Kate Morton - The Distant Hours

‘Oh, you mustn’t mind that,’ said Percy Blythe, waving a thin hand. ‘That’s just the caretakers, playing in the veins.’

I suspect I looked confused; I certainly felt it.

‘They’re the best-kept secret in a house as old as this one.’

‘The caretakers?’

‘The veins.’ She frowned, looking up, followed the line of the cornice as if tracing the progress of something I couldn’t see. When she spoke again, her voice was slightly changed. A hairline crack had appeared in her composure, and for a moment I felt that I could see and hear her more clearly. ‘In a cupboard in a room at the very top of the castle there lies a secret doorway. Behind the doorway is the entrance to an entire scheme of hidden passages. It’s possible to crawl along them, room to room, attic to vault, just like a little mouse. If one goes quietly enough, it’s possible to hear all manner of whispered things; to get lost inside if one isn’t careful. They’re the castle’s veins.’

I shivered, overcome by a sudden and pressing image of the castle as a giant, crouching creature. A dark and nameless beast, holding its breath; the big, old toad of a fairy tale, waiting to trick a maiden into kissing him. I was thinking of the Mud Man, of course, the Stygian, slippery figure emerging from the lake to claim the girl in the attic window.

‘When we were girls, Saffy and I liked to play pretend. We imagined that a family of previous owners inhabited the passages and refused to move on. We called them the caretakers, and whenever we heard a noise we couldn’t explain, we knew it must be them.’

‘Really?’ Barely a whisper.

She laughed at the expression on my face, a strangely humourless ack-ack that stopped as suddenly as it had started. ‘Oh, but they weren’t real . Certainly not. Those noises you hear are mice. Lord knows we’ve enough of them.’ A twitch at the corner of her eye as she considered me. ‘I wonder. Would you like to see the cupboard in the nursery that holds the secret door?’

I believe I actually squeaked. ‘I’d love to.’

‘Come along then. It’s quite a climb.’

The Empty Attic and the Distant Hours

She was not exaggerating. The staircase turned in upon itself, doubling back again and again, narrowing and darkening with each flight. Just when I thought I was going to be plunged into a state of utter blindness, Percy Blythe flicked a switch and a bare light bulb fired dully, swinging on a cord suspended from the ceiling high above. I could see then that at some point in the past a rail had been attached to the wall to assist with the final steep assault. Sometime in the 1950s, I guessed; the metal cylinder had a dull utility feel about it. Whomever and whenever, I saluted. The stairs were perilously worn, all the more so now that I could see them, and it was a relief to have something onto which I could clutch. Less happily, the light meant I could also see the webs. No one had been up those stairs in a long time and the castle spiders had noticed.

‘Our nurse used to carry a tallow candle when she took us to bed at night,’ said Percy, starting up the final flight. ‘The glow would glance against the stones as we went and she’d sing that song about oranges and lemons. You know it, I’m sure: Here comes a candle to light you to bed .’

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head : yes, I knew it. A grey beard brushed my shoulder, sparking a wave of affection for my plain little shoebox bedroom at Mum and Dad’s. No webs there: just Mum’s bi-weekly dusting schedule and the reassuring whiff of disinfectant.

‘There was no electricity in the house back then. Not until the mid-thirties, and then only half voltage. Father couldn’t abide all those wires. He was terrified of fire, and understandably so considering what happened to Mother.

‘He devised a series of drills after that. He’d ring a bell, down on the lawn, and time us on his old stopwatch. Shouting all the while that the place was about to go up like a mighty pyre.’ She laughed, that glass-cutting ack-ack , then stopped again suddenly when she reached the top step. ‘Well,’ she said, holding the key in the lock a moment before turning it. ‘Shall we?’

She pushed open the door and I almost fell backwards, bowled over by the flood of light that came rolling towards me. I blinked and squinted, gradually regaining my vision as the room’s contrasting shapes sharpened into view.

After the journey to reach it, the attic itself might have seemed an anticlimax. It was very plain, with little of the Victorian nursery about it. Indeed, unlike the rest of the house, in which rooms had been preserved as if the return of their inhabitants was imminent, the nursery was eerily empty. It had the look of a room that had been scrubbed, whitewashed even. There was no carpet, and the twin iron beds wore no covers, jutting out from the far wall each side of a disused fireplace. There were no curtains, either, which accounted for the brightness, and the single set of shelves beneath one of the windows was naked of books and toys.

A single set of shelves beneath an attic window.

I needed nothing more to make me thrill. I could almost see the young girl from the Mud Man ’s prologue, woken in the night and drawn to the window; climbing quietly onto the top shelf and gazing out across her family’s estate, dreaming of the adventures she would one day have, utterly unaware of the horror that was about to claim her.

‘This attic housed generation after generation of Blythe family children,’ said Percy Blythe, her eyes making a slow sweep of the room. ‘Centuries of peas in a pod.’

She made no mention of the room’s bare state or its place in literary history and I didn’t press her. Since the moment she’d turned the key and led me in, her spirits seemed to have sunk. I wasn’t sure whether it was the nursery itself that was having such an enervating effect, or whether the increased light of the stark room simply allowed me to see her age writ clearly within the lines of her face. Whatever the case, it seemed important to follow her lead. ‘Forgive me,’ she said finally. ‘I haven’t been upstairs in a time. Everything seems… smaller than I remember.’

That I understood. It was strange enough for me to lie down on my childhood bed and find that my feet had grown past the end, to look sideways and see the unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where Blondie had once been pasted and remember my nightly worship of Debbie Harry. I could only imagine the dissonance for someone standing in a bedroom they’d outgrown some eighty years before. ‘All three of you slept up here as children?’

‘Not all of us, no. Not Juniper; not until later.’ Percy’s mouth contorted a little, as if she’d tasted something bitter. ‘Her mother had one of the rooms off her own chamber converted to a nursery instead. She was young, unfamiliar with the way things were done. It wasn’t her fault.’

It seemed an odd choice of words and I wasn’t sure that I understood.

‘Tradition in the house was that children were permitted to move downstairs to a single room when they turned thirteen, and although Saffy and I felt very important when our time finally came I must confess to missing the attic room. Saffy and I were used to sharing.’

‘I suppose that’s common for twins.’

‘Indeed.’ An almost smile. ‘Come. I’ll show you the caretakers’ door.’

The mahogany cupboard stood quietly against the far wall, in a tiny box-like room that opened out beyond the twin beds. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck to enter, and the fruity smell entrapped within the walls was almost suffocating.

Percy didn’t seem to notice, bending her wiry frame to pull at a low handle on the cupboard, creaking the mirrored door open. ‘There it is. Right in there at the back.’ She eye-balled me, hovering near the doorway, and her blade-thin brows drew down. ‘But surely you can’t see; not from all the way over there?’