Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

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

‘ Meredith …’

I almost screamed. It was right behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tom loves me.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I love him.’

‘I know you do.’

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

‘What?’

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

Then, with a swooping certainty, I understood.

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

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

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

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

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

And then she disappeared into the dark corridor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Day After

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

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

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