom pulled his arm back, rolling onto his side to face her. ‘Unfortunately, Maggie couldn’t help me there. She said I had to ask the girl myself and see what happened.’

‘Well, if that’s what Maggie says… ’

‘So?’ said Tom.

‘So?’

He propped himself up on an elbow and adopted a posh voice. ‘Will you do me the honour, Juniper Blythe, of becoming my wife?’

‘Well, kind sir,’ said Juniper, in her best impersonation of the Queen, ‘that depends on whether one might also be permitted three fat babies.’

Tom took the cigarette back and smoked it casually. ‘Why not four?’

His manner was light still, but he’d dropped the accent. It made Juniper uneasy and somehow self-conscious and she couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Come on, Juniper,’ he pressed. ‘Let’s get married. You and I.’ And there was no doubting now that he was serious.

‘I’m not expected to get married.’

He frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

A silence fell between them, remaining unbroken until the kettle whistled in the flat downstairs. ‘It’s complicated,’ said Juniper.

‘Is it? Do you love me?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Then it isn’t complicated. Marry me. Say yes, June. Whatever it is, whatever you’re worried about, we can fix it.’

Juniper knew there was nothing she could say that would please him, nothing except yes, and she wasn’t able to do that. ‘Let me think about it,’ she said finally. ‘Let me have some time.’

He sat abruptly, with his feet on the floor and his back to her. His head was bowed; he was leaning forwards. He was upset. She wanted to touch him, to run her fingers down the centre of his back, to go back in time so that he’d never asked her. As she was wondering how such a thing might be done, he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. It was folded in half, but she could see there was a letter inside. ‘Here’s your time,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘I’ve been recalled to my unit. I report in a week.’

Juniper made a noise, almost a gasp, and scrambled to sit beside him. ‘But how long…? When will you be back?’

‘I don’t know. When the war is over, I suppose.’

When the war is over. He was leaving London and suddenly Juniper understood that without Tom this place, this city, would cease to matter. She might as well be back at the castle. She felt her heart speeding up at the thought, not with excitement like an ordinary person’s, but with the reckless intensity she’d been taught to watch for all her life. She closed her eyes, hoping that it might improve matters.

Her father had told her she was a creature of the castle, that she belonged there and it was safest not to leave, but he’d been wrong. She knew that now. The opposite was true: away from the castle, away from the world of Raymond Blythe, the terrible things he’d told her, his seeping guilt and sadness, she was free. In London, there’d been none of her visitors, there’d been no lost time. And although her great fear – that she was capable of harming others – had followed her, it was different here.

Juniper felt a pressure on her knees and blinked open. Tom was kneeling on the floor before her, concern flooding his eyes. ‘Hey, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.’

She’d had no need to tell Tom any of it and for that she’d been glad. She hadn’t wanted his love to change, for him to become protective and concerned like her sisters. She hadn’t wanted to be watched, her moods and silences measured. She hadn’t wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

‘Juniper,’ Tom was saying. ‘I’m sorry. Please, don’t look like that. I can’t bear to see you look like that.’

What was she thinking, turning him away, giving him up? Why on earth would she do such a thing? To follow the wishes of her father?

Tom stood, began to walk away, but Juniper grabbed his wrist. ‘Tom – ’

‘I’m getting you a glass of water.’

‘No,’ she shook her head quickly, ‘I don’t want water. I just want you.’

He smiled and a stubbled dimple appeared in his left cheek. ‘Well, you already have me.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I mean yes.’

He cocked his head.

‘I mean I want us to get married.’

‘Really?’

‘And we’ll tell my sisters together.’

‘Of course we will,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want.’

And then she laughed, and her throat ached but she laughed despite it and felt lighter in some way. ‘Thomas Cavill and I are getting married.’

Juniper lay awake, her cheek on Tom’s chest, listening to his steady heartbeat, his steady breaths, trying to match her own to his. But she couldn’t sleep. She was trying to word a letter in her mind. For she’d have to write to her sisters, to let them know that she and Tom were coming, and she had to explain it in a way that would please them. They mustn’t suspect a thing.

There was something else she’d thought of, too. Juniper had never been interested in clothing, but she suspected that a woman getting married ought to have a dress. She didn’t care about such things, but Tom might and his mother certainly would, and there was nothing Juniper wouldn’t do for Tom.

She remembered a dress that had belonged once to her own mother: pale silk, a full skirt. Juniper had seen her wear it, a long time ago. If it were somewhere in the castle still, Saffy would be able to find it and she would know just what was needed to resurrect it.

FOUR

London, October 19th, 1941

Meredith hadn’t seen Mr Cavill – Tom, as he’d insisted that she call him – in weeks, so it was a tremendous surprise when she opened the front door to find him standing on the other side.

‘Mr Cavill,’ she said, trying not to sound excited. ‘How are you?’

‘Couldn’t be better, Meredith. And it’s Tom, please.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not your teacher any more.’

Meredith blushed, she was sure she did.

‘Mind if I come inside for a moment?’

She shot a glance over her shoulder, through the other doorway and into the kitchen where Rita was scowling at something on the table. Her sister had recently fallen out with the young butcher’s assistant and been terribly sour since. As far as Meredith could tell, it was Rita’s plan to ameliorate her own disappointment by making her little sister’s life every bit as miserable.

Tom must have sensed her reservation for he added, ‘We could go for a walk, if you prefer?’

Meredith nodded gratefully, closed the door quietly behind her as she made her getaway.

They went together down the road and she kept a small distance, arms crossed, head bowed, trying to seem as if she were listening to his good-natured talk of school and writing, the past and the future, when really her brain was scurrying ahead, trying to guess at the purpose of his visit. Trying very hard not to think about the schoolgirl crush she’d once nursed.

