Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

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

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

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

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

The other one. My breath caught.

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

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

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

‘Thomas Cavill,’ I whispered.

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

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

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

There was nothing I could think to say.

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

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

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

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

And this time, she wordlessly agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Night at the Castle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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