Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

And she does. She tells him everything. All about the dream, the man who is coming for her, the fearsome man who lives in the mud.

Finally, Tom reached the castle and saw that it wasn’t a lamp at all. The glow he had been following, the beacon bringing sailors safely home, was actually electric light, spilling from a window in one of the castle’s rooms. A shutter, he noticed, was hanging loose, breaking the blackout.

He’d offer to fix it when he went inside. Juniper had told him that her sisters were keeping the whole place running themselves, having lost what little help they’d had to the war. Tom wasn’t much when it came to mechanics, but he knew his way around a hammer and nails.

Feeling a little brighter, he waded across a patch of water in the low-lying land around the castle and climbed the front stairs. Stood a moment by the entrance taking stock. His hair, his clothes, his feet could not be wetter had he swum the Channel to get there; but get there he had. He slid his duffel bag off his shoulder and dug inside, looking for the jam. There it was. Tom pulled the glass jar clear and held it close, ran his fingers over it to check there’d been no breakage.

It felt perfect. Perhaps his luck was on the rise. With a smile, Tom ran a palm across his hair in an attempt to order it; knocked on the door, and waited, jam in hand.

Percy cursed and brought her palm down hard on the toolbox lid. For the love of God, where was the bloody hammer? She racked her brain, trying to remember the last time she’d used it. There’d been the repair work on Saffy’s chicken run; the boards that had come loose on the sill in the yellow parlour; the balustrade on the tower staircase… She didn’t have a clear memory of returning the hammer to the box, but Percy was sure she must have. She was mindful of that sort of thing.

Damn it.

Percy felt her sides, fiddled a path between the buttons of her raincoat to dig inside her trouser pocket; clutched the pouch of tobacco with relief. She stood and smoothed out a cigarette paper, held it clear of the drips that were falling still from her sleeves, her hair, her nose. She sprinkled tobacco along its crease, then licked and sealed it; rolled the cylinder between her fingers. She struck a match and drew hard. Breathed in glorious tobacco, breathed out frustration.

A missing hammer was the last thing she needed tonight. On top of Juniper’s return, the mysterious blood all over her shirt, the news that she intended marriage, not to mention the afternoon’s encounter with Lucy…

Percy drew again, wiped something from her eye as she exhaled. Saffy didn’t mean it, she knew nothing of what had happened with Lucy, of the love and the loss that Percy had endured. Percy had been careful about that. It was always possible, she supposed, that her twin had heard or seen or somehow intuited that which she should not, but even so. Saffy surely wasn’t one to rub Percy’s nose in her misery. She, of all people, knew how it felt to be robbed of one’s love.

A noise and Percy drew breath, listened hard. Heard nothing more. She had an image of Saffy, asleep in the chair, the empty whisky glass precarious on her lap. She’d moved, perhaps, and it had fallen to the ground. Percy scanned the ceiling, waited another half a minute, then decided that was all it had been.

Regardless, there was no time to be standing around lamenting what had been and gone. Cigarette clamped between her lips, she returned to digging through the tools.

Tom knocked again, and set the jar down by the door so he could rub his hands together. It was a big place, he supposed; who knew how long it might take a person to get from top to bottom? A minute or so passed and he turned away from the door, watching the rain tumble over the eaves, wondering at the odd fact that one might feel colder being wet and sheltered than when one was standing beneath the rain’s full force.

His attention fell to the ground and he noticed the way water was gathering deeper round the castle rim than it was further out. One day in London, when they were lying in bed together and he was asking all about the castle, Juniper had told him there had once been a moat at Milderhurst, that their father had ordered it filled in after his first wife died.

‘It must have been grief,’ Tom had said, well able to understand when he looked across at Juniper, allowed himself to imagine the gaping horror of her loss, what such an absence might drive a man to do.

‘Not grief,’ she’d replied, threading the end of her hair through her fingers. ‘More like guilt.’

He’d wondered what she’d meant, but she’d smiled and swivelled to sit on the side of the bed, her naked back smooth and just begging him to stroke it, and his questions had fallen away. It hadn’t occurred to him again until now. Guilt – for what? He made a mental note to ask her later; when he’d met the sisters, when Juniper and he had broken their news, when they were together, alone.

A triangle of light caught Tom’s attention then, shining on the watery surface. It was coming from the window with the broken shutter. Tom wondered whether the repair might be a simple matter of hooking it up on an existing catch, and whether he ought to attempt it now.

The window wasn’t high. He could be up and down in no time. It would save him coming out again once he was clean and dry, and it might just win the sisters’ hearts.

With a grin, Tom set his bag down by the door and headed back out into the rain.

Since the moment she’d turned her back on the crackling fire of the good parlour, Saffy has been dreaming her way inwards along the ripples of her mind’s pool. Now she reaches its centre. The place of stillness from which all dreams flow; to which all return. The site of her old familiar.

She has dreamed it countless times before, has been dreaming it since she was a child. It never changes; like an old piece of film footage, the spool rewound, ready to play again. And no matter that she’s been there before, the dream is always fresh, the terror as raw as ever.

The dream begins with her waking; thinking that she’s woken to the real world, then noticing the strange quality of silence that surrounds her. It is cold and Saffy is alone; she slides across the white sheet and puts her feet on the wooden floor. Her nurse is sleeping in the little room nearby, slow, steady breaths that should suggest safety but in this world signal only unbridgeable distance.

Saffy walks slowly to the window. She is drawn there.

She climbs atop the bookcase; gathers her nightdress round her legs against a sudden deathly chill. Lifts a hand to touch the misted glass and peers out into the night…

Percy found the hammer. It took much hunting and a fair amount of cursing, but finally her hand closed round the smooth wooden handle that years of varied use had rubbed clean of splinters. With a huff of jubilant frustration, she yanked it from amongst the spanners and screwdrivers and laid it on the floor beside her. Opened the glass jar of nails and shook a dozen or so into her hand. She held one up against the light, studied it, and figured two and a half inches in length had to be enough to do the trick, at least for the night. She tucked the clutch of nails inside the pocket of her raincoat, snatched up the hammer and stalked back across the kitchen to the door.

He hadn’t got off to the best of starts and that was a fact. Misjudging a stone and slipping back into the muddy moat had been a rude shock and certainly not part of the plan, but after swearing like a soldier – which, of course, he was – Tom had picked himself up, dragged the back of his wrist across his eyes so he could see, and attacked the wall with more determination than ever.

Never say die , as his commanding officer had shouted at them when they were fighting their way across France. Never say die .