They came to a stop at the same park where Juniper and Meredith had conducted their fruitless search for deckchairs back in June when the weather had been hot. The contrast between that warm memory and the grey skies now made Meredith shiver.

‘You’re cold. I should have thought to remind you about a coat.’ He shrugged his arms from the sleeves of his own, handed it to Meredith.

‘Oh no, I-’

‘Nonsense. I was getting hot anyway.’

He pointed at a spot on the grass and Meredith followed readily, sitting cross-legged beside him. He spoke some more, asked her about her writing and listened closely to her reply. He told Meredith that he remembered giving her the journal, that he was delighted to think that she was using it still; all the while he plucked strands from the grass, rolling them into small spirals. Meredith listened and nodded and she watched his hands. They were lovely, strong but fine. A man’s hands, but not thick or hairy. She wondered what they would feel like to touch.

A pulse in her temple began to throb and she felt dizzy thinking about how easily such a thing might be done. All she had to do was reach out a little further with her own hand. Would his be warm, she wondered, would they be smooth or rough? Would his fingers startle then tighten around her own?

‘I have something for you,’ he said. ‘It was mine, but I’ve been recalled to my unit so I need to find it a good home.’

A gift before he went back to the war? Meredith’s breath caught and all thought of hands dissolved. Wasn’t this the very sort of thing that sweethearts did? Exchanged gifts before the hero marched away?

She jumped as Tom’s hand brushed her back. He retracted it immediately, held his palm before her and smiled, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that the gift, it’s in my coat pocket.’

Meredith smiled too, relieved but also somehow disappointed. She returned his coat to him and he withdrew a book from its pocket.

The Last Days of Paris, a Journalist’s Diary, she read, turning it over. ‘Thank you… Tom.’

His name on her lips made Meredith shudder. She was fifteen now, and although perhaps only passably pretty, she was no longer a flat-chested child. It was possible, wasn’t it, that a man might fall in love with her?

She was aware of his breath close to her neck as he reached over to touch the book’s cover.

‘Alexander Werth kept this diary while Paris was falling. I’m giving it to you because it shows how important it is for people to write what they see. Particularly in days like ours. Otherwise people don’t know what’s really happening, do you see that, Meredith?’

‘Yes.’ She glanced sideways and found him looking at her with such intensity that she was overcome. It happened in a matter of seconds, but for Meredith, stuck in the moment’s middle, everything moved like a film reel on slow motion. It was like watching a stranger as she leaned closer, drew breath, closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his in an instant of sublime perfection…

Tom was very gentle. He spoke kindly to her, even as he removed her hands from his shoulders, even as he gave them a squeeze, unmistakably of the friendly sort, and told her not to be embarrassed.

But Meredith was embarrassed; she wished only to melt into the ground. To dissolve into the air. Anything but to be still sitting beside him in the stark glare of her horrible mistake. She was so mortified that when Tom began to ask questions about Juniper’s sisters – what they were like, the sorts of things they enjoyed, whether there were any particular flower they favoured – she answered as if by rote. And she certainly didn’t think to ask him why he cared.

On the day Juniper left London, she met Meredith at Charing Cross Station. She was glad of the company, not only because she was going to miss Merry, but because it kept her mind from Tom. He’d gone the day before to rejoin his regiment – for training first, before being sent back to the front – and the flat, the street, the city of London itself, was unbearable without him. Which is why Juniper had decided to take an early train east. She wasn’t going back to the castle though, not yet: the dinner wasn’t until Wednesday, she still had money in her suitcase, and she had an idea that she might spend the next three days exploring some of those swirling paintings she’d spied from the window of the train that had brought her to London.

A familiar figure appeared at the top of the concourse, breaking into a grin when she spotted Juniper’s eager wave. Meredith scuttled through the crowd to where Juniper was standing, directly beneath the clock as they’d arranged.

‘Well, now,’ said Juniper, after they’d embraced, ‘Where is it then?’

Meredith held her thumb and forefinger very close together and winced. ‘Just a few last-minute corrections.’

‘You mean I won’t have it for the train ride?’

‘A few more days, honest.’

Juniper stepped aside for a porter pushing an enormous pile of suitcases. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘A few more days. No more, mind!’ She shook a finger with mock sternness. ‘I’ll be expecting it in the post by the end of the week. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

They smiled at one another as the train let out a mighty whistle. Juniper glanced over and saw that most of the passengers had boarded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose I should be – ’

The rest of her sentence was smothered by Meredith’s embrace. ‘I’m going to miss you, Juniper. Promise you’ll come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘No more than a month?’

Juniper smoothed a fallen eyelash from her young friend’s cheek. ‘Any longer and you’re to presume the worst and mount a rescue mission!’

Merry grinned. ‘And you’ll let me know as soon as you’ve read my story?’

‘By return of post, the very same day,’ Juniper said with a salute. ‘Take care of yourself, little chicken.’

‘You take care, too.’

‘As always.’ Juniper’s smile straightened and she hesitated, flicking a stray hair from her eyes. She was deliberating. The news ballooned inside her, pressing for release, but a little voice urged restraint.

The guard blew his whistle, blocking out the voice, and Juniper was decided. Meredith was her best friend, she could be trusted. ‘I have a secret, Merry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told anyone, we said we wouldn’t until later, but you’re not just anyone.’

Meredith nodded keenly and Juniper leaned in towards her friend’s ear, wondering if the words would feel as strange and wonderful as they had the first time: ‘Thomas Cavill and I are getting married.